Over the edge

It's only in very wet weather that you see this stream, normally just a trickle, tumbling down the cliff from the coast path to the cove about 60 feet below.

I took this shot from the adjacent headland looking back toward the land. I've slithered down the gulley 2 or 3 times in drier weather to get to the little storm beach at the bottom. Most years a few seal pups are born down there but not this year.

Looking at this reminded me of something I read recently about the myth that lemmings commit suicide by leaping over a cliff edge to their deaths. The story started with the 1958 Disney nature film White Wilderness in which you can 'see' migrating lemmings apparently hurling themselves into the Arctic Ocean. In fact the scene was entirely fabricated: it was filmed in Manitoba, Canada, using a few lemmings purchased from Inuit children. The lemmings were first placed on a turntable for filming and the footage edited to make it appear there were thousands on the move, then they were taken to the cliff overhanging a river and pushed over the edge to their doom, their dying falls cleverly filmed by concealed cameramen. So the legend was 'proved' and became fixed in the public imagination. In reality although these small rodents occasionally migrate when food supplies run low and sometimes come to grief en route they don't deliberately commit suicide as the film suggests. White Wilderness has become known as Disney's snuff movie.

See here and here for further details, and here for film clips.
I learnt about this from the book What I Don't Know About Animals by Jenny Diski.