Every year, my friend Tom and I go for a “Christmas Adventure”. We started doing it in 2014 and it’s become a beloved ritual. We even managed it in 2020 and 2021 (with special guest Catherine!) – we both had to drive, which meant no wine and we had to keep our distance but it turned out a day in the freezing fresh air of the Dorset coast could be achieved despite restrictions. This year was our first proper adventure in a long time, by which I mean that I drove and Tom had wine.
We opted for Hengistbury Head and Mudeford Spit. Every other GCSE Geography class in our year got carted down here for physical geography coursework – Hengistbury Head is a large chunk of cliff in a stretch of flat beach and very interesting for coastal studies. My class got sent to the local village to study land use – colour the roads in red and the gardens in yellow and the shops in blue, that sort of thing. Now write a project about it. I’m still bitter about it some 22 years later. Tom didn’t do Geography at all, so he was out of all this drama.
So, off to physical geographical wonder Hengistbury Head. It more or less forms the southern boundary of Christchurch Harbour. Mudeford Spit is most of the western boundary and a gap of around 55m, depending on the tide, separates it from Mudeford Quay. In nearby Poole Harbour, which is notoriously shallow, you could probably walk that, at least at low tide. At Christchurch, it forms a bottleneck, an area of high blood pressure and dangerous waters. There’s a ferry but it runs from the end of the Quay to a jetty more than halfway back on the Spit and costs £2.50 per adult, cash only. I’m amused to note parrots travel for free.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. We parked at Hengistbury Head, grabbed a coffee from the Hiker Cafe in the car park, wrapped up in Tom-made knitwear (he made me the Fluffy Clouds hat, aka The Tom Hat 2, last year, which you’ll have seen in a lot of last year’s Iceland posts, and now I have the matching scarf, plus the Northern Lights hat which you’ll see in this year’s Iceland posts. Very warm they were too!) and set off. We’ve never really been rained on during these adventures and it was a clear enough day but windy enough to be chilly. The sea was doing some spectacular things as we walked along and started to climb the Head and local watersports enthusiasts were taking advantage. I couldn’t make out what they were all doing but there were definitely windsurfers, kitesurfers and wingfoilers. Have you seen that? It’s like windsurfing except there’s no mast. You hold the wing in both hands like it’s something inconvenient you’re having to carry and if you get up enough speed, the board rises up out of the water on a mini hydrofoil and from a distance, you look like you’re levitating. No sailors that I could see.
From here, you can practically touch Hampshire. To your left, the New Forest pretty much sprouts out of the side of Christchurch and a good chunk of the Isle of Wight is to the right. I’m not very accustomed to being on the easternmost edge of Dorset. From anywhere else on my bit of coast, the Isle of Wight is to the left and just hazy enough that it’s very obvious it’s out to sea. From here, and driving up through Southbourne, it could very easily be attached to this bit of coast. Behind is Christchurch Harbour. I did my kayaking courses here about 18 months ago. It’s quite reedy around the edges, quite hard to define where land ends and harbour begins and Christchurch Priory dominates the landscape to the west. It’s one of these half-Gothic, half-Norman really-pretty-old churches and it survived Henry VIII and his dissolution of the monasteries in the same way as any other survivors – by waving the “but we’re just a harmless parish church” flag.
It’s all heathland on top. Dorset and Hampshire used to be a huge swathe of heath up until quite recently, maybe two hundred years ago, probably less. It sounds absurd in rural Dorset to say urbanisation arrived and the heath got buried but that’s pretty much what happened. Patches of heathland remain. We went to one last year, the Arne nature reserve. Now the one on top of Hengistbury Head is pretty isolated, being surrounded by beach, dunes, marsh and reedbeds. When people, think about Dorset’s landscape, it’s always “green countryside”, “Jurassic Coast” and “sea” but in actual fact, it’s far more varied than that.
I got a bit lost among the gorse and sandy tracks and heather but eventually we found our way first to a viewpoint over the Spit and then down onto its sands. I hadn’t realised that on the seaward side, with the help of some small artificial groynes, the Spit has a scalloped coastline where attempts to protect it from erosion have resulted in a series of miniature rounded bays. The reason they’re trying to protect it isn’t just the human urge to not let things change – or at least, to not let nature effect that change – but because Mudeford Spit is home to a few hundred of the most expensive beach huts in the world. According to the local paper, number 222 went on sale last summer for – wait for it – £450,000. Admittedly, these are rare in that you can sleep in them. They’re pastel-coloured mini-cabins with a mezzanine bedroom you can’t stand up in, electricity and proper little kitchens, rather than the glorified garden sheds on most beaches but you still have to walk along the beach to the shared toilet and shower blocks. I was tempted to hire one for a couple of days but the only one I’ve found that you can book online without emailing the owners is £170 a night and I’m not that curious, especially as that’s in low season when it’s likely to be too cold and miserable to use either the beach or the water.
Tom and I walked along the harbour side, admiring the beach huts while I tried to find a set of circumstances under which Tom would own one. Neither of us is ever going to be able to afford one – you need to be landed gentry or Elon Musk, as far as I can tell. “What if… you were so rich you had money burning a hole in your bank account? Would you buy one?” “No.” Tom lives in Liverpool, which makes these prices look even more horrifying than they do to me. Owns a three-bedroom house – with its own inside bathroom where you can stand upright in every room – for a fraction of the price of one of these but I did get him to say that if he randomly inherited one, he’d probably keep it and rent it out.
(If you’re interested in what they’re actually like, Brogan Tate’s mum inherited one and Brogan occasionally does vlogs from it – you can watch her Beach Hut Solo Staycation Vlog from summer 2021 here)
We went all the way to the end of the Spit and I had a paddle. I’m doing the Bluetonic Winter Challenge, which means 21 things of my choice relating to water between October and March. Anything for a badge. I’ve not done as much as I should so I wanted something towards it. A paddle. Shoes off on a sandy bit, wade in, not quite up to my ankles. It was cold but then suddenly it was really cold. It was cold enough to suck my brain out through my feet. It was ice cream brain freeze except in my feet. People think it’s ok to immerse their entire bodies in water that temperature! I promise you, I’d have had a cold shock-related heart attack if I’d gone in any deeper than the feet. Tom captured a great photo of me looking shocked which he kindly put on Facebook and, not having taken a towel, I endured sand in my socks for the rest of the day.
We had lunch at the Beachside Cafe. It’s a temporary thing after the last one burned down – three food vans forming three sides of a square and a room with plastic sides facing the harbour on the fourth. The Pizza and Paninis van was closed but Tom got fish and chips “so expensive you’d expect silver service” (£11) and then a paper cup of mulled wine which he drank on the picnic tables outside. The temporary place was supposed to be closed by now. There is permission to build a replacement permanent cafe between the 2022 and 2023 summer seasons and I suspect the reason it hasn’t started is that they don’t want a straight-up replacement for the old one, they want something better. The temporary cafe is doing a pretty good job in the meantime and as for the prices – if you’re paying £450k for a beach hut, you’re not even going to notice £11 for lunch.
We’d talked about taking the ferry over to the Quay to go to one of the cafes. Not a lot of point now, plus we’d only get caught in the rain, plus – it turns out now – we wouldn’t have been able to anyway as neither of us has carried cash for years. Instead we started heading back to the car. We walked up the seaward side of the Spit, commented some more on the huts and then walked back along the inside of the harbour, where the land train runs when it’s running, which isn’t in winter.
This is a nice walk when it’s not so busy. It turns out a reasonably dry Bank Holiday straight after Christmas is exactly the day everyone wants a nice coastal walk. Even better, I’m sure you can divert somewhere and walk right on the shoreline. I’ve done it with my dad – we saw redshanks and sandpipers wading in the water but this walk was mostly woodland. Lots of children. Lots of dogs. Far too much noise for spotting redshanks, which are timid little birdies.
A quick stop in the visitor centre for Tom’s professional opinion on the hat and glove selection (the verdict: not impressed) and to look at exhibition of coastal-inspired wood- and linocut art in the Upstairs Gallery. In 2020, I did Six Views on the Laugavegur Trail in Six Media. This time I’d like to create a few more related works of art and make my own exhibition like that, although mine will never make it beyond my office walls. Six Views was postcard-sized. Project 2023 will be about the size of this, up to A4. Yes, that will be interesting and satisfying. I can’t find the name of the artist but I’m sure the exhibit is called something like Not Just Puffins and it’s scenes from the coast between Cornwall and Hampshire.
It rained quite heavily once we were safely back in the car. It’s not relevant to Hengistbury Head or Mudeford that we then went to the usual pub for the first time in three years, where I had a chocolate brownie with ice cream and Tom had three glasses of wine. Usually it’s on the evening of the 23rd, not the afternoon of the 27th and there are a few more of us – although as people have babies and move away, it’s fewer and fewer every year, and not at all since the plague. Now we have it on Zoom which means everyone can come regardless of where they live and the ones with babies can put them to bed and then come back to the screen.