A very rare topical blog today! Did you see the goings-on at Durdle Door over the weekend? If you didn’t, allow me to summarise.
Durdle Door is a natural rock formation with an arch cut out of it by water action. It’s most beloved of GCSE geography textbooks. You either park at the caravan park at the top and walk down the steep gravelly path to the formation or you park at Lulworth Cove and walk the hardest half a mile over the clifftops I’ve ever seen. Durdle Door sticks out from the mainland by a narrow bit of cliff with rough steps going steeply down to a beach on each side. The one on the Durdle Door side is a pebble beach right beneath crumbly chalk cliffs, with no way on and off except those steep rough steps. On Saturday, four morons felt it was a good idea to scramble out to the Durdle Door rock formation and then jump 70 feet into the water below, which is both shallow and full of bits of half-worn rock. Consequently, the air ambulance had to be called out to retrieve severely injured casualties – nothing with wheels is getting within half a mile of that beach.
This was complicated by the fact that half the country had descended on that bit of beach because a killer virus still being on the loose is nothing compared to “Boris said we can go to the beach!” “Boris said we can travel as far as we want!”. The beaches were packed. And because getting off the beach involves a struggle up a single-track rough set of steps, the quickest way to clear space for the helicopters to arrive was to pack everyone together further up the beach. A coronavirus orgy.
In short, we’ve now got four people with severe injuries and a few thousand people who’ve spread a killer virus around a tiny village that had more or less escaped it by virtue of being small, rural, summer-based and sticking to the damn rules. Dorset Council & Dorset Police have now closed both Durdle Door and Lulworth and closed all access roads in the vicinity, leading to shrieks of “On whose authority have you closed public places when Boris said we can go to the beach, you totalitarian dictators?!”and fortunately, the council and the police have been able to shriek back “It’s the private Lulworth Estate and they’re entitled to close their own land to keep their own people safe”.
(Though of course even the council, the police & a national outcry over those scenes can’t stop a family that owns a castle, two villages, a stretch of coastline and two very lucrative car parks from clawing at more money and the Welds refused to close said car parks and the people just drove through or round closed roads on Sunday.)
I live in Dorset. Because I’m of the generation that had it ironed into us to never use our real names on the internet and never put our addresses on the internet and never give out any personal information on the internet, I tell you all that I’m from the nebulous “Wessex area” but I’m in Dorset. I’ve sat and read just about every word of Twitter on the subject of Durdle Door this weekend and I see that some people are trying to blame those crowds on the locals. Do you know how I know it’s tourists and idiots sitting on that beach and not locals?
Because locals know that anywhere within ten miles of the sea is a no-go area when the sun is out. We wouldn’t dream of going to Durdle Door on a bank holiday. We’re certainly not stupid enough to jump off the cliffs. We would never go to Sandbanks during the summer holidays. We don’t go to the beach. It’s not that we don’t want to. But scenes like you’ve seen at Durdle Door this weekend are what all our beaches look like throughout the entire summer, all the way from Brighton along the south coast through Dorset, round Cornwall and up to Bristol.
We have a word for the people who come down here, clog up the roads, fill the car parks, take up the beaches and go home saying “You need us, you need the tourist money so you can’t complain about us!”. Grockles. I once met a lady from Cornwall who hates the word because she thinks it’s rude and insulting and ungrateful to the people who keep Cornwall’s economy afloat and she has a point. Down in the south west, we’re not industrial counties. This isn’t where the jobs are. Mining in Cornwall is over. Fishing in Devon and Dorset is over. The only people who come to the south west for jobs are youngsters coming to instruct surfing and sailing and coasteering during the summer. This is where people come to retire and where people come on holiday. We need the tourism money.
But the tourist money only goes to the car parks and the cafes and the souvenir shops. It doesn’t come to the likes of me. I’m in my mid-thirties and I live with my parents, in the same bedroom I moved into when I was eleven. Property on the south coast is incredibly expensive, and I’m not even on the coast. I’m well inland. I have a friend who paid more for a one-bedroom flat in Southampton than another friend paid for a three-bedroom house in Liverpool. That’s down to a combination of “desirable touristy location” and prices being pushed up by people buying holiday homes. Why is this a county full of retired people and tourists? Because they’re the ones who can afford to buy here, people who’ve made money in places that are more economically active. Yeah, maybe I should move. But this is my home and it’s not fair to be pushed out by people who aren’t even from around here.
But it’s not fun to live in some of the loveliest places in the country and to be stuck in your house all summer because the rest of the country has overrun your home. Sandbanks is one of the greatest stretches of beach in the UK – long and golden and soft and warm and one of the most expensive places for property in the world. We wave cheerfully at “Harry’s house” and we don’t blink when we run into him in the Tesco Metro at Shore Road. We don’t even feel the need to specify that we mean Harry Redknapp, local celebrity. But the Sandbanks car park is a place most of us have never been. By 9am, there’s a queue stretching from the entrance most of the way back to Lilliput. We do have a lesser-known bit of good beach that we can mostly get at in the evening but I’m not telling you where because don’t we get one bit of beach that’s mostly ours?
Do you know what’s inland from our famous Jurassic coast and our glorious beaches? Heathland. North Dorset is mostly green rolling countryside but in between is miles and miles of heathland. Heathland burns really easily. How easily? Well, over the weekend they finally extinguished the last of the Wareham Forest fire (started by a campfire), which lasted nearly two weeks and destroyed 220 hectares, an area five times the size of the Vatican. We’ve had firefighters in from outside Dorset because we just don’t have the resources to fight such a big fire for so long. Particularly not when the grockles are stretching them in other directions
So our local fire services have been screaming at the top of their voices HIGH FIRE RISK – NO FIRES – NO BBQS. This has been on signs along the sides of the roads and in the news and they’re exhausted from repeating it on social media. And then on Saturday evening, Dorset & Wiltshire Fire Control tweeted that in the first hour and a half of their shift that night, they were called out to 46 out-of-control barbecues and bonfires, 30 of them in the Studland area. The problem is that people are taking disposable barbecues to the beach and dropping them in bins while they’re still hot. Consequently our fire services are rushing to the same bins next to the beach over and over again because a grockle has accidentally set it on fire again and again.
Three or so weeks ago, before Boris said, the south west had one of the lowest rates of infection in the country. We’re rural, so we’re not spreading it within a close-packed community. We don’t really have buses so we’re not spreading it on overcrowded public transport. We kept to the rules. It was safe for my mum to go into hospital to have a major cancer operation because we hadn’t overrun the hospitals with virus cases. And then Boris opened his mouth and now half the country thinks it’s their right to come here and now we’ve got scenes like the one on Durdle Door, uncontrollable wildfires and one of the highest infection rates in the country.
I read the comments on the local paper’s Facebook page the day before the beaches were reopened – local people being drowned out by non-local people shouting things like “Boris said!” and “It’s not your beach!” and “We won’t come here in the summer with our tourist money and then you’ll be sorry!” and for good measure, a bit more “Boris said!” and a lot of “But we want to come to the beach” and “It’s my right!”. It’s not even as if we’re benefiting from the tourist money. They’re not spending anything because nothing’s open to spend it on. The only people who seem to be benefiting are the Lulworth Estate because do you have any idea what it costs to park at Lulworth and Durdle Door? Another reason the locals go there so rarely.
Do you wonder that we talk about grockles in those tones? Do you wonder that we’re not grateful for the tourist money? Grockles are actively damaging the places they’re crowding into. They’re bringing killer viruses onto our beaches, into our hospitals and shops and setting our home on fire. They’ll be causing massive coastal erosion to the beauty spots as well but we’ve got more pressing things to worry about right now. Thousands of people climbing up the same rough-worn rock steps every day? Then they go back to their industrial counties where they have well-paid jobs and houses that they can afford and swimming around in their money like Scrooge McDuck for the winter and leave us standing in the ashes and the trash (which of course, they don’t put in the bins and even when they do, they’re full by mid-morning) and saying to each other, “Well, at least we can go to the beach when it’s snowing”.
This started off meant to be a reasoned explanation of what it’s like to live within reach of Durdle Door and finished off a bitter and impassioned rant about tourists. I’m sorry. I’m a tourist myself. But I see up close and first-hand what overtourism is like and the entire country has seen it this weekend and yet as soon as the police reopen that road, we’ll have exactly the same thing. There will no holidaying in the UK this summer, no matter what happens with the virus and “staying alert” because there won’t be room anywhere. Please stay at home. Please stay away from beaches and beauty spots and the south west.
If you’d like to give the cost of an ice cream to this Dorset-dweller who doesn’t get any tourist money, I have a Ko-fi here.
I post every Monday and Thursday – Thursday’s blog will be about the time I took my inflatable kayak out to sea last summer so pop back to see whether I drowned.