A path that slips through time

Beer Head looking beyond Sidmouth towards Ladrum Bay

The South West Coastal Path snakes westward along the coast for 630 miles from Poole in Dorset, curls around the Lizard and  Lands End Peninsula and comes to rest in Minehead, Somerset.





Our little section of this path has special significance for it hides secrets that are millions of years old. Along Lyme Bay the cliffs are Jurassic and contain the bones and fossils of dinosaurs. While the red Triassic cliffs of our home town are even older than the age of dinosaurs. This part of the coast has been designated a World Heritage Site.
http://www.jurassiccoast.com/

Beer Beach breakfasts are a perfect way to start a day!

Breakfast on Beer Beach is a sublime start to a walk along this beautiful coast - and an experience we try to repeat whenever we are inclined to rise early on a sunny morning.

Breakfast watching the fishing boats coming or going, depending on time and tide has a way of slowing you back into real timelessness.

Looking down to Brancombe Beach

Walking from Beer to Branscombe can be easy-going along the spectacular cliff-top pathway, or via the more dramatic Hooken Undercliff.

The history of the Hooken Undercliff is interesting, as documented in White's Devonshire and elsewhere, as it happened relatively recently.

"A part of the high cliff facing the sea, between Beer and Branscombe, called Southdown, was the scene of a great landslip in 1790, when upwards of ten acres of land sunk down about 250 feet".

What White does not mention is that after the gigantic landslip, the crab fishermen from Branscombe and Beer discovered their crab pots sitting high above the sea, where the seabed had been forced upwards by the landslip!

The undercliff may not have been formed in Jurassic times, but there is a primeval, other-worldly sense of place down there. There is a stillness and a silence broken only by the songs of a thousand birds, or the rustle of undergrowth where a small mouse scuttles or a snake slips unseen. In places the path drops close to the deserted beach where the waves wash in and wash out again witnessed only by the sea birds and the ocassional walkers like ourselves.

Branscombe lies at the end of our walk - a stretched out village that lines a long valley ending with a cafe on the beach.  The beach where a few years ago The Napoli had floundered and cast out its cargo.  Now all that remains of that ship is it's anchor - a gift to the village, an apology for it's sudden rude and unannounced arrival.

The call of the sea is powerful and the coastal path lies waiting, a narrow path that slips and winds its way through time  - and through our time and through our place, and by walking it we claim it, we know it, we hear its stories and we begin to understand ourselves.