It’s a view that hasn’t changed – has never changed, really, not in thousands of years. There’s nothing in your sightlines that tells you when today is, nothing that marks the presence of modern humankind. Apart from a bit of coastal erosion, everything else you see – the green cliff-top, the rock you’re sitting on, the rocks and shingle and waves, the broad expanse of water ahead of you – they’re all the same things that anyone could have seen, would have seen on this spot in history.

In 55 BC, you might have seen a fleet of ships approaching, and anxiously awaited their arrival to learn if they were friend or invader. They landed on the shingle beach just up the shoreline from here: their leader, it turns out, is the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. This is where he came, then saw and conquered, right here – this place where the sea ended and Britain began.

The next invasion was the Normans, in 1066, landing not far west of here, at Pevensey, before their famous victory in the battle near Hastings. As William the Conqueror arrived to begin his possession of the island just along the coast, the waiting locals could have stood on the nearby cliffs and seen his ships drawing in, just there, into the bay.

If you’d been wandering this cliff path on December 29, 1170, you probably wouldn’t have known that some dozen miles away, Thomas à Becket was being put to death in Canterbury Cathedral. But sitting here at Michaelmas in 1255, you might have heard rumours that an extraordinary creature had landed just ten miles up the coast, an animal called an elephant, from the French King Louis IX, destined for the royal menagerie in the Tower of London.

Three centuries later, in the summer of 1588, this same stretch of coast was marked with beacons to warn of the approach of the Spanish King’s Armada. You would have been able to see the skirmish with the English ships from here.

And when the exiled Charles Stuart returned from his exile to reclaim the English throne as Charles II, he too landed at Dover. His first sight of his homeland, from which he’d sailed away so reluctantly a decade earlier, was this very place – the white cliffs standing high over the water, not perhaps looking quite as welcoming as he might have hoped.

Then came the Napoleonic wars, and dramatic views of Napoleon’s armies massing over the water (this "seeing France on a clear day" has its uses).

And then later still, within living memory now, to the times when Vera Lynn sang of the "bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover"; the times when many expected a full-scale German invasion, a threatened occupation (like the Norman occupation long ago now), and when we walked this path and looked out to sea, wondering if it would come. And then they did come, and that was the "finest hour".

Underground, right beneath your feet, there’s a network of tunnels – effectively just behind the white cliff-face, which were dug centuries ago but which came into their own now. The evacuation of Dunkirk was controlled from here. And Churchill stood on a balcony set into the cliff below the castle watching as the Germans came; and the Spitfires roared down-country to the coast – from behind you there – and there were dogfights in these very skies.

Perhaps it’s whimsical to suggest that Churchill sat on this very same rock – like you, like William the Conqueror, like Julius Caesar – and looked out at this same view, watching their chapter of history unfolding. Whimsical, yes; and yet we do know that these people’s stories all did pass through this point, and that the place remains all but unchanged, the same views, the same rocks.

English Heritage chief executive Simon Thurley wrote in the June 2006 issue of Heritage that what excited him about history was the sense of continuity it gave him, the connections to real people living lives in other times. “We all have our own ideas about why history matters. For me, it has a lot to do with continuity – the sense that those who have gone before us have appreciated the same buildings we do. Heritage is a thread that knits history together.” It’s about two millennia of stories crossing paths on this same piece of common ground; and the fact that while we don’t know for sure who sat on that rock you’re now sitting on, think of all the different people who might have, and their stories, and ours…