The English Channel was an open road to anyone who had more ships than the British. The Dutch treated it with contempt in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and successfully invaded England in 1688 (the grotesquely misnamed "glorious revolution"). Ditto the steppes of Russia: ask the Mongols, or for that matter the Poles in the 1590 (what? you didn't know that Muscovy collapsed in the 1590s, and that Poland held Moscow for some years?) or the Germans in 1917, whether they gave them any trouble. No geographical feature is worth a damn unless people have technology and organization - and organization trumps technology - to exploit it. One century after the Dutch had treated the English Channel like the front gardent of their own home, Napoleon, wiht all the resources of Europe at his feet, could not cross it; why? because military realities, not geography, had changed. I have nothing but contempt for determinist views, and physical determinissm is one of the dumbest.
no subject