After another stellar English breakfast cooked and served lovingly by Caroline and spiced with a sizeable discourse on the impacts of modern English schooling on children, we loaded up the car. A general “South-West’ objective and a vague notion of a BBC rendition of a Jane Austen novel had us turn right out of the driveway with the hope and optimism only available to those unaccustomed to English summer holidays by the seaside.
Honestly, we could’ve just spent the day driving around Piddletrenthide (and nearby Puddletown) – it’s so green and vibrant! Three metre high hedge rows that morph into dark green tree tunnels whilst passing through woodland, picturesque stone cottages and gardens glowing with roses, magnolia, honeysuckle, delphiniums, lupins and geraniums of more colours than we knew existed.
Our first stop, based on a book at the B and B describing Thomas Hardy’s haunts (basically all of Dorset), was the village of Beaminster, where we grabbed a coffee and stretched our legs after the arduous 30-minute drive from Piddletrenthide
We stopped briefly at a viewing point that happened to be an Iron Age multivallate Durotrigian hillfort (yeh, I knew that) and was also where Wordsworth and his wife used to go walking. It’s Dorset’s second-highest point (277m), so stunning views out to the coast.
Re-caffeinated and rested, we headed towards the coast and Lyme Regis where BBC’s adaptation of Pursuasion was filmed. Its compact streets (and crowds) make parking impossible, so a park-and-ride service is provided at the top of the hill. For us, this doubled as a mini town-tour, and we sat back on the bus’s top deck and enjoyed the additional altitude and close-quarters viewing as the double-decker squeezed through the narrow main street.
The ‘change’ huts on the manufactured pebble beach deserve their own ethnography, assuming one had the time. Family garden-shed-sized mini-homes decked out with kitchens and libraries, loungerooms and games cupboards, clothes racks, artworks and surfcraft collections, tens of them lined up along the beach top with myriad pastel coloured doors.
We walked the sea wall and up into the gardens commanding a clear view back over the beach to the red Jurassic cliffs (just west of where Broadchurch was filmed at West Bay). After a picnic lunch, we grabbed a beer at the Volunteer Inn, re-provisioned ourselves for dinner at Tescos, caught the park-and-ride bus back up the hill and hit the road.
By the afternoon, as we dropped down into Beaminster, we’d gained a good understanding of how the road generally stays high as it rolls along the undulating green and yellow patchwork-quilt of cow paddocks, then dives down into the towns nestled in the oceans’ inlets cut into the cliffs by river and sea.
Teignmouth was a surprise. Walking along the sea wall, we wondered where everyone was (particularly as all the carparks were full). Our curiosity was satiated after rounding the seawall’s end and dropping down the stairs to the back beach facing the enclosed bay. Coming out between two boat hire shacks, we found ourselves captured in an English summer holiday movie set. Red and white poms downing beers (men) and cocktails and wine (ladies), while kids jumped off harbour walls, sunbaked, threw seaweed at each other, mucked around in boats and generally behaved as kids do on summer school holidays on the beach – there were hundreds of them. The beach shacks were even larger and better decked out than at Lyme Regis, and we felt as if we were intruding in their private lives, walking through their bedrooms, between parents in shacks and their children on the beach, umbilical cords of shack flotsam and jetsam joining their worlds. We jagged a table end at the Ship Inn and enjoyed an afternoon cider or two amongst the crowds, before completing a bit of a town recky and heading to Torquay, where we’d found a room at less extortionate rates than the popular beachfront places.
Tomorrow we think we’ll cross the river at Dartmouth by ferry, then check out the little seaside village of Salcombe. Perhaps we’ll stop there or maybe push on to Plymouth, not sure. Today was leisurely, only a few hours driving, and we seemed to cover a large section of the distance to Landsend. We’ll see how we go.