North of that river the coast is low-lying and bordered by sand-lunes, to which succeed on the Strait of Dover the cliffs in the neighborhood of the port of Boulogne and the marshes and sand-dunes of Flanders, with the ports of Calais and Dunkirk, the latter the principal French port on the NOrth Sea.
Foveaux Strait is as cold and windy as the Strait of Dover.
From Pegwell Bay south to a point near Deal the coast is flat, and the drained marshes or levels of the lower Stour extend to the west; but thence the coast rises again into chalk cliffs, the eastward termination of the North Downs, the famous white cliffs which form the nearest point of England to continental Europe, overlooking the Strait of Dover.
It must suffice to say that the separation of Ireland from England was a comparatively recent episode, while the severance of the landconnexion between England and the continent by the formation of the Strait of Dover is still more recent and probably occurred with the human period.
Various lines of reasoning unite in proving that the Mesozoic rocks of the south rest upon a mass of Palaeozoic rocks, which lies at no very great depth beneath the surface of the anticlinal axis running from the Bristol Channel to the Strait of Dover.
