Møns Klint is six kilometres of white chalk standing 128 metres out of the Baltic, and it is coming down. The cliffs run along the Danish island of Møn, and the chalk in them is the floor of a warm sea of seventy million years ago. It ought to be lying flat. Late in the last glaciation an ice sheet pushing in from the Baltic hit that old seabed and shoved it, folding and slicing it upward until parts stand near vertical. That reads best from the beach looking up, where the level bands and the buckled ones sit side by side. Slabs still come away, most often in winter and spring when frost and meltwater get into it. The way down is the Maglevandstrappen, 497 steps through beech forest to a shore of pebbles and flint, the wall going silent and sheer above you.
Dronningestolen is the high point, 128 metres of chalk dropping away beneath your boots. The Baltic lies flat and empty beyond, the white line of the coast curving off both ways. Klinteskoven grows right to the edge, its oldest beeches past four hundred years, leaning out over the drop. Peregrines nest on the faces below, and without this cliff Denmark would have none. The last Danish pair bred here in 1972; pesticides then emptied the country for nearly thirty years, until a Swedish male and a German female paired on this chalk in 2001 and started it again. Inland of the forest the chalk lies a hand's depth under the turf at Høvblege, too lime-rich and thin for farming. That is the only reason eighteen of Denmark's wild orchid species are still there, at ankle height and easy for you to walk straight past. The same grass holds the country's last large blue butterflies, whose caterpillars smell enough like ant grubs that the ants carry them home and feed them all winter. And down on the shingle, what the cliff keeps losing lands at your feet: sea urchins, and the cigar-shaped shells of Cretaceous squid, loose among the flint for anyone looking down.