When you think of Kent's most stunning beaches, what springs to mind?

Maybe Thanet's Botany Bay with its imposing chalk stacks, or perhaps the windswept stretch of Tankerton, overlooking the North Sea.

But one particular beach in the county takes the cake as a rather unlikely candidate for inspiring musicians for decades - Dover.

The pebbled shore overlooking the busy port and the world's busiest shipping lane has been a famed subject for artists across the world, from ambient legend Brian Eno to California's The Bangles.

Earlier this month, rising South African star Baby Queen - real name Bella Latham - released her new song Dover Beach to hundreds of thousands of plays on streaming services.

Despite the picturesque views of her home country, it was Dover where she took a pilgrimage to write her new songs, travelling from her current home in West London just to see it in all its 'glory.'

Bella told KentOnline the beach lived up to its fabled place in her head: "I got into this taxi, and it was this taxi drier that lived in Dover. I was telling him how excited I was to be in Dover and looking at the white cliffs, and he was like 'are you okay'?

Baby Queen's Dover Beach music video, featuring shots from Samphire Hoe

"Anyone who lives or grows up in the place you de-romanticise, because it's your immediate environment and what you know so well, but it's kind of nice to see it through those person's eyes who have never seen it before.

"I thought it was amazing, I've never seen the British white cliffs and I hadn't seen the ocean in two years. It was really a magical experience in a kind of weird way."

Bella's pilgrimage to the beach gave her a space to be alone and write songs, in a place that had lived in her mind since childhood.

Sat there on the pebbles she wrote Dover Beach, about the feeling of infatuation and seeing that person everywhere you go.

She said: "I like to write completely isolated and decided to go to Dover, I sat on the beach and wrote poems, it was great.

"I was really stressed out about writing songs and I wanted to write music that sounded good to my ears, not what I thought needed to be a hit.

"It was a really creative experience."

So how is it that a rising star - who spent last weekend at Courtney Love's house partaking in Buddhist chants - came to so fall in love with this particular stretch of the Kent coast?

It turns out we have none other than Victorian poet Matthew Arnold to thank.

"Listen! you hear the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back..." - Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Arnold, who was a close friend of William Wordsworth, published a poem titled Dover Beach in 1867, which has come to be his most celebrated work.

The poet is thought to have written it in 1851, whilst on a honeymoon in the town with his wife.

Famed for tackling Arnold's crisis of faith as the country launched fully into the Industrial Age, people the world over also love the piece for its striking lines recounting the beautiful sight looking out across the Channel strait.

Despite being a deeply pessimistic poem, the 19th Century writer ends by proclaiming the only thing which will stop the anxiety of existence is love.

Bella grew up with the poem and had always imagined one day visiting the place she had read about countless times.

Speaking from her home in Fulham, she said: "Now I can't wait to go back.

"It's crazy, so many people from Dover have gone onto the music video and been commenting saying it's so weird to see Dover romanticised in this way."

Bella and her team returned to the town last month to shoot the music video for the single - although it should be noted that they picked the slightly more picturesque spot of Samphire Hoe instead.

In the YouTube comment section for the video, user Victoria Packman wrote: "Came here after seeing filming on Dover beach, my home town. Now a fan of Baby Queen! Hope she does well."

While Dan Parkes commented: "Quality! From a Dover resident! Remember us when you are number 1!"

Bella was surprised when told she was just one of several artists to use the beach - and Arnold poem - as inspiration for her music.

In 1984, Californian band The Bangles released their first record All Over The Place, which contained a track called Dover Beach.

In an interview with the website Songfacts, Vicki Peterson said: "Susanna and I were slightly geekish about opening the Norton Anthology of English Literature, flipping through that and going, 'Hey, this is a great line.'

"She had come across the Matthew Arnold poem Dover Beach at some point and that inspired that song, that idea of applying the fantasy of escape and the reality of what that would really mean. It was a really fun time to just mine the world for ideas."

Despite KentOnline's best efforts to contact the band and find out if they ever visited the beach, we received no response.

Almost two decades earlier, New York poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed their band The Fugs, who performed with the likes of Fleetwood Mac and Tangerine Dream.

The pair specialised in a satirical and political style which blended spoken poetry and rock music.

One of their most famous tracks is - you guessed it - Dover Beach, a cover of the Arnold poem.

As a major part of the countercultural scene in the 60s, the band would play in dank sweaty New York venues and perform this song about a far-flung beach on the English coast.

The band set the poem to a meandering folk song - something Pulitzer-winning American composer Samuel Barber also did with a string quartet in 1931. It apparently remained one of Barber's favourite pieces he ever set to music - he once describe the poem as "one of the few Victorian poems which continue to hold their stature."

The beach appeared again in a piece of music created by Brian Eno - producer of Talking Heads, U2 and former keyboardist of Roxy Music.

Eno is considered one of the most influential musicians of the 21st Century, and spearheaded ambient music in the 1970s.

One of his ambient pieces, composed for the Derek Jarman film Jubilee, was called Dover Beach.

It's a slow, brooding piece of music, with a background hiss that sounds like the surf cascading off the beach pebbles.

Speaking to Newsweek, he too explained a connection with Arnold's poem: "I so much thought the message of that film (Jubilee) is of young people being trapped in a turmoil that they can't understand, which they, of course, nonetheless react to. So it seemed to fit."

Again, it is unclear whether Eno ever actually visited the beach himself.

But with such a storied legacy, the question is who will be next to find inspiration in Dover's pebbled seaside?

Next time you visit, take a look around - you never know who might be there.

To find out what’s going on in the county and for all the latest entertainment news click here.

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