Every year since 2014, my friend Tom and I have gone for “an adventure” between Christmas and New Year. Usually that involves me picking Tom up from his parents’ house, driving off to some bit of coast and having some wine (well, Tom has the wine. I don’t like it and also I’m driving).
We weren’t sure whether we’d even be able to do our adventure this year but by Christmas, we were in tier 2, which means you can meet up to six friends or family outdoors and that meant we could go ahead, albeit with some alterations to the usual pattern – such as that Tom had to drive himself and that although we could go inside for food and drinks, I was still very wary of that and so we sat outside and froze.
It’s been eleven days from doing it to publishing this post and in those mere eleven days, we’ve gone from tier 2 to tier 3 and into national lockdown. We were so spectacularly lucky to get to do this day out and now we’re both sitting at home, working from our laptops and not doing anything.
We went to Studland and specifically to the car park at Middle Beach, which is where I park when I’m kayaking because it’s where my favourite kayaking company is based. It was 11am and morning in December means relatively low sun blocked by the cliffs, so I managed to take some magnificent blue-tinted photos of the sea while I waited for Tom. Normally you can walk down from either side of the car park and walk along the beach but it’s had a landslide recently – there had also been a major landslide a couple of years ago when I was new to kayaking there, which pretty much ate the storage hut so I’ve seen this particular bit of shore being permanently reshaped right in front of my eyes, which is kind of interesting in its way. Dorset’s Jurassic Coast is literally in the geography textbooks, so as well as examples of all the coastal formations, here it is demonstrating coastal erosion.
There are lots of interesting things about Studland but I’ll quickly do the highlights. First, this area used to be owned by the very same Bankes family I mentioned in the Kingston Lacy post last week. They were major landowners, whose estates covered a royal castle, a 17th century country manor house, an “eccentric gothic” country home by the sea, an Iron Age hillfort and acre upon acre of land. Second, Studland Bay is actually pretty shallow, by which I mean do not try it but I reckon you could wade from Middle Beach out to Old Harry Rocks at low tide and possibly at high tide. But I repeat, don’t try it. Third, this is newly designated a Marine Conservation Zone and it’s one of the most important sites in the country for various species of seahorses because it has a particular kind of submarine grass, I think. And fourth, there’s a naturist beach just a mile and a half away. We didn’t venture up there to find out how many men – it’s always men! – were enjoying the freezing December breeze.
So, I met Tom in the car park and we stood awkwardly at our six-foot distance across a puddle and did the “oh… I can’t hug you this year”. But as I’ve already said, we’re so lucky to have been able to see each other at all and I’m not complaining about the changes, I’m simply making sure no one thinks we weren’t taking things seriously. I introduced Tom to the sea and the blue light and then we decided to get a cup of coffee (or hot chocolate) from the Middle Beach Cafe and sit outside on the benches in the fresh air to make plans and enjoy the view. I believe it was ok coffee, it was definitely ok hot chocolate. Hot chocolate can be a bit hit or miss and this one was a hit.
Then we had to decide whether to head north and walk along the beach or head south towards Old Harry. Old Harry it was, and it was a bit further than we’d really expected. I kept saying “the headland is just around that corner” and it never was. It’s been quite a while since I’ve walked that bit, to be fair. I wrote the blog post about it in 2013. There was a sign saying it was a mile and three quarters, which works out about 35 minutes based on my rough estimation of twenty minute to a mile but we took longer. Dawdled. Paused outside the Pig on the Beach, which is a restaurant/hotel in the aforementioned gothic eccentric holiday home. I knew it wasn’t going to be the sort of place that would do the sort of food I eat and I’ve since discovered it’s not the sort of place urchins like me get to stay at either. It’s got two beautiful shepherd’s huts – you get two huts, one to sleep in and one to bathe in, but they start at £210 per night. Even their “Extremely Small” rooms are £145 a night. I’d be camping somewhere in the hills, possibly beside the tracks of the Swanage Railway Looks great from the outside, though.
So off we went to Old Harry. A lot of it is path and a lot of the path was blocked by large puddles. No problem for happy dogs, no problem for walkers in wellies but it forced the path to become one-way only for the rest of us. It’s right along the clifftop but the view is blocked by bushes and scrub and small trees and there are only one or two spots where you can get through to have a proper look at the Jurassic Coast before you reach the headland itself. Geography textbook: here we have cracks becoming caves becoming arches becoming stacks becoming stumps. Old Harry himself is the tall thin stack at the end and his wife, another stack, collapsed in 1896. I’ve kayaked through the arch in the big stack called the foreland or No Man’s Land and that’ll split the rock down the middle one day, into two thinner stacks.
It was busy! It was a beautiful day and people were taking the opportunity to get out for a walk over the Christmas period, some of them most likely from other tiers, escaping into glorious and less-restricted Dorset for a few days and resulting in us moving to tier three a couple of days later. A lot of them by now were having a post-pub-lunch walk and a few, like us, still working up their appetites. We took our annual selfie, only this time with Tom waving from the background and not quite able to see himself on the screen, and I took photos of him standing far too close to the edge of the narrow fragile headland.
The original plan had been lunch at the cafe at Middle Beach – Tom liked the look of the wholetail scampi – but then we passed the Bankes Arms, which is quite possibly my favourite old-fashioned country pub (see, there’s that Bankes family again!). It’s got proper wooden tables and also squishy leather sofas, open fires, a propensity for wet muddy hairy dogs, simple but plentiful pub food listed on chalkboards on the wall and a big open-air garden. In hindsight, we should have sat in the temporary structure that they think is heated outdoor seating but is actually indoor seating with plastic windows, but for the sake of COVID safety, we sat outside. The sky was blue and the sun bright and we were both toasty warm from a far longer walk than we’d expected so it seemed a good idea at the time. You connect to their wifi and order your food online and then it’s delivered to your table ten minutes later, if you manage to spot the huge red IMPORTANT – ENTER YOUR TABLE NUMBER FIRST notices in between every section of the menu. It’s the first time I’ve eaten out since March, unless you count ordering a panini from a kiosk at West Bay and eating it on a bench overlooking the harbour. I had a cheese baguette – warm, light fluffy bread with melting butter and huge thick chunks of cheese wedged in it. They’re very generous with the cheese at the Bankes Arms and it frequently defeats me.
However, by the time we’d got through the food and the drinks, the reality of sitting outside a pub in December had well and truly kicked in. It was freezing. The sort of freezing where you shuffle along, holding your body stiffly and moving unnaturally and trying to decide whether everything hurts from the cold or is numb from the cold or even if it’s both at the same time. My own fault – it was so nice and sunny that I’d decided my thickest t-shirt, my extra-heavy multi-pocket hoodie and a hat was enough for a walk in December, and so it was while I was walking. Now, any and all extremities were ready to shrivel and fall off.
We finished off back at Middle Beach Cafe for more hot drinks to warm up, this time carried in paper cups as we walked along the beach, making the most of the daylight. The sun had set, the sky was a beautiful shade of pastel blue and pink and the nearly-full moon glowed brightly overhead. The coast can be really bleak in winter; choppy grey sea under heavy grey sky, but we had Studland possibly at its best. We saw dogs walking on the beach and splashing in the water, we saw a man and child who knew nothing about structural engineering trying to build a dam across the stream and just widening the stream over and over again with their diggings, we saw seabirds sailing on the calm waves. After the walking and the freezing, suddenly there was serenity.
