History
The name Beachy Head appears as 'Beauchef' in 1274, and was 'Beaucheif' in 1317, becoming consistently Beachy Head by 1724, and has nothing to do with beach. Instead it is a corruption of the original French words meaning "beautiful headland".
In 1929 Eastbourne bought 4,000 acres (16 km2) of land surrounding Beachy Head to save it from development at a cost of about £100,000.
The prominence of Beachy Head has made it a landmark for sailors in the English Channel. It is noted as such in the sea shanty Spanish Ladies:
- "The first land we sighted was called the Dodman,
- Next Rame Head off Plymouth, off Portsmouth the Wight;
- We sailed by Beachy, by Fairlight and Dover,
- And then we bore up for the South Foreland light."
The ashes of German social scientist and philosopher Friedrich Engels, one of the fathers of communism, were scattered off the cliffs at Beachy Head into the Channel, as he had requested.
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“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
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“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
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—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)