Uplyme to West Bay

Walked by Sally and Richard, Saturday 27th April 2013.

About 11.5 miles of walking, around 11 miles on route of South West Coast Path (allowing for diversions and for the JordanWalks starting point of Uplyme rather than Lyme Regis). About 7 hours, including stops.

Click here for all our photos from this walk.

We left Fingle B&B around 9.30am after a lovely breakfast (delicious fruit, scrambled egg, then home-made marmalade on locally baked speciality bread) and a chat with Jane Thomas and her husband and with our fellow guests, a friendly young couple who have left their three children with grandparents to come away for a weekend to celebrate a friend's 40th birthday. They are having lunch today at nearby River Cottage.

Landslips had given us yesterday's delightful walk through the Axmouth to Lyme Regis Undercliffs, but on today's walk, landslips are associated with path diversions, including a diversion mostly on roads from Lyme Regis to Charmouth, clearly loathed by many walkers. These are the same Black Ven landslips that make Lyme Regis and Charmouth famous for fossils, as each fresh landslips exposes fresh fossil beds. Anyway, we had our own plans! Rather than walking back down to Lyme Regis, we would cut across from Uplyme to Charmouth, rejoining the official diversion halfway across.

We walked the few hundred yards down Church Lane in Uplyme, to the point where the East Devon Way went off on a delightful path by the River Lim and we followed this, with joggers and dog walkers for company. (We met lots of dogs and walkers today, presumably because it was a Saturday, but this was friendly rather than being a problem). We then followed the Wessex Ridgeway (one of the paths we hope to walk in its entirety fairly soon) up Dragon Hill - this was attractive too. Finally, we continued to climb and turned left onto the main road above Lyme Regis, to rejoin the official South West Coast Path diversion. This took us straight across a golf course, then down through woodland to rejoin the main road (which loops round to the north) and onto more minor roads through Charmouth and back to the coast. 

Charmouth is a real fossil hunting beach, with the Charmouth Heritage Coast Centre and a shop (selling fossils...), but we restricted ourselves to buying sandwiches for lunch from the cafe. 

The path to the east of Charmouth has also been deemed unsafe and closed. Many people still walk up this section, some actually walking in an adjacent field, but we are boring law-abiding sorts, so we followed the diversion. This took us back up through Charmouth and then along the narrow and attractive Stonebarrow Lane, which climbed...and climbed...and climbed. Eventually at the National Trust car park, we turned right and followed a path down past Westhay Farm to the coast. 

A number of ascents and descents followed, with quite a lot of other people about (including a number of young women with pink feathery scarves - not sure what that was about). We crossed a stream by a recently rebuilt footbridge, stopped for our sandwiches, then climbed to the top of Golden Cap, at 191 metres the highest point on the south coast of England. Golden Cap takes its name from the distinctive outcropping of golden greensand. It was chilly on the top, so we didn't hang about.

We descended to Seatown, with its large caravan park, on this occasion useful! We'd been down to the pub by the beach but their ice cream kiosk was not open - then Richard noticed ice cream signs back at the caravan site. We actually managed to buy both local ice cream and decent postcards, which up to this point had been eluding us! 

From Seatown we climbed again, first to Ridge Cliff, then to Doghouse Hill and then to Thorncombe Beacon. I particularly enjoyed this section of the walk. Part-way up, we met another coast path walker, who has walked the whole path the way we are going, and is now walking it in the South Haven Point to Minehead direction. He told us that he is wild camping and was contemplating camping on top of Golden Cap. We didn't like to tell him how windy it was up there.

We walked down to Eype Mouth, with another caravan park, though (as at Seatown) the stony beach had a certain attractiveness. From here, an easy cliff walk brought us to West Bay. West Bay is Bridport's harbour, but it is a bigger place in its own right than I had expected. To avoid the problem of shingle blocking the harbour mouth, the River Brit is dammed with sluices until there is a head of water behind them. The sluices are then opened fully to allow a great surge of water to scour the pebbles from the harbour entrance.

As in Lyme Regis, we'd had some difficulty getting single night accommodation in West Bay and we ended up at Seadale B&B whose address is technically Bridport, but which is actually the first house you reach after a very short section with no houses between West Bay and Britport - so it is no distance at all from West Bay and has the benefit of good views across the floodplain of the River Brit. The only problem is that it is on the main road between and so was a bit noisy - but most of the B&Bs we'd considered had been in this same row of houses and I doubt we could have done better.

We met Linda Clue in the garden picking daffodils, and she showed us to our room. It started to rain as we got inside, so we waited for it to stop before heading out (and for the first time this holiday, we wore waterproofs for safety!) We walked back down to West Bay, initially trying to walk on the bank across the flood plain rather than on the road, but then realising that we were not sure how we would get out at the other end so retracing our steps. When we got down to West Bay we started by photographing the distinctive East Cliff in the evening sunshine.

Our best eating options seemed to be a nice looking restaurant called Seagulls or fish and chips from one of the many kiosks around the harbour, especially since we hadn't had fish and chips yet on this holiday, and it is becoming something of a tradition. 'Seagulls' was fully booked, so the next decision was which fish and chip kiosk! We opted for 'Traditional fish and chips' who cooked our meal to order. Richard waited (by the time our order was ready there was quite a queue) whilst I went to find a bench.

The fish and chips were delicious, but it clouded over as we were eating, and we needed the waterproofs for warmth. As we pottered about West Bay afterwards (actually looking for a post box for our postcards) we noticed the amazing sky to the east, where it was raining. We walked to the other side of the harbour hoping to get good photographs, though even then I'm not sure we did it justice.

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