This is one of the hazards of planning and scheduling your blog so far ahead. I went to Mudeford and Christchurch in January and right now, I don’t have an empty blog spot to put it in until mid-June. Some shuffling and rescheduling will be required.
In the middle of January, my mum collapsed in the bathroom in the middle of the night and ten or so days later we finally established that she’d fractured her spine. One of the results of this was that it left my dad pretty much just as housebound as she was so on the Friday, I was instructed to take him out and exercise him. She means this in the sense of a big dog that’s been cooped up and is bored and restless; he’s been trying to figure “why everyone thinks I need to do more exercise”
So we went to Hengistbury Head. I missed out at GCSE Geography. All the other classes went and studied the cliffs or the coastal geology or something. My class went to Lytchett Matravers with maps and coloured in where the land was used for housing and roads and shops. You try writing a piece of serious coursework on that when everyone else is writing about longshore drift and weathering.
We walked up to the top of the hill. It looks like a more impressive chunk of cliff from literally any other angle. In fact, it’s hard to tell it’s a cliff at all. It forms the end of the west Dorset coastline. Below it is Mudeford Spit and then Christchurch Harbour and the coastline starts again on the other side.
We took the steps down to the spit. It’s quite a bustling place in summer, with a fairly upmarket seafood restaurant – well, until it was razed to the ground in a fire. They’ve agreed this week to rebuild, only to immediately decide the plans are too ambitious so I have no idea what might be there by summer.
In January, it’s empty and chilly and all the colours are slightly muted. It feels like an old-fashioned poor fishing village. In fact, what runs down the spine of this sandbar is a very long line of rainbow-coloured beach huts, among the most expensive in the world. That’s why it’s deserted. Their owners aren’t sitting out on the deck enjoying the greyish view in January.
We had lunch at the temporary cafe. That is, I had a Twirl and a carton of apple juice and Dad had a vegetable samosa, a cheese & onion pasty bigger than most Cornish pasties, and a black Americano and we dogwatched for a little while.
He comes down here occasionally with my mum – there’s a land train that drives you down the narrow track from the Hengistbury Head visitor centre. But he’s never investigated the sort-of path that follows the inside of the harbour. We spent about half of it wondering if we’d have to turn back and take the train road and about half of it birdwatching. There was a Little Egret paddling in the pond near the train stop and we saw four or five redshanks wading along the shore. I heard an oystercatcher but for the life of me couldn’t see it and there was the usual assortment of miscellaneous gulls.
That sort-of path does in fact rejoin the track just before it turns round to the right and becomes impassable reeds. We paused at the visitor centre because I like to get postcards of my adventures and then we watched starlings having a proper splashy bath in the dog bowl outside the cafe.
Because we’d been able to see the tower of Christchurch Priory all the way, and because I’m cathedral-mad at the moment, we popped in to see it on the way home. It’s not on the same scale as a cathedral, of course, but it was interesting. For one, I’d been under the impression it was a ruin. Maybe the abbey buildings are. The church is 900 years old and while I’m not certain what exactly a priory actually is, it seems like the sort of place Henry VIII would have knocked down. But he didn’t.
The nave is pure and glorious Norman. Three levels of chunky rounded arches, with decoration at the top. The aisles are surprisingly Gothic and so is the quire. The latter at least was definitely a later addition but it was also the oldest part because it contains the Miraculous Beam, which dates back to the original Norman church built to replace the Saxon one.
The carpenters cut this big solid beam. Cut it too short. The story goes that they were “embarrassed” by this. I reckon I’d be more than embarrassed. Timber like that was expensive and they’d just ruined a huge piece of it. So they went home for the night. But there was one carpenter who didn’t. He hadn’t spoken to anyone and he hadn’t eaten. And when the carpenters came back in the morning, not only had that beam miraculously become more than long enough, it was in place in the ceiling. Some people think it’s unlikely Jesus came to Somerset during his lifetime. I’ll say nothing on the idea that he came to Dorset in the twelfth century and did a bit of woodwork. I mean, he was a carpenter but surely he gave that up when he became famous as the son of God?
We paused briefly at Christchurch Town Quay to admire the flocks of swans and the old mill and then we headed home via the pharmacy and the supermarket for prescription opioids and KFC-style chicken legs. My dad was very impressed with his day out and his long walk. “It just goes to show you don’t have to go a million miles from home to have a good day”, which is rather the point of Wessex Girl.