I read the article about the under-cliff walk and the cliffs at Black Rock (The Argus, January 30).

I am a bit miffed about the way people are at one another on how to look after it, the walk and the cliffs. Whatever happened to the past and how they were maintained then?

The Bevan boys went over the cliffs in bosun's chairs and trimmed them back as they would have done in the coal mines. It's nonsense to say rain is causing most of the damage. It causes approximately four per cent, the rest is done by frost and ice getting in, then thawing, bringing down the chalk - not forgetting the constant battering from the winds.

Some people seem to have forgotten the amount of chalk that was taken away from the cliff face. Hundreds of thousands of tons were taken when the Marina was built and stockpiled adjacent to the now existing west arm. When they thought the time was right, they bulldozed it all over the seawall onto the beach.

They ran their piling cranes on to it, only to be beaten by the highest spring tide for an age. The whole lot was washed away - machines and all - gone in six hours! The only thing it left behind was a lot of red faces.

-Sean Fowler (ex-sea defence worker), Old Shoreham Road, Hove