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| The English Riviera |
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The English coast from Swanage to Exmouth is like a necklace strung with jewels of scenery, writes Tilly Lavenas
You can’t go any farther,” the moustachioed shopkeeper said. His wildly diverse merchandise looked as if it had been drop-kicked onto the counter, jungle-like in its randomness. “The open coast ends here. Beyond is the Undercliff and it’s all wilderness.”
Guy and I were embarking on an idiosyncratic tour of England, without much advance planning, careering madly around the country. Guy’d had a feeling that Lyme Regis in west Dorset was an appealing little town, so that’s where we’d arrived after crossing several counties in our rented Peugeot.
It turned out that Lyme Regis is just one town on a remarkable coast that runs from Swanage in Dorset to Exmouth in Devon. You could think of it as the English Riviera, or as a necklace strung with jewels of scenery: Golden Cap, Lulworth Cove, Durdle Door, Chesil Beach. People come here for the beaches, the clifftop walks, the little seaside towns and the many-million-year-old fossils that you can pick up on the shore.
In 2001, this 90-mile stretch was designated the Jurassic Coast, a Unesco World Heritage Site, like the Grand Canyon and the Pyramids and the Great Barrier Reef. The sailing events of the 2012 Olympics will take place off this coast (July 29 to Aug. 11) in the waters of Weymouth Bay.
But back then we knew the area only as a beautiful coastline, three hours from London. And we soon learned that the Undercliff was one of its more amazing features, seven miles of subtropical landscape dense with luscious vegetation. From the cliffline, several hundred feet down to the sea, continual landslips have created a jumble of slopes and ravines, an unusual and almost inaccessible habitat for plants and birds.
There was no obvious route into the Undercliff. We found our way along a path marked by four pine trees, then a meadow, then an earthen avenue that led into the forest but soon turned into the precarious path our friend had warned us of. It was a black thread tightroping along the tops of narrow ridges between deep crevasses. Down to the right we saw a small pond completely carpeted in brilliant green duckweed. Then, far down to the left, a larger bright-green pool; I half expected a crocodile to rise from its depths. The whole terrain was a jumble of ridges and gullies.
We were seldom aware of the sea, a few hundred feet below through the trees, until we came to a low-slung branch with a glorious view through a gap. We sat on it to eat our sandwiches. We met few humans, but there was abundant other life: gulls, thrushes, crows, the intimate twittering of other birds nearby yet invisible. Under the canopy of oaks and ashes was dense vegetation — ivy, wild garlic, horsetail, nettles, dock, fiddlehead ferns.
As much as I cherish the Undercliff, I’ve hiked it only a few times since that fateful day, usually to show our American visitors England’s only jungle.
In May, I decide that it’s time to revisit this exotic place. I lace up my hiking boots, pack some leftovers and soon we’re following the same pine-marked walk. We emerge onto a grassy hillside with a seat and a view back toward the Cobb (the ancient breakwater in the famous
opening scene of The French Lieutenant’s Woman).
I used to be a lot fitter (weren’t we all?) and now it’s difficult to navigate the muddy thread along the tops of the knife-edge ridges. Gingerly, I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to avoid the massive roots across the path.
But where are the two green pools we remember? And at lunchtime we can’t find the tree where we’d eaten our picnic on that maiden hike. Has the ground moved or the path been re-routed? Probably a bit of both. The process of slippage that created the Undercliff is always at work, and the path keeps having to adapt to change. Sort of like life.
We now know a lot more about the Undercliff, of course. For example, the old pumping station about two miles in once supplied spring water to an estate at the top of the cliffs. It belonged to a rich 19th-century grocer, Sir Henry Peek, who wanted the water to fill his ornamental lakes. When an Italian ship sank in the bay, he had its cargo of marble statuary hauled up by donkeys to decorate his mansion.
Weymouth Bay is sheltered by another remarkable lump of scenery called the Isle of Portland. I want to visit it again, and my friend Marie suggests that we do it now, before it gets locked down by the Olympic crowds and security.
The “Isle” isn’t really an isle, being connected to the mainland by a 17-mile ribbon of gravel. Scarcely believable quantities of the famous Portland stone went into the making of Buckingham Palace, the United Nations headquarters in New York and innumerable other structures. Christopher Wren used a million cubic feet of it in St Paul’s Cathedral.
We head to Tout Quarry Sculpture Park, which Marie insists is one of the most fascinating places in Dorset, if not England. Like the Undercliff, it’s not easy to find. You drive through an industrial area, and the only indication that you’ve arrived is a discreet parking sign.
We walk about 100 yards until we come to the Circle of Stones, a rectangular rock table surrounded by rock seats, like a Stone Age boardroom. From it leads an avenue lined by what appear to be just more rocks, until you see that sculptors have transformed them: adorable faces, an owl, a bear, a horse (or is it a cow?), a cornucopia. My favourite is a whimsical figure holding onto his hat. And look at that Rodin-like figure hunched over in despair! There’s a Viking ship, made of concrete and railroad ties, and a fireplace, actually scorched by a fire that someone shouldn’t have lit in it. The best-known sculpture is an early Antony Gormley, “Still Falling,” a life-size figure frozen in mid-dive down the rockface. We marvel that no one is here except us and — more marvellous yet — there’s no admission or parking charge.
We can’t leave Portland without visiting its high-cliffed tip, the Bill. Several currents meet at this jutting point of land, and they make for some of the most dangerous conditions along England’s coastline. Hence the three lighthouses built here to warn ships coming into Weymouth.
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