We walked a short distance down a path by East Cliff to a point where we could see, as we couldn't previously, the rail line that ran along the coast, partly through rail tunnels piercing the cliffs, and partly over the land that rose above their base. Then Adams pointed out to me something jutting horizontally out of the chalk cliffs a little above and to the side of the railroad cutting. It was a large and long-rusted collection of wheels, gears, and cams, all compounded together into the shape of some fantastic Dadaist engine. "What you see there is the remains of the last machine ever tried out for boring a Channel tunnel," Adams said. "That's the Whittaker boring machine, an electrically driven affair, powered by a steam-driven generator, and it was tried out here after the First World War. Actually, it was developed by the Royal Engineers for mining under the German lines, and in 1919 Sir Percy Tempest, who was chief engineer of the South East & Chatham Railway—an amalgamation of the South-Eastern Railway and the London, Chatham & Dover Railway, which in turn, by further amalgamation with other lines, became the Southern Railway—thought it might do for the Channel tunnel. In 1919 he asked permission from the Board of Trade to drive a new heading from the old Number Three ventilating shaft at the eastern end of Shakespeare Cliff a little way under the foreshore, and got it, but he changed his mind and decided to try the machine in the chalk down here. The Whittaker machine cut a tunnel twelve feet in diameter, and some time between 1921 and 1924 they drove a heading into the chalk, just at the point where it's sticking out now, for some four hundred feet. They never quite removed the machine from the heading when they were finished, but it was maintained right up to the outbreak of the Second World War, when it became derelict."