The forgotten world of the Lyme Regis landslip

                                                                                                                   Illustration by David Juniper

The open coast of Lyme Bay, with its fields, cliffs, and beaches, is like a sunny balcony facing south. This ends at Lyme town, tight up against the western end of Dorset. Beyond here, the way is blocked by a wilderness, which has been called the only jungle in England

It is almost impassable, though not quite: there is a precarious path. With a little imagination you could turn this into a fairy story: a seaside kingdom, ending at a mysterious forest, through which an adventurer penetrates to discover another land!

The Undercliff is a five-mile section of coast where the clifftops stand well inland, because the ground has broken away and falls in a long jumble to the sea. Because the layers of rock slope seaward and are lubricated by water, they keep slipping down over each other, rather like a tilted pack of cards.
The greatest slip happened on Christmas Day in 1839. Twenty acres of farmland split away, moving 300 feet out and down, and off the shore a reef was pushed up. The details were well studied by William Conybeare, a great geologist who happened to be vicar of Axminster. The reef disappeared, but the detached block, known as Goat Island, still had a sown wheat field on top, which next August was reaped by girls dressed as nymphs; and parties of visitors came to view the scene and take tea at Landslip Cottage. You can still see Goat Island and the Great Chasm behind it, though now obscured by trees.

In earlier times a small population was scattered through the Undercliff. There were grazing sheep and rabbits, charcoal-burners, several cottages. Over the past century it has been one of the few parts of England to become more wild instead of less. Perhaps it is haunted by its departed folk, and by the French Lieutenant’s Woman (Sarah Woodruff) who used to go walking in it, and the German prisoner of war said to have hidden out here, and whoever left the six-months-abandoned tent found by two children in 2003?

Under the forest canopy of oaks and ashes there is dense vegetation, ivy, wild garlic, horsetails, duckweed, badgers, foxes, adders, butterflies; 400 species of wildflowers have been recorded; various searches found 254 fresh-water invertebrates, 150 kinds of fly and wasp in five days, 89 kinds of lichen in one day.

At the Lyme end there are several ways in. From Monmouth Beach a path climbs beside a stream. From the Holmbush car park, a walk marked by pines joins the first path in a field, and they emerge onto a grassy hillside with a seat and a view down over the Cobb. From Ware Lane there is another footpath, also a gravel road. Last and most spectacular, from the upper end of Ware Lane a path goes past Ware Farm to the top of a fantastic spire called Chimney Rock. Here you are among the treetops, and you descend winding steps into their shadows.

All these ways unite in what is at first a wide earthen avenue into the forest. It doesn’t stay this easy! It becomes a thread along the tops of knife-edge ridges, between crevasses some of which are filled with bright green pools; later, it clambers with steep steps in and out of gullies. Much of the time you cannot see the sea, though it is not far below. About two miles in, you pass an old pumping station, once used to supply Lyme with spring-water.

Half way along, if you’ have had enough, you can take an easy path up a ravine, to emerge among the buildings of the Rousdon estate. This started as a mansion built by the rich grocer Sir Henry Peek; later it was Allhallows School. Peek had water pumped up from the Undercliff to fill his ornamental lakes; and when an Italian ship sank in the bay he had its cargo of marble statuary hauled up by donkeys to decorate his house.

But if you press on, after another mile and a half you are passing along the seaward flank of Goat Island. The path is sometimes runs close to the sea, sometimes steeply higher, and eventually it curves to brings you out of the Undercliff, to the top of a bright green valley, now filled by a golf course, down which there is a marvellous view across the estuary of the Axe to the tall white cliff between Seaton and Beer. From Seaton you could catch a bus back to Lyme.

By Guy Ottewell

Since Guy wrote this piece the dire weather of early 2014 means this fascinating classic walk is closed due to slippage. Hopefully it will reopen soon. I.D.