I have many Christmas traditions (these three decorations must go here, here and here on the Christmas tree, making mince pies with Dad, putting out the boots, eating my body weight in After Eights) and one of them is that on the day after Boxing Day (or the day after that, depending on whether there’s a storm), I go for an adventure with Tom, an adventure involving the coast and wine, although this year it was only when I got home that I realised no wine had been consumed all day, just cider. And then, of course, I have an annual blog tradition where I write about it. I have a custom Google map where I keep track of where we’ve been each year and I have a separate layer for ideas for the future, so around November most years, I open it up and have a think about scenery and provision of wine and distance and then generally I get up on the morning of the adventure and just decide there and then where we’re going.
This year it was West Bay. West Bay is the sort of small Dorset fishing village that would ordinarily pass by the eyes of tourists and travellers except that it starred in a little-known TV series called Broadchurch. If you watched it and you know the area, you’ll know that Broadchurch is such a huge place that pretty much the entire Dorset coast played the part of some part of town but West Bay featured particularly for that big golden cliff, so perfect a finding place for a body, and the round building on the west side of the harbour, an apartment building, motorbike shop & cafe in real life, stood in for the police station.
Thursday was a windy day, although not quite as wet and wild as Wednesday, which was the day we’d normally go out. We parked behind the Station Kitchen, a restaurant with a railway wagon as a dining room, and made our way up the great big shingle sandbank to the East Beach with some difficulty. That bank is hard to climb at the best of times; it’s steep and it’s stony and every step you take slides you back a bit but we were doing it against the wind, and without realising just how much it was sheltering us from the worst of the wind until we stood on top. West Bay is one of my favourite places for watching the sea being violent. As long as you keep out of the way of the cliffs (how to spot grockles? They’re the ones climbing on the piles of collapsed rock with no regard for the rest of the cliff about to follow it down), you can watch the sea crashing from relative safety here. Houses with sea views always have inflated prices but if you live near the sea, you’ll know that during the autumn and winter, the sea can often be a grey and vicious thing. Actually, if you live near the sea, you probably only see it during the autumn and winter because as soon as the sun comes out and the water turns blue, the grockles descend and you can’t get near the beach. I’m thinking of previous trips to West Bay and pretty much all the ones I can remember have been in winter.
Anyway. I had my grandad’s old camera, discovered in the loft while getting the Christmas decorations down. It’s a 35mm semi-professional SLR film camera, it weighs 1.3kg with the long lens on and while I love it, I have to admit the weight of it means I’m probably not going to be taking it out and about with me. I took it this time because I’m still working my way through an experimental 24-exposure film. It makes all the right noises and I think it’s taking photos but until I get that film developed, I don’t know for sure. I thought West Bay would be a good subject for that experimental film. There is a minor issue that the inbuilt light meter doesn’t work (the main problem is that it was built for a certain mercury button battery that’s been banned since the last of these cameras were made in 1972; but quite likely the electronics have corroded in the probably three decades since it was last used) but I thought I’d sorted that – light meter app on my phone. But that turned out to not be as easy as it initially looked. I have a long way to go with this camera. But the sea rolling and hissing and throwing foam onto the shingle looked like it might be a good subject for an ancient film camera, so I took photos. I only had 9 photos left on the film and still failed to use them all. How many photos did I take on my phone? 130. But I couldn’t manage 9 on the actual camera.
We took the usual selfies. Tom knits so I had a new hat (the Misfit hat) and I happened to have brought along the Misfit scarf (Tunisian crochet and not a single bad stitch in it) and Tom had his own hat and scarf so we look very colourful and cosy in the pictures. We enjoyed the beach, then we walked around the harbour with the intention of walking out on the pier. It feels weird to call it a pier. Piers are supposed to be wooden structures that you never quite feel safe on. West Bay’s pier is solid stone – or at least, it has a solid stone/asphalt top – and it’s as much a protective harbour wall as it is a pier. Instead of sticking straight out into the water like I’d expect from a normal pier, it goes diagonally, so as to almost cover the entrance to the harbour, and from the viewpoint at the end, it’s less than 150m from East Beach. But as we approached it, the mist became rain and we took shelter in the Windy Corner Cafe, inside the “police station”.
Most of West Bay had had the same idea. We were very lucky to get a table within two minutes of arriving. We considered lunch – or more likely at that hour, brunch – but settled for coffee, hot chocolate, dog-spotting and waiting for the weather to improve. It looks like it does good food and if it had been warmer, I’d have been tempted by some of their smoothies. Maybe in the spring, after a cliff hike.
By the time we’d finished, the weather was better, or at least brighter. We took to the pier where you could enjoy that churning water on three sides. I tried to capture waves smashing on the other side of the harbour wall with the old camera but they weren’t very cooperative, I probably wasn’t exposing it correctly and anyway, the point isn’t to get good photos, the point is to find out whether the thing actually works.
Next stop, we walked along West Beach until the prom joined the inland route over the cliffs to follow the South West Coast Path. You’d think with orange beaches most of the way to Charmouth and Lyme Regis that the route would just follow the beach but no. Have I mentioned fragile cliffs prone to collapse? The route often deviates inland, over the cliffs rather than below them and here was one of those places. Tom wanted to climb up to the top. Precisely where “the top” is, that’s a bit of a question. Google Maps says Thorncombe Beacon is two and a half kilometres ahead and that’s usually a summit. We didn’t go that far. We went as far as the meadow above the houses, which is only about 300m. I’d like to say that it’s relatively steep and it’s hard work in winds that will almost bear your weight. Was it the most intelligent thing to do in that kind of weather? No. But the wind was at least blowing strongly onshore and thus pushing us away from the edges.
At the bottom of the hill again, I took some photos for Tom’s seasonal profile picture change and then we debated whether to walk along the prom and see how far we could go or whether to have lunch. With only two hours left on the car, we opted for lunch. We might have had fish & chips at the kiosks around the harbour if it hadn’t been so windy but instead we took shelter in the George. This is one thing about the Tom Adventures – I rarely bother with lunch if I’m out by myself and I know little to nothing about cafes and pubs. If I’m in West Bay and I’m hungry, I’ll probably have a toastie from Rachel’s kiosk on the far side of the harbour and eat it on the bench, fending off starlings. It’s very civilised to instead have cheesy garlic bread (or a cheeseburger) with orange juice & lemonade (or cider) inside in the warm and the dry.
We had time for our walk on the prom after lunch. The prom is closed a couple of hundred metres along, mostly because it runs straight onto a beach with crumbling cliffs but once you notice the lump of rock half the size of my car lying on the concrete on the other side of the locked gate, you really start to realise why you’re not allowed any further and why we make such a noise about cliffs in this part of the world.
Instead, we enjoyed the waves breaking on the rocks below us. Well, Tom did. I realised there was a possibility of a wave being thrown upwards onto the prom and so I kept my distance, with camera in hand to capture the moment. The sea did not comply. Oh, it was dramatic and it’s always fun to watch nature in this kind of mood and then, just as I’d forgotten about it, the sea flung a wave at us from the left instead of the right, where I was expecting it. Tom got drenched and it turns out I wasn’t far enough back to escape most of it either. I’ll give the wind one thing; by the time we got back to the car, I think we’d both forgotten how wet we were. But before we got back, I spotted a black shape in the water. A seal? A dog? A human? A closer look and yes, it was a human. Two humans. Surfers!
On the one hand, of course you need conditions like this to surf. On the other hand, my instinct to not go in the water when the weather’s like this is so overwhelming. When I was a caver, the unofficial price of being pulled out by cave rescue was a keg of beer. If I was surfing in weather like this, I’d have the money for the keg for the RNLI sitting there ready for release. Where even is the nearest lifeboat station? I’d not noticed one in West Bay itself. Lyme Regis, nearly eight miles away. Lifeboat crews are volunteers and I’m sure they’d rather be sitting at home, eating their body weight in After Eights like the rest of us, than getting the little boat out and bouncing sixteen miles to scoop up surfers. They’d already been called out on Christmas Day to rescue a dog in a red jumper which had fallen over a cliff. Anyway, these surfers seemed fine. Got knocked off their boards within seconds the couple of times they managed to jump up but they didn’t get into any trouble, or at least the RNLI didn’t have to go to them. But if you’re thinking of going into the sea in weather that windy – windy enough that you can lean forwards and the wind will take your weight – maybe think about doing something else. I hear After Eights are good this time of year.
We finished the day in the pub at Bridport. West Bay, really, is Bridport’s harbour. Bridport is the port on the River Brit but being nearly two miles from the sea, isn’t actually the port. We thought it might be less windy away from the coast and it was, when we were safely hidden inside the Ropemakers, a fairly traditional-style pub with no phone signal (and we didn’t find the wifi password until we were on our way out!). Still no wine was consumed. We gossiped, we compared books and film and TV (which reminds me that I’m going to spend some of this weekend finishing off Interview With the Vampire) and then it was time to go home. Other than my daily walk around the local streets, usually done reluctantly and after it got dark, that was the only time I left the house over the entire Christmas period. Well, I did some shopping on the 22nd and I went ice-skating on the 23rd but basically, I sat at home and ate After Eights for nine solid days. I’d like to say I have plans for getting out and about in January to make up for it but.. we’ll see about that.