Undercliff


I've just spent the weekend on the Devon/Dorset border. On Saturday I took my brother-in-law Bill on the seven mile hike from Seaton to Lyme Regis on the undercliff footpath. We were blessed with glorious weather (until a bruising hailstorm ambushed us at Lyme Regis). This area has a well documented history. The unstable nature of the geology of the area has lead to landslides, slumps and slippages along this section of the cliffs, with major events occurring in 1775, 1828, 1839 and 1840. The 1839 slip was most probably the most celebrated as it happened on Christmas Eve and was visited at the time by two geologists (Buckland and Conybeare) who surveyed it. The area of land affected was over 1,000 yards in length and took whole fields down with it. The following autumn these fields were harvested in celebration of the event, which had by then attracted thousands of site-seers.

Most of the footpath is wooded, meandering up and down through mostly beech and ash in a grotto-like setting, streams and fern-choked banks lending the walk a magical air. But be warned - the land is still slipping and at any time the path can show cracks and collapses. Indeed, we were faced with a number of tricky moments at the Seaton end of the walk and I believe that the path is now closed here. You can still walk most of it from Lyme Regis however, but check with the tourist board first!

There were two botanical highlights, with one fairly good patch of Wild Daffodil (below) and a couple of places in which Opposite-leaved Golden-saxifrage could be found. Singing Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps could have been freshly in. You cannot wander from the path. To do so would be highly dangerous as the ground is steep, broken and choked with vegetation. It does make you wonder as to what could be found here.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more