Mud and Chesil Beach. And More Mud: South West Coast Path – Day 41

Eype’s Mouth to Abbotsbury

28,000 steps

In the morning I do a quick stocktake. Water is everywhere. Lying in pools on the ground, dripping from trees and buildings. Spraying itself liberally into my face as I set out, assisted in reaching all parts of me by the vigorous wind.

On the plus side – I’ve had coffee. And there are no blisters. Yet.

And after an initial downpour, the rain fades. The Path is however even muddier than yesterday after a further night’s rain. Mud will become a theme of the day.

I’m promised a walk along a “spectacularly dramatic section of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site”. Beginning, the guide says, “with some short, steep climbs”.

I’m also promised the chance of peregrines, possibly visible from Burton Cliff, and level going as I reach “the spectacular, long pebbly sweep of Chesil Beach.”

Leaving Eype’s Mouth, the Path is very slippery. And did I mention that the morning is very windy? I put up the hood of my cagoule as I climb the slope towards West Bay. The wind rattles it so fast and loud around my ears it sounds like a helicopter landing behind me. The wind is gusty and uneven, causing me to stumble a few times. I make a mental note to keep close to the line of the fence, not the cliff. Signs warn of unstable cliff edges, I don’t want to add an unstable walker to the mix.

At last, in the distance I can see the Isle of Portland, a faint smudge on the horizon through a haze of cloud and spray. I stop for coffee in West Bay. While I drink it, rain sweeps in from the churning sea on the high wind. Foam coats the harbour like fresh snow. I waste ten minutes trying to get the rain cover on my rucksack and my full poncho over me and pack. This takes so long that the rain stops and I give up.

I climb a steep slope up muddy steps from West Bay, and along the cliff top. The Path here joins something called the Hardy Way. So that cheers me up. The wind playfully assaults me all the way from West Bay to Burton Beach. Despite the wind, there’s less rain than forecast, which I have to admit is a big plus.

At Burton Bradstock, I pass from one Ordnance Survey Explorer map to another. I think this is the 14th map of the Path, and it will be the last, taking me all the way to Poole. There is no sign of any peregrines. They’re probably tucked up somewhere warm and dry, toasting crumpets.

The start of Chesil Beach

I’m also now on Chesil Beach. Chesil is a 17-mile ridge of pebbles, backed by the the largest tidal lagoon in Britain, the Fleet. It’s been the scene of numerous shipwrecks, and it was renamed Dead Man’s Cove by the ever-cheerful Thomas Hardy.

I read somewhere that over thousands of years the wind and sea have sorted the pebbles on Chesil Beach so that different sizes are distributed along the bank, with larger stones in the east, smaller in the west.

My research (not yet peer-reviewed) backs this up.

The Path veers slightly inland. For a while, it’s pleasant walking, shielded from the wind by the high shingle bank. But after a while the Path gets very boggy and I wonder whether it might not have been better to walk on the shingle itself.

The Path becomes a sea of mud and the next half hour is even less enjoyable than the spin-cycle experience of the cliff top walk.

It’s a relief when the Path veers right and back onto the gravelly bank.

I hate to grumble, but I confess that wading over the shingle is very energy-sapping. The novelty soon wears off. My calves begin to complain.

I’m relieved to find a cafe at West Bexington, where I have soup and coffee (and relief from the wind).

After lunch there is more shingle-wading, but eventually the Path gets easier and becomes a patchily tarmacked road behind the Chesil ridge. (With occasional stretches of mud.)

I’m alone most of the afternoon, which is unsurprising in this weather.

The sun breaks through in mid-afternoon, and the Path veers inland, as the Fleet separates Chesil Beach from the mainland, leading up and into Abbotsbury.

The village is truly the heart of Hardy country, but I forgive it for that. It has thatched cottages and a swannery, which claims to be the only place in the world where you can “walk through the heart of a colony of nesting mute swans.”

There’s also a 14th century chapel to St Catherine, the patron saint (it says here) of spinsters and virgins.

Abbotsbury is on the route of another long-distance trail – something called the MacMillan Way. This turns out to be a path all the way from Abbotsbury to Boston in Lincolnshire. With Poole only around 60 Miles away, I might soon need a new path…

Tagine, Sourdough, and Dorset Gold: South West Coast Path – Day 40

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.

Lyme Regis with subtle ammonite-themed lampposts

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.

Leaving St Ives

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.

The hill out of Charmouth

The “View” from Golden Cap

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.

Seatown Beach, with Anchor Inn

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.