The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths (28 page)

By 1839, the fashion for the picturesque was everywhere. Scenery should be wild, noble and dramatic, and what could possibly be more dramatic than land that had ripped itself asunder with a mighty roar and a bone-stirring shudder? Even the mountains of Scotland, Wales and the Lakes couldn’t compete with that. Visitors came in their droves, on foot, by pony and trap, and by chartered pleasure steamers from Weymouth, Exmouth and Torquay. Locals hired themselves out as guides, embellishing their stories of That Fateful Night a little more with every threepenny bit proffered. But the greatest entrepreneurs were the two farmers on whose land the slip had occurred. The paths that soon grew up to steer the visitors around the Landslip – one for the gentlemen, and a less vertiginous one for the ladies – deliberately passed through both farms, and visitors would be efficiently divested of a shiny sixpence at each. Some tried to escape the charges and find their own way, often straying on to the land of a third farm, Little Bindon. The farmer there also charged the going rate of sixpence. Look-outs were employed to ensure that no-one escaped.

The Tourism Enterprise Award for 1840 must however go to James Chappell, the owner of Bindon Farm, on whose land the majority of the Landslip had occurred. By the summer after the slip, up to a thousand tickets a day were being sold, but he saw the potential for even more, and organised a fair for 25 August, culminating in a celebratory reaping of the corn that had continued to grow on Goat Island, the section that had sheared off his fields and now sat in strange isolation hundreds of yards, and a yawning chasm, away. As an added incentive to spectators, the most buxom young ladies were chosen to wield the first scythes, and, by the end of the day, you could purchase – and plenty did – a framed certificate with a few ears of the special corn affixed to it by sealing wax. Through the day, the many beer tents and food stalls, the jugglers and balloons all did a roaring trade, and the evening resounded to the sound of music, dancing and, as darkness fell, no doubt other kinds of merrymaking in the more secluded corners of Goat Island. According to the
Dorset County Chronicle
, 10,000 people had come that day. The Landslip was a goldmine.

So much the worse, then, when the owner of Pinhay Hall, newly built a mile or two from the Landslip towards Lyme, suddenly closed the Undercliff path that linked the town to its cash cow. Although it had been used for centuries by fishermen, stone quarrymen, farmers, labourers, smugglers and Preventive Men, those employed to hunt them out, Mr John Ames of Pinhay was having none of it. He had ideas about building his own arboretum, and didn’t want to see it ruined by a daily invasion of erotically charged ’Erberts and ’Arriets. He threw up a wall across the path, declaring that it was not now, and never had been, a right of way.

Lyme Regis seethed. A townsman, Joseph Hayward, decided to take Ames on in the courts. Three different cases took place in swift succession in Exeter, eventually coming down on the side of Hayward and the town. Ames had built a huge bonfire, to be lit as a final two fingers to the townsfolk on his expected victory, but instead he was landed with a court bill of £10,000. Hayward’s costs of £1,500 were soon wiped out by an active fundraising programme from amongst Lyme’s grateful population. In fury, Ames instead threw up eight-foot-high flint walls through his estate and funnelled the now legally proven right of way through the dank little gap between them.

The Landslip’s fame and allure lasted well into the twentieth century. When the tiny little branch railway from Axminster to Lyme Regis was finally opened in 1903, its only intermediate stop was near the hamlet of Combpyne. The station was proudly christened ‘Combpyne for Landslip’, a name that lasted until the Second World War. Landslip Cottage, now reduced to a few ivy-clad stumps, continued to dole out afternoon teas to visitors into the 1950s. But by then, it was nigh on impossible to see the very features that had made the Landslip such an attraction in its early days. The blindingly white chalk-cliff faces had dulled, the natural harbour was long silted up, and everything was choked by dense vegetation that had been busily reclaiming the broken land for nature.

Today, the area of the landslip – Goat Island and the Chasm, let alone the lagoon – is abandoned to the elements. They are off limits, both officially to preserve the Undercliff’s status of nature reserve, but also practically, for you would be ripped to shreds by gorse and brambles if you tried to get through on the paths that the Victorian trippers gouged so effectively out of the newly exposed slopes. Coming from the Seaton end to the west, the Landslip area is only about a third of the way to Lyme, and as I stood and read the interpretation board, drily regurgitating the facts and figures, I gazed up at the still-impressive cliffs of the Chasm, now cloaked in green. Gulls and buzzards circled overhead, but their shrieking began to sound like happy visitors clambering in awe over the rocks and terraces. Awe, and possibly a subterranean pulse of lust. ‘Bindon Cliffs: Where the Earth Moves’ – even the interpretation board, decorated with its logos of multiple funding agencies, is slyly titled with a nod to its sensuality.

The Landslip – still marked as such on the OS map – comes right at the outset of the Undercliff part of the walk back to Lyme. It’s a good introduction to the exuberant fertility of the path, which courses through dense thickets of ash, maple, beech, ivy and what could well be triffids. Yet again, the weather had seen fit to act in the most appropriate manner for my route. In this year of paths, it had been uncanny just how perfectly apposite the conditions had been for each walk. Not a drop of rain had fallen on me in eight April days on the Ridgeway (and the Icelandic ash cloud had cleared the skies of planes for six of them). My walk across Wales had taken place in luscious warmth, with decent cloud cover to prevent me burning on the most open or knackering stretches and luminous sunshine when in the lanes, the woods or the ancient holloways. The night walk across Dartmoor had been under a cloudless sky and a full moon, albeit a slightly shy one. Even the torrential storm on the dreaded Coast to Coast had done its job of permitting me to give it up as a bad job. And in the Undercliff, rain the previous night had dampened everything down, but now a searing, steamy heat was wafting round me as I moved quietly through the jungle. It felt, smelt and sounded so exotically unEnglish. To the Victorians, this must have seemed like a taste of the Empire itself.

This was all the more unexpected when the previous couple of miles of coast path had been so tediously Little English. Seaton promenade, a concrete wall between a shingle beach and drab apartments, was deserted at 9.30 on a midsummer morning. The path then climbs up to a golf course, where the potholed car park makes all too clear the local way: the spaces nearest the club house were reserved, in pecking order of proximity, for the Secretary, the Captain, the Seniors’ Captain and the Ladies’ Captain. Behind the doors of Dunroamin or Ocean View down in town, someone was plotting the day when that car-park space will be mine,
all mine
.

Golfers had been on my mind a lot while I’d been walking. Mark Twain’s immortal observation that ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’ pretty much sums it up for me, and I’d hated the bits of path, particularly on the Ridgeway, that had taken me across golf courses. As I lumbered past, dripping in sweat and weighed down by a tatty rucksack, I could feel the waves of impatience pulsing off the neatly coiffed, time-is-money businessmen forced to wait until I’d gone. On one course in the Chilterns, I’d been told off for going the wrong way. ‘The path is up by the thirteenth,’ a snooty lady hissed at me, shooing me out of the way as if I were a cat crapping in her begonias. Golfers and walkers, I concluded, must be almost mutually exclusive circles on a Venn diagram, for there is something almost inherently antipathetic in each towards the other – aesthetically, if nothing else. I’d rather stand and gaze at a landfill tip or a bus station than a golf course. They make my eyes ache, with their fussy uniformity and fake countryside pretensions.

After climbing over the golf course itself, and annoying a few middle managers, you skirt some cornfields and pass a sign warning you of the harshness of the walk from here to Lyme. It’s the coast path, but there is no access to the coast, and no way off inland either. You are locked into a six-mile green corridor. The temperature continued to climb as I pounded the copper groove of the path, up and down rough flights of muddy steps, around gargantuan ash trunks, over their roots and through creepers and clearings. Just occasionally, the milky-blue sea would appear far below, its soft splash a welcome, if frustratingly unattainable, antidote to the intense mugginess. The sweat poured off me, and mindful of the overheated headaches that tend to crucify me in such circumstances, I stopped pretty much every mile in order to cool and dry off. By the time I finally reached Lyme, I’d drunk two litres of water, and my head was still throbbing. It was well worth it, though. Twenty-five years after having my teenage hormones recklessly stirred by John Fowles’s take on the Undercliff, their rather creakier fortysomething heirs had twitched in eager accord.

Thank God I’d walked in the direction I did, though. After the furtive, oozing jungle of the Undercliff, popping out of it into the seaside starch of Seaton would have been a horrible shock. Dropping down into Lyme is a definite change of tempo, but it’s a destination still odd enough to maintain the illusion that you’ve left normality far behind. I sauntered to the end of the Cobb, along its hunched serpentine back, before ambling down the bright little prom that links it with the town centre. This, I was chuffed to find, was named Ozone Terrace, a fine memento of chin-up Victoriana. If Seaton fancy rebranding their prom, I’d like to suggest Bromide Boulevard.

For all my lack of enthusiasm at the idea of doing a whole coast-path walk, there is something wonderfully anti-prissy about them. Just look at the cover of any OS Explorer map to see the officially prescribed ways in which we’re supposed to interact with our countryside – on a bike, on a designated bike trail, in a helmet; on horseback, through the heather in a hi-vis tabard and a helmet; perhaps climbing a rockface, in shoulder pads, knee pads and a helmet; in a small sailing boat on a Home Counties reservoir, in a lifejacket and . . . you get the picture. In fact, you’ve got the picture, probably dozens of them, the grinning faces of corporatised leisure all fully concordant with section 14, paragraph 6 of the relevant health and safety legislation.

By contrast, take a coast-path walk, and hear the existential howl of your flimsy mortality every couple of minutes. Some of them are spectacularly terrifying, the unfenced path snaking its way along vertiginous, unstable cliffs and down muddy scree slopes, with just jagged rocks and the restless crash of the ocean to break a fall. In these cotton-wool times, it hardly seems possible that they’re still legal, let alone to be yet further encouraged as the plans for a nationwide coast path tiptoe forwards. I recently heard a talk by a warden from the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park about their coast path. It was basically a litany of deaths, injuries and problems landing the helicopter ambulance. Apparently, injuries peak in the autumn, when seal pups are born and walkers go that little bit further to have a good look through their binoculars or to take the perfect pho . . . to . . .
bump
.

Dicing with danger is good for us, and paths, for all their quiet charm, can offer some unexpectedly hair-raising experiences. After the Undercliff, the one section of British coast path I was most keen to try was the Elie chain walk, in Scotland. Part of the splendid Fife Coast Path, the section at Elie is a kind of
via ferrata
, or ‘iron way’, where you have to haul yourself up and down cliffs using chains bolted into the rockface. It is great fun: enough of a challenge to demand real concentration and give some hairy moments, especially if you’re prone to vertigo, yet easy enough for most to attempt. The path is also supremely beautiful, as the chains take you into coves and gulches that you’d never reach otherwise, and have you hanging above pounding blue waves if you time it right. It’s no idle leisure path either, for the chains were initially installed sometime in the early twentieth century to allow local fishermen access to remoter corners of the coast.

Purists will sniff at the idea that Elie is a proper
via ferrata
, as you don’t have to clip yourself on to the chains and there’s little danger of a serious injury. There is a commercial one now in the Lake District, along an old slate miners’ path, but for proper terror, you need to go abroad. The most infamous
via ferrata
in Europe is in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. The Orla Perç (Eagle’s Path) was established in 1901, and climbs up sheer rock faces to over seven and half thousand feet. Dozens have died attempting it. Even that doesn’t qualify as the continent’s most terrifying path, though, a title that surely belongs to El Camino del Rey (King’s Path) in Andalucia, southern Spain. A one-metre-wide walkway built in 1905 on to the side of a sheer cliff, it was originally used to ferry workers between two hydro-electric schemes. Parts of it have completely crumbled away, leaving just a metal girder to edge along, with a drop of up to 700 feet below. Even looking at the various videos on YouTube of young desperadoes walking the
camino
was enough to make me swoon.

Welded as they are to totting up their Munros, Nuttalls, Marilyns and all the other sub-divisions they’ve invented for Britain’s modest mountains, Wainwrighty types would contend that Britain’s most dangerous path is something like Striding Edge on Helvellyn, or one of its fellow glacial arêtes, such as Crib Goch on Snowdon or Carn Mór Dearg on Ben Nevis. These knife-edge paths have all the right ingredients, and there have been accidents galore, but I think my nomination for the country’s deadliest path is coastal. It’s still marked on the map as a right of way, but unless you really know what you’re doing, your chances of surviving it are slender.