Sunday 14 June 2026

Day 48 of walking
Lyme Regis to Bridport
Distance: 21.14km
Total distance: 939.60km
Climbing: 746m
Total climb: 31,158m

Our 9.30am taxi turned up at 9.10am and we were back in Dorset at Lyme Regis ready to start walking at 9.30am. Our taxi driver was a happy chappie, he was Moroccan and overnight Morocco had drawn their World Cup Football match against Brazil which was something of an upset. Lyme Regis at 9.30am on a Sunday morning was already beginning to buzz. The cafes and restaurants offering breakfast or coffee were doing a great trade. People were already marking out their plots and setting up their little tents and shelters on the beach.

Besides The Cobb, famously featuring in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and the book and film of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Lyme Regis is best known for its fossils. The Jurassic Coast is a treasure trove for fossil-hunters and fossils are found at most of the beaches including Lyme Regis. The most common finds are ammonites – the spiral-shaped shells of extinct marine molluscs, and belemnites – once called ‘Devil’s thunderbolts’ due to their shape but are really part of an internal shell of a squid-like animal.

‘She sells sea shells on the sea shore’ The person this tongue twister is said to refer to is Mary Anning, the famed local palaeontologist who made numerous discoveries of great importance in the coastal cliffs around Lyme Regis. She rose from a poor and uneducated background to become one of the world’s leading and most revered fossil collectors and palaeontologists. She made the first of several important discoveries in 1811 at the age of 12, unearthing a 17 foot long ichthyosaurus (fish lizard), in 1823 she discovered a complete plesiosaurus (near lizard) and in 1828 a pterodactyl skeleton. Unfortunately due to the great social inequality of the time a woman of her background was never given the plaudits she deserved. In order to make a living she had to sell her finds to other scientists who then took all the credit for them. In 2010 however she was included in the list of 10 British women to have most influenced the history of science.

A major feature of the walking today is the large number of cliff slippages caused by a combination of wet weather and geology. After a walk along the promenade and sea wall at Lyme Regis the first diversion was inland on roads away from the coast, across yet another golf course, back onto some roads to meet the coast again at Charmouth. The interest here was a nice beach, a Heritage Coast Centre, a good location for fossil hunters, and for us a shop with an ice cold drink of apple juice on what was turning out to be hot day.

From Charmouth there is a long steep climb, with diversions inland away from and back to the crumbling cliffs to Golden Cap – at 191m the south coast’s highest point. The highest point on the entire Coast Path is Great Hangman – 318m, but it is on the west coast. The views up and down the coast were spectacular on this clear day, way beyond Beer Head to the west and the Isle of Portland to the east. We came over Golden Cap in 2023 in white out conditions and saw nothing, so today was pretty special. Golden Cap gets its name from the distinctive layer of bright yellow-orange sandstone (known as Upper Greensand) that forms the very top of the hill. From the summit it is a very fast steep descent to the beach at Seatown, a tiny village with a pub, pizzeria, sauna, car park and huge holiday park.

Another steep climb and descent over Doghouse Hill to the beach at Eype Mouth, a tiny hamlet with just a few small chalets and a car park. I was feeling very hot after all the climbing so had a quick swim before we tackled the last climb of the day at West Cliff before going down into West Bay. The whole of the coast today was steep crumbling cliffs and there have been many large landslides. The path keeps away from the more dangerous cliff edges but sometimes got very close to the edge and you could peer down to the beach and water below. This was a bit unnerving when you realised the piece you were standing on was severely undercut and there were large cracks in the ground around you.

West Bay is a working harbour but also thrives on the tourist trade. The original harbour was at Bridport a couple of miles inland on the River Brit. The river silted up and boats became too big for the river so a new port was constructed on the coast. This was named Bridport Harbour until the railway came to Bridport and in an early example of rebranding the name was changed to West Bay to be more attractive to tourists.

At West Bay we left the Coast Path and went inland 3.2 kilometres on a public footpath, initially through a large holiday park and then along the banks of the Brit and Asker Rivers to the town of Bridport, where we are staying at the Tiger Inn. It is tough doing an extra 3 kilometres at the end of a hot, strenuous day but West Bay has very little hotel or B & B accommodation, just the holiday park and some modern high-rise apartments. The Tiger Inn is a nice 18^th century establishment, and of course we are up two flights in the attic. Like every pub and Inn in England they are showing non-stop World Cup Football and there is a lively crowd downstairs and in the two outside beer gardens. It could be a long noisy night.

The Tiger Inn does not serve food other than breakfast so we went down the road to The Bull Inn. We stayed there in 2023 and knew they did evening meals. It was a Sunday and to our joy they were serving Sunday Roasts until 8pm. Two weary but hungry walkers after a strenuous day, tucked into a great roast chicken with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and vegetables with lashings of gravy.