The Jurassic Coast is the umbrella name for the shoreline between Exmouth and Swanage, renowned for undulating hills, pebble beaches and crumbling cliffs. It's partly in Devon but mostly in Dorset, and famed for its fossils as the wave-lapped rocks relentlessly recede. In 2001 it became the UK's first geological UNESCO World Heritage Site, and rightly so. And I've just spent a week exploring it, or at least the 30 mile section in the middle, so this three-part series will just take in the highlights between Seaton and Portland. [75 photos]
Seaton is the southeasternmost town in Devon, a fishing port turned seaside resort at the mouth of the river Axe. These days it's more of a retirement bolthole, the local holiday camp having closed in 2005, and is conveniently located in a dip between chalk and sandstone cliffs. The esplanade fronts a pebbly beach with a defensive sea wall, guarded by a recent pair of sculpted gates designed to protect against the stormiest tides. If ornamental gardens, clocktowers and ice cream kiosks incapable of squirting a 99 are your thing, Seaton may only marginally disappoint.
Second place in the town's tourist trail goes to the recently-rebranded Jurassic Discovery centre, a collection of fossils, animatronic dinosaurs and soft play facilities targeted firmly at a younger family audience. Top of the list is the famous Seaton Tramway, a three mile track which follows the floodable end of the Axe estuary, its service only of practical use for a handful of Colyton residents who want to go shopping at Aldi. But as the only tram system in the southwest it draws all the afficionados, plus who doesn't enjoy hopping aboard a heritage throwback to a bird hide in the middle of nowhere then riding back again? With trams running every 20 minutes it's a better service than many London suburbs. Geoff made a 20 minute video about the Seaton Tramway last year if you want to see what you're missing, like we did.
There isn't time to cram everything into a week's holiday so other places we didn't visit include the town's museum, the quarry caves further round the bay in Beer and the model-railway-focused oddity at Pecorama. They know how to appeal to Men Who Like Trains in Seaton. I really wanted to visit The Undercliffs, site of a massive landslip on Christmas Day 1839 when 800 million tons of rock collapsed replacing coastal farmland with a gapingchasm behind a long slumped slope. Even Queen Victoria came down to view that. A challenging footpath now follows the subtropical weirdness which has grown up since, but it's seven miles long with no access except at either end so we drove to Lyme Regis instead.
Lyme Regis is fossil central, and also a very pretty seaside town thus a key stop on the Dorset tourist trail. It's very nearly in Devon, indeed a half-mile hike up the cliffs from the harbour will see you across the boundary. That harbour is The Cobb, once a premier south coast port but now a picturesque refuge for bobbing boats. It's shielded by a broad sinuous breakwater of ancient providence whose upper level slopes seaward in contravention of all modern health and safety legislation so is wildly attractive. You'll have seen Meryl Streep standing on it in The French Lieutenant's Woman and also imagined it in Jane Austen's Persuasion because she loved a bit of Lyme too.
For fossils you need the other side of town, specifically the sweep of exposed shale beyond Church Cliffs where any slide or tumble could reveal a sheaf of ammonites or the skeleton of another enormous lizard. Many of the earliest dinosaur discoveries were made here, most notably by local fossil hunter Mary Anning who uncovered the first known ichthyosaur and plesiosaurs, the former in 1813 when she was just 12. Had the Geological Society of London accepted women members she might have been more famous in her own lifetime but instead male professors wrote up most of her discoveries and Mary had to rely on flogging fossil curios to make a living. Pleasingly she now has a crowdsourced statue overlooking the east bay, accompanied by her dog Tray who was lost to a landslide. If you fancy hunting fossils yourself, follow her gaze.
The heart of the town is a squish of old buildings at the mouth of the River Lym, rapidly sloping inland. The ancient bend between Bridge Street and Church Street is particularly tight so a real challenge for double deckers, indeed a ridiculous constriction to have to negotiate on Lyme Regis's sole A road. By driving carefully you can avoid damage to the Guildhall and to the town's museum, a multi-storey £9 attraction packed with history and, obviously, a heck of a lot of fossils. A separate £5 museum focuses solely on fossils and dinosaurs while for twice that you can hand hold a starfish or feed some mullet at the aquarium. And then there are the elephants.
Animal-themed sculpture trails are a big thing in many towns and cities, and currently in West Dorset it's elephants. A herd of almost 60 have been scattered across Lyme Regis, Bridport and West Bay, with a couple of outliers at Hive Beach to make finding them all even harder. You can't miss their jolly decorated fibreglass at all kinds of key locations, although to discover the full list of locations you'll need to download the Stampede-by-the-Sea app or pay £2 for a map, all proceeds to the local hospice. We reached the westernmost elephant just as a local retired couple finally completed the gargantuan task of seeing them all and felt the need to outpour all their anecdotes. After several minutes they were still griping about the shop that's only open on Wednesdays ("and she wouldn't let us in"), until we finally extricated ourselves with another "well done" and backed away.
We didn't have the wherewithal to find our way to the craft nexus at the Town Mill, nor the energy to climb the high street in search of fossil shops, nor the urge for a sit-down meal at The French Lieutenant's Bistro. Where we did ultimately end up was The Beach House Cafe with its bright red tables, evocative 1970s Letraset typeface and mighty bacon and sausage baguette. I really wanted to sample the 'Bread Pudding and Custard' advertised on the chalkboard outside but there were alas other places to see.
Beachy Head may be eyewateringly high but Golden Cap is another 30m above sea level, and at 191m the highest point on the entire south coast of England. It's located amid the rollercoaster cliffs between Charmouth and Bridport, a wedge-shaped projection loftier than the rest and visible for miles around. The lower slopes of Jurassic clay support a layer of weathered Upper Greensand on top, characteristically yellow in colour hence the name Golden Cap. It used to be yellower but over the last 100 years the seaward slopes have been increasingly covered with gorse and other vegetation, thus it looks more like Green Cap... at least until the next landslide. My photo was taken from Lyme Regis without a decent zoom, sorry, but closerphotos give a betteridea.
The coastal hamlet of Seatown is only a mile away but it's a whopping ascent, which is why you should never rely on Google Maps for hillclimbing. The approach from Charmouth is longer and more up and down so equally challenging, thus we took the easier route and drove to Langdon Woods where the ticket machine at the top of the National Trust car park is already at 160m. It was then a shady loop round a bluebelled forest, a brief earthen descent, a saunter across a buttercup meadow and finally 70 steps up the prismatic cap. I was barely out of breath. The summit is a broad grass plateau with sandy patches and yes, the views from either side are spectacular.
That's the view across Lyme Bay back to Lyme Regis, a sand-rimmed sweep beyond a fringe of gorse. The National Trust memorial stone is also on this side, remembering its chairman the Earl of Antrim in whose memory this gorgeous upland was purchased for the nation. Meanwhile the trig point is located on the eastern side overlooking Seatown and a distant Chesil Beach, plus further bush-covered slump. It was a lovely place to linger, and also a delight to finally visit a location I'd long lusted after on a map. It was great to know nobody along the entire south coast was higher, but it's perhaps worth saying that the Waitrose in Biggin Hill is 10m higher still, just not with such a cracking view.
When I was a child I had a well-thumbed puzzle book, one of several, which posed an intriguing question about this Dorset village. What's special about this sign, it asked, above a graphic of CHIDEOCK written in block capitals. I think I had to look up the answer but it tickled me, and it tickled me even more as we drove down a hill on the A35 and there was the village sign for real.
The answer if you haven't guessed is that all the letters in CHIDEOCK have horizontal line symmetry, i.e. the name looks exactly the same if you place a mirror above or below it. It may even be the longest such placename in England, hence its inclusion in the puzzle book, unless of course you know better. I would thus like to tell my nine year-old self that I have finally been to this unique location, and indeed nipped into the post office for a newspaper, which is pretty impressive on reflection.
