NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

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 ...

I've just spent a week in Dorset with the family, in which the world of natural history was put to one side, apart from a single day when I took the coastal path out of Lyme Regis and headed westwards to meet a tall stranger with a penchant for Cadbury's Chocolate Buttons... I arrived at Seaton, just over the county boundary into Devon, where Gavin Haig (he of Not Quite Scilly fame) met me for a most enjoyable tour of the birding patch that he is lucky enough to have on his doorstep. The small band of regular birders (some of whom I ticked) have turned this sleepy edge of the county into a birding hot spot. We started at Seaton Hole, where we viewed the very bushes that were once haunted by a Hume's Warbler, while scoffing Lemon Sponge Cake and a mug of coffee - us that is, not the warbler. From here we could also gaze along the cliffs to Beer Head, the site of yet more birding successes. The jewel in the crown of the area must be Black Hole Marsh (above), a recent...