Bridport to Abbotsbury  17km
Ascension 51m  Accumulated ascension 4020m

7.30 Breakfast and a good early start. Retraced our steps back to West Bay stopping at a large Morrison’s store to buy some lunch provisions. At West Bay we discovered The Station Kitchen. This a cafe/restaurant in a quaint little railway station and two railway carriages used as dining cars. There is only about 50 metres of track left of what was once a branch line serving the port.

The Coast Path was to go up East Cliff from the beach at West Bay but of course we came upon the usual Public Notice; Emergency Temporary Closure of Footpath. This order only came into force on the 9th August but is in force for 6 months. Helpfully they included a map which showed the diversion route. Usually this means extra distance and often using public roads. Not too bad this time a little on the road, then up a field and across yet another golf course and down to Hive Beach. That was the climbing and descending done for the day. We thought from there the walking would be easy but the hard work had only just begun.

The cliffs petered out to gentle ups and downs and the path now continued along the back of the beach. The beach was quite steep with a wide mound of shingle and then the path behind this. The walking was very tiring, the shingle was made of pebbles about marble sized, polished and loose so that every step sank into them with no grip. We struggled on this for about an hour then went down to the water’s edge where you walk the magic line. This is a line in the sand between high on the beach where it is too dry and soft, and low on the beach where it is too wet and soft. If you can keep on this the going is good and we made great progress to West Bexington where we took a break for lunch.

Sometimes for lunch we have been buying “Meal Deals” which most grocery stores have. You get a main, snack and drink for about £3.40 – £3.90. The main can be sandwiches, wraps, pasta etc, a snack can be chips, choc bar, fruit,  scotch egg etc and the drink can be water, soda, juice, smoothie etc. The Meal Deal price is much cheaper than buying three things individually. Today for my snack I chose the option of two pork pies. As pork pies go they weren’t too bad, nice pastry and a tasty filling but boy were they small. About the size of a meat ball, one mouthful and they were gone.

From Hive Beach we had been walking on Chesil Beach. This is a massive simple linear shingle beach 29km long, up to 15m high and up to 200m wide stretching from West Bay to the Isle of Portland. Behind the beach is a shallow tidal lagoon, The Fleet. It is said to be the finest example of a barrier beach in the world. The beach is famously said to comprise of more than 180 billion pebbles, which gradually reduce in size as you travel along the beach, from around 5 cm long at the Chiswell end to pea-sized at West Bay. People landing on the beach at night having been fishing, or smuggling, are said to have been able to work out their location based on the pebbles’ size. The sorting of the pebbles is due to the difference in wave height and direction along the beach. Even though there are 180 million pebbles it is illegal to take even one!

After lunch we struggled on the shingle beach for about half an hour before mercifully it went inland a bit to a dirt track then four wheel drive track, then narrow tarmac road as we arrived in Abbotsbury.

Abbotsbury is a picture post card pristine village with a rich history going back 6000 years. It is set among rolling hills and is only a mile inland from Chesil Beach. It has many historic buildings but is best known for its swannery, the only managed colony of nesting mute swans in the world. The swannery was set up by Benedictine Monks in 1393.

From our window at the 300 year old thatch roofed Coward’s Lake Farm House we can see the late 14^th century St Catherine’s Chapel standing alone on the top of Chapel Hill. We will walk out that way tomorrow and take a closer look.