Category Archives: Lyme Regis

May 15 2011

Life on the Lym

DOGS and ducks, sheep and sparrows, all life is here on the River Lym. We’ve pitched a tent just 30 minutes’ amble over the Dorset border, in sublime Uplyme – just us and 16 pints of Cheddar Valley cider.

This part of Devon, Hook Farm campsite, is half an hour’s drive from the office. It’s peaceful, yet surprisingly noisy. Church bells and a determined and sustained tweeting from the birds fails to drown out a zombie chorus of sheep growling, barking and shrieking on the hillside.

We set up our new barbecue and enjoy spying on our neighbours. Sometimes we use the binoculars, when we are not training them on the buzzards crying and circling above. We watch campers grapple with inflatable mattresses and speculate on how old they are, and what they’re smoking. Inexplicably, someone has hung up four socks on sticks stuck into the ground.

As dusk settles in, we can’t distinguish birds from bats any more. The sun sets on my right and the moon rises to my left.

Next morning we head for Lyme Regis, just over a mile and a half away. It’s hard to know if we are in Devon, or Dorset. We cross a bridge that’s badged up with the Wessex Ridgeway Trail - surely now we must be on home turf.

Uplyme is sublime – large character cottages shrugging under thatches and fighting off vast swathes of wisteria. Gardens are bursting with tumbling blooms. The footpath cleaves through clumps of pungent wild garlic and follows the twists and turns of the River Lym as it wends its way towards the sea. There’s stinging nettle leaves as big as my hand, and brightly coloured bungalows cluster at the waterside.

We emerge where the Lym trickles and gurgles into the sea. We climb up Broad Street to The Volunteer Inn, and sit down for a well-earned pint of Otter Ale and large glass of pinot grigio. We lunch on excellent whitebait, and ham sandwiches, then turn into Langmoor Gardens for a stunning view down to the ancient harbour of Lyme Regis, flanked by Golden Cap (golden no longer, thanks to encroaching bracken).

We head past the Hix Oyster and Fish House – but today’s a day for catching our own, so we stroll down to the Cobb and catch a ride on the Sunbeam out to mackerel heaven.

Seagulls scream and dive as our four lines pull in seven fine fish for tea.

We head home (via the Harbour Inn for a pint of Cornish Rattler and Town Mill). On our way back we see a mother duck keeping a close eye on her brood of fluffy ducklings. A lamb watches us pass. I harvest armfuls of wild garlic for us to cook with our fish. Mackerels plucked from the sea and slapped on the barbecue in under three hours. Heavenly.

We drink more Cheddar cider and head to the Talbot Arms for a top-up. We stagger back to the tent. Not a drop of rain all weekend. The sun sets on some very happy campers.

Mar 6 2011

Chilling out at Chesil Cove

WE taste the salt on our lips as soon as we sit down.

Portland is a pale blonde streak of pebbles bleached by time and tide. The sea’s a deep and heart-stopping blue. This is Chesil Cove, although as the sun beats down, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s an off-duty Maldive.

We sit under the sea wall, currently being shored up by Defra, munching an impromptu picnic of sandwiches and strawberries. We squint seawards – what we think is a seal turns out to be a cormorant, diving for fish.

The Cove House Inn, which hosts a raucous music festival (big cider fest) over the summer bank holiday, is one of our favourite watering holes. We last came here to watch the sun sink into Lyme Bay during the summer solstice.

We fall silent, drinking in the simple joys of sky, sea, and shore in all their stripey glory.

Oh, and gulls. Don’t forget the gulls – they revel in it almost as much as we do.

I think this is where I fell in love with the sea. My mum brought me and my brother here one stormy, stormy day. We were little, and it was well over two decades before the catchphrase ‘Jurassic Coast‘ was coined. We chased the waves and listened in awe to the undertow sucking the pebbles away – loud as a jet engine.

It seems quietly amazing to think we’re sat where the Chesil Beach starts, right here, on our doorstep.

To our right, it stretches out for 18 miles, past the Fleet Lagoon, Abbotsbury, Burton Bradstock, to West Bay.

The West Weares rise up to our left, terraced into the Chiswell Earthworks sculpture created by John Maine. Beach huts are studded into the hill.

Behind us hunches higgledy-piggledy Chiswell, rugged, secretive, strangely seductive. Not for the first time, we think we’d like to live here.

Lured by the chance to win a wedding with all the trimmings – flowers, photography, catering, civil ceremony – we’ve just been to scope out Portland Castle as a venue for our own upcoming nuptials. I wish we could get married here, on the beach, standing looking out to sea on the large flat pebbles, with the wind in our hair, hearing the gulls’ cries on the wind.

We bask in the sunlight and discuss ideas, in no great hurry. Like the song says, we have all the time in the world.

As we drive off Portland we see two riders and horses galloping, galloping half way up the island. It’s a wild and wonderful sight.

Jan 23 2011

In search of Fishpond Bottom

SUCKERS for silly-sounding place names, we’re terribly excited when Google maps reveal to us the heretofore uncharted territories of Fishpond Bottom, close to Lyme Regis and the Devon border. But this tiny hamlet is so tiny, we somehow manage to miss it altogether. Despite a five mile hike around the Marshwood Vale, we only skirt the edges of a green bowl, where our promised land lies.

Taking it from the top, my first tumble comes scampering up the ramparts at the Iron Age hill fort Coney Castle, landing cushioned by piles of damp and pungent leaf mulch.

As we descend towards Fishpond Bottom, the sun sparkles off Lyme Bay. The path is studded with splashes of yellow gorse. This is Dorset at its best – truly an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

Lyme Light

All I know about Fishpond Bottom is what I can glean from the blog by local photographer Jonathan Tolhurst, who intriguingly mentions that the hamlet is named ‘after the Fishpond which was created by some breakaway monks from Abbotsbury’.

The terrain is not for the faint-booted. We take an unmetalled road, slipping and sliding our way along ancient lanes cobbled together by people from long ago. It’s spongy, boggy, and sometimes we’re ankle-deep in slurry.

After panting up a hilly incline we pause for a picnic next to Nettlemore Farm. Perching on three-legged stools, shelling hard-boiled eggs and munching on chunks of cheddar, we excite the interest of two small boys playing spies. Peering at us through binoculars, they alternately hide behind a hedge, drag out a telescope on a tripod and take photographs of us with a disposable camera. In turn, we train our binoculars back on them and can’t stop laughing.

We keep on trekking. Halfway down a sloping field, craning my neck to follow a kestrel’s flight, I slip and land splat! in an enormous cow pat.

Undeterred, we trample on – and suddenly realise we’ve somehow stumbled into foreign lands. The B3165 road creates a natural boundary between Devon and Dorset. To our right, the paths are badged up by Devon County Council…

…and on our left, street furniture is stamped with the logo of neighbouring authority, Dorset County Council.

What a bureaucratic minefield! Is it unfair to imagine buck-passing phone calls from Dorchester to Exeter? Who’s in charge of clearing fallen trees from the road? Or potholes?

The B3165

As we stumble on, fungus and lichen clutch at trunks and logs. Mossy tree roots morph into copper piles of leaves.

We emerge at Lamberts Castle, high on the Wessex Ridgeway – the perfect wild camping spot come the summer. We dip down and look into the round bowl valley below. The Marshwood Vale stretches out in a lazy green haze.

As we clamber back towards the car, sheep fart loudly behind us. Pink starts to stripe the sky, and the sun sets on Fishpond Bottom. I smell of cow dung all the way home.