From John Renouf.
IT was during my early teenage years at school that I first developed my lifelong interest and fascination with geology.

This interest was sparked by one of the standard textbooks of the time, Arthur Holmes’s Principles of Physical Geology. However, it was in another well-regarded text on the same theme, Wooldridge and Morgans The Physical Basis of Geography: An Outline of Geomorphology, that I found Jersey’s north coast offered up as an example of a specific type of coastline. But the real excitement then was that our Island figured in a national textbook.

As a professional geologist, I can still appreciate these cliffs as, to use the technical description of the textbook, ‘a wonderful example of a crenulate coastline of compound origin’. But it is as a Jerseyman, who roamed this whole landscape as a boy, that I cherish them. It is to me, as to many others, an emotional attachment to these beautiful cliffs. I love them for their wildness and generally unspoilt views.

Surprisingly few people know of the archaeological wealth of the area, apart from a vague awareness of the prehistoric importance of Le Pinacle on westward-facing cliffs south from Grosnez or the cave of La Cotte à la Chêvre found just to the west of Plémont beach and in full view of the holiday camp. It is not the view that our Neanderthal near-ancestors would have had when they stood at the cave portal and looked out northward across the bare landscapes which held groups of roaming woolly rhinoceros and woolly mammoth. No sea then. No holiday camp, either.

Then there is the immediate farming landscape at the edge of which the holiday camp lies. This is a landscape of narrow tracks and walled fields which preserve an unusually large area of a pre-1800 farming area. The comparison of the field pattern on the 1795 Duke of Richmond Map with that of today shows that there has been little change. This rich tapestry therefore enshrines deeply significant aspects of the Island’s past. It is not just preservation of the physical view which is at stake but the fabric of history and prehistory which is woven into it. The importance of this historic landscape cannot be exaggerated.

I would argue that Jersey’s cliffs from L’Etacq to St Catherine’s Bay are an integral whole and that nowhere along that length is there any destructive intrusion that even approaches the eyesore that is development on the Plémont headland. Whether holiday camp or housing, absolutely no effort should be spared by those with the power to return this headland to some sort of natural state, to do so.

The views between Grosnez and Sorel – and it should be remembered that the Plémont headland is so prominent that anything built there can be seen for long stretches of the coast over the whole distance from Sorel on the east to Grosnez on the west – should be safeguarded, and the land that our forebears, whether palaeolithic mammoth hunters, neolithic or post-medieval farmers, have handed down to us in a richly enhanced yet essentially natural state should be allowed to remain so for those who value Jersey to enjoy into the future.

So what should be done? In my time there was always the blot of the holiday camp, which is acknowledged by most to have been an unfortunate development at a time of different values. The States should follow the precedent set in 2001 by the purchase and demolition of the former Bal Tabarin/Adrian’s at the top of L’Etacq Hill to enhance the subsequently designated Les Landes SSI. This landmark decision for the southern end of the Les Landes SSI should be matched by the even more long-sighted purchase and demolition of the holiday camp at the eastern end.

We have only one north coast. If the Plémont site should be developed, its monetary value will then be such that no future Island wish to reverse the situation will ever be possible.
Le Côtil des Pelles,
Route du Petit Port,
St Brelade.