It had a vital strategic placement on a rocky bluff over the St Lawrence River, at the furthest point that ocean-going ships could venture from the Atlantic.

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Aside from this jarring image, Tirin Kot is a bucolic-seeming place, a market town of flat-topped adobe houses and little shops on a low bluff on the eastern shore of the Tirinrud River, in a long valley bounded by open desert and jagged, treeless mountains.

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An hour before dark I stood on the summit of a small chalk bluff, from which I looked down onto Cuckmere Haven, the point at which the river reaches the English Channel.

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