Lyme Regis to Eype’s Mouth
26,000 steps
On the train I eat a sandwich and take stock of the way the world is, six months on from my last encounter with the coast path. Scientists have warned that the world is on its last chance to tackle global warming. The world has shrugged. We have carelessly got through several prime ministers and sundry other ministers as the government has been forced to shovel money into people’s pockets to pay inflated energy bills. The council I’m part of has had to scrape together money for schools to feed children turning up to school hungry.
And in the newspaper I read that astronomers have found an “ultra massive black hole around 33 billion times the mass of the sun.”
Outside the window there is no sign of the sun, owing to a sky emulsioned with mist. Nor, thankfully, is there any sign of an ultra massive black hole. Clouds dip low and touch the treetops, breathing soft rain over the fields. There seems to be an awful lot of mud.
The Path however abides. It’s waiting for me when I step off the bus at Lyme Regis. The guide promises that today’s walk is ‘moderate’. It includes a climb over Golden Cap, the highest point on the South coast of England, so there’s that to look forward to. The weather forecast promises sunny intervals today. It seems good to get the high ground out of the way early – tomorrow’s weather forecast is an absolute dog.
The tide is coming in, ruling out the beach walk to Charmouth, so I head along a newly-engineered raised path below the eroding cliffs and up some steps to the road, before the Path turns off into a very muddy field and angles uphill towards some woods.
The sound of the road falls away behind, and I’m soon immersed in birdsong and the rattle of the wind among wintry branches of shrubs and trees. The Path winds back and forth up and over the wooded hillside, with a few too many counter-intuitive turns away from my assumed direction of travel because of landfalls.
The Path soon zigzags down toward Charmouth. A statue commemorates the fossil-plundering that has gone on in these parts over the years.
I’m now about halfway along the “Jurassic Coast,” England’s only natural world heritage site, which stretches 96 miles from Exmouth to the end of the Path near Poole. Coastal erosion here has exposed nearly 200 million years of geological history.
At different times, the area has been desert, shallow tropical sea and marsh. In some areas (notably the one I’m currently in) landslides are common, which have exposed a wide range of fossils. Scores of different rock strata have been identified at Lyme Regis, each with its own species of ammonite.
At Charmouth Beach I stop for coffee and bread pudding, consumed above the pebbled beach, churning with slate grey waves. In the 18th and 19th centuries Charmouth village was a noted resort. Visitors included Jane Austen, who wrote that it was “a nice place for sitting in unwearied contemplation.”
Unlike Jane, I’m not sitting. I’m not contemplating. And to be honest, I’m not unwearied.
From Charmouth, the Path joins the so-called “Monarch’s Way,” commemorating the route taken by Charles II after defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, before slipping away to the Continent and leaving England to Cromwell. An inn here supposedly gave shelter to the fugitive Royal, when he came disguised looking for a boat to take him to France. He got away, but not before a mishap with the first boat that was lined up for him. The boat’s master was prevented from helping Charles when he let slip the plan to his wife and she locked him in his room and stole his clothes to keep him from getting involved.
Leaving Charmouth, I climb up a long and muddy hillside. A misty rain drives in off the sea to spice up the climb. After a while the rain fades and clouds clear. After a few minutes of the sun’s heat the soggy ground exhales a moist warmth up at me.
At the top, the Golden Cap summit is shrouded in cloud. The view along the coast from here must be amazing. On a clear day. Which this is not.
Once you’ve passed the south coast’s highest point it must be downhill all the way to Poole. The first part of the descent, into Seatown, is again very muddy and slippery. Making me grateful – not for the first time – for my stick, which repeatedly prevents me applying my face or backside to the mud.
Over lunch in Seatown’s Anchor Inn, I reflect on social change since the 80s. I eat winter vegetable tagine, with sourdough bread and a pint of Dorset Gold bitter. The music is an unbroken cool playlist of 70s reggae. Forty years ago, when I first walked the Ridgeway, you were grateful for keg beer and salted peanuts and an expensive jukebox stuffed with Leo Sayer and David Essex.
Further back in time, Seatown used to have a Whit Monday Fair. In Thomas Hardy’s novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the young Michael Henchard, gets drunk on rum-laced Furmity (a mix of wheat, dried fruit and sugar, often with added spirits). So potent is this brew that he auctions off his wife Susan, along with their baby daughter, to a passing sailor. Like most Thomas Hardy characters, in most Hardy novels, it’s fair to say Henchard lives to regret his actions.
After lunch, it looks like a straightforward stroll over Thorncombe Beacon to Eype’s Mouth. But over lunch the wind has grown massively in strength, sweeping curtains of cloud and rain in from the sea. For a while I’m completely enclosed in a glowing globe of cloud, unable to see the ground at the foot of the hill in any direction, guided only by the fact that the mist over the sea is brighter than that over the land.
I’m walking through a Lovecraftian landscape of mist and skeletal trees.
And misshapen tree stumps, like the claws of dead monsters.
All of which makes me glad to descend again out of the mist, this time into Eype’s Mouth.
I check tomorrow’s weather forecast again. Strong winds and rain.
Chris Barnham - The View From SE13 