March 26 & 27, 1999: Upwey to Lulworth Cove via Weymouth

On the morning of March 26th, a Friday, I took my pack down to the car and left it in the boot. That afternoon, the last day of classes before our two week spring holiday, I made some quick adjustments to my costume, donning my boots and losing my tie, and Dorothy, on her way home, drove me to the Maida Vale tube stop. Half an hour later, pack on my back, I was searching the crowds at Waterloo for the faces of Tosh, Harold, and Marge – who were about to accompany me on my twelfth and final attempt to complete what is now known as The South West Coast Path.

They arrived with only about ten minutes to spare, bought some coffee from a kiosk, and we were soon aboard a Weymouth train – which departed at 4:30. We had a buffet car beer to celebrate our outing, which I had been looking forward to with great anticipation, and I told them, to their great delight, that I had a new project: “I’m writing a book and you’re all in it!” They were very enthusiastic about my ideas for a walking book and asked many questions, which certainly helped the time pass. Tosh, of course, kept thinking of incidents that she wanted me to include and I have to say I was certainly thinking of using all those she mentioned  –though not necessarily in the chapters she proposed.

This expedition had been long delayed. We were supposed to have undertaken it the previous June, but I was undergoing angioplasty then and when I had recovered I felt that a more level Thames Walk would be a safer option – with which to check out the ticker. The Lees had nevertheless visited much of the territory by car last June (even staying at the hotel we had booked into at Lulworth Cove), and – more recently – they had been back in the area on a weekend with our friends, the Haradas.

The great complication in walking this final stretch was not a ferry problem or the state of the tides, but ownership of seven or eight miles in the heart of the Dorset Coast by the Ministry of Defense, whose Lulworth Firing Ranges are closed to the public much of the time  – though they do have a few open weeks and they do allow passage through their property on most, but not all, weekends. (To their horror, Keith and Candice-Marie are forced to alter their schedule, as they attempt to visit to Lulworth Cove, because of unanticipated firing in Mike Leigh’s Nuts in May.) I had noticed from my collection of South West Coast Path handbooks that one usually open week is the one before Easter and Tosh had made bookings under this assumption. Then we had discovered that because Easter was very early this year a later week had been chosen for the benefit of walkers; this meant that if we wanted to cross MOD property we would have to do it on a Saturday or Sunday.

There were other problems. We had reached Upwey, on the coast path’s inland alternative, in 1997, but to continue this route and make it all the way to Lulworth Cove on a Saturday seemed a tall order. I decided, therefore, to switch from the inland route to the coastal one, since a walk from Weymouth to Lulworth Cove seemed to be much more within our scope. But because I didn’t wish to leave any break I had determined that we would have to close the gap between the two routes by walking from Upwey into Weymouth tonight, even though we would be doing so in darkness.

I was encouraged in this strange venture by my discovery that Weymouth is only a little over an hour’s walk from Upwey. I also knew that the road we had taken down from the inland alternative to reach this unmanned halt, Dorchester Road, had pavement and that it would have streetlights, and that it was aimed unerringly at the very Weymouth Esplanade we wanted to reach. So this is why, at about 7:15, with night having fallen, the four of us climbed out of the Weymouth train a stop early and climbed down to a parking lot where a dad had just been met by a toddler on a tricycle.

I had a Weymouth A to Z with me and I used this to get us out of some winding suburban streets and out to the main road – where we turned left. Walking was quite straightforward, except for one roundabout, and it was still so mild that I could walk in a sweatshirt. Teenage Upwey was waiting at the bus stops on route, ready for a night on the tiles, even one thirteen year-old blonde tart with a skirt the size of a postage stamp. Although we had agreed to check into our hotel first and then look for a place to eat, Tosh now discovered that she was starving, a plaint she repeated every five minutes. She would have rushed into every hotel dining room and Chinese takeaway en route if the rest of us hadn’t ignored her.

When we reached the Esplanade we turned right and passed the rather empty amusement emporia as we made our way west toward the bulb-lighted clock tower. Tosh knew some of these landmarks because she had recently been here with her geology class. The Esplanade became St. Thomas Street and just before reaching the harbor we found the Crown Hotel. It was 8:20 and we had successfully breached the gap between the two routes – for the coast path uses this street to escape Weymouth. (It is no wonder that, when the walking book I had been talking about on our train trip did finally appear early in 2011 – as A Walker’s Alphabet – that I used this obsessive gap-mending strategy as an illustration for my chapter on neurotic behavior on the trail.)

We checked in (the hotel was swarming with an ancient assemblage of coach party-goers on a “keep fit” weekend) and took the lift to the third floor. Here we threw down our packs and marched down the stairs (we could never get the lift to retrieve us), noting that the Crown was into nautical regalia. The rooms were called cabins, the floors decks, and the staff were dressed as minor shipboard personnel.

We got a few suggestions about where to eat and walked up to the bridge over the harbor, spotting a likely looking pub, the Kings Arms, across the way. Unfortunately they stopped serving at 9:00 and it was now 8:50. “I can serve you if you order right away,” the chef told us, peeking out of his hatch. Of course most items on the menu were off, but Harold and I had pollock (a cousin of the cod) and chips. The bar staff were apologetic about matters, but the food was fine when it came. No sooner had it been served when, indeed, the light was doused in the kitchen and drinking became the only pastime in what was clearly a comfortable local – with much chatter back and forth between the tables. Harold and Marge wanted ice cream desserts so the staff had to relight the kitchen in search of these items.

It was about 10:00 when we departed the Kings Arms, walking back across the drawbridge and returning to our hotel. The wheelchair and zimmer frame brigade were keeping fit by watching a barely dressed young girl doing a hootchy kootch on the dance floor. It think that was supposed to represent some sort of shipboard festivity, vaudeville night. We agreed to meet for breakfast at 8:30 and soon went to bed. It took a while for the local revelers, on the way to their cars, to pipe down, but I slept pretty well anyway.

I was up early on the morning of Saturday, March 27, and used fifteen minutes or so before our breakfast rendezvous to cross back over to the west side of the harbor where I walked along taking photos with my old Canon. It was a lovely morning; there was a cool breeze but it was radiantly sunny and the scene was very picturesque. Another senior gentleman was out walking with his granddaughter -  “Let’s go see if that dozy old granny of yours is up yet.”

The Lees were afraid that we wouldn’t get served in the dining hall, which was soon crowded with the geriatric coach party folk but the “cabin crew” were very efficient and we were soon beginning the morning ritual of the English breakfast. I choose the full breakfast each day, though this is not one of my favorite meals. Then we went back upstairs to claim our packs and returned to the lobby, where the Lees were settling up the bill. I waited outside while this process took place and was interrogated by a woman who wanted to know how she might get started walking the coast path on her own. She was still spooked by the murder of two poor souls on the Pembrokeshire Coast Path almost a decade earlier.

At 9:40 we were at last able to shamble along St. Thomas Street and rejoin the Esplanade. There were already lots of people about, though none brave enough to actually enter the waters. We passed the statue of George III and a Lost Children collection point and plodded in an easterly direction past beach cabins, retirement homes, and more hotels. For a while, opposite the Lodmore Nature reserve, we walked along a sea wall. When we reached the end of this stretch at Overcombe I pointed out a post office across the road where Margie could mail the first of a plethora of postcard messages. The others went into a cafe to use the loos and I knew there would be a delay because Tosh really does feel she must buy something in return for use of this amenity – in this case a cup of hot chocolate.

We then headed uphill away from the sea front, turning right onto a bit of grassy parkland and approaching the cliff edge just at the spot where a hang glider was swooping back and forth beneath a large purple chute. Redcliffe Point and the limestone cliffs of White Nothe now dominated our prospect and we moved into the rhythm of the walk on good paths, with many of the hedgerow trees coming into white blossom amid the yellow gorse, already in bloom.

At Bowleaze Cove we dropped down to cross the River Jordan at an amusement park. It was the first time I ever remember a guidebook instruction calling for the walker to “pass to the left of the helter skelter.” We then climbed up to the rather institutional looking Riviera Hotel, a giant of a holiday park on the hillside. On our left we could see the outline, in chalk, of George III on horseback, a large figure cut from the turf above Sutton Poyntz  – which we would have gotten much closer to had we been using the inland route. Evidently there had been a local argument in 1808 because George was pictured leaving Weymouth.

After Redcliffe Point we descended to a footbridge over a gulley and past a second holiday center. The approach to Osmington Mills (where Tosh had been with her geology friends only a few days before) has always been a troubled one, due to landslips on Black Head. I was afraid that we might be sent into Osmington itself, which used to happen, and that this would have been a considerable detour for us, but a nice route had been engineered on the inland side of Black Head and this gradually dropped down to the road between the two villages, just a few hundred yards above the famous Smugglers Inn.

We would have stayed here had we been able to start our walk on a Saturday, but now it would serve as a well-placed and welcome spot for a nice pub lunch. It was only 12:10. I had barbecued ribs (not very successful, but very messy) and a pint of lager, and then I went outside to use the mobile phone to call Dorothy – holding it over the babbling brook in front of the thatched inn so that she could hear where I was calling from. The pub was soon full of trippers and there was a crush at the bar that you had to circumnavigate every time you wanted to go to the loo in order to get some barbecue sauce off your hands, feet, and elbows.

We left at 1:15, passing behind the pub. The going was pretty easy, with only occasional dips into the minor valleys, and it didn’t take us too long to reach the hamlet of Ringstead, where the path jogs to the left. There was a parking lot, a kiosk, and toilets (we never passed one of these without pausing to make a visit). The others bought ice creams while I sat on the grass. Margie had a mint choc ice, her favorite, but I believe she could never again find this confection on this trip. I took her picture as she tucked in.

We followed a track eastward, climbed to cross over the top of Burning Cliff, passed St. Catherine’s by the Sea and pulled up even with Holworth House. Locals were having a spring cleanup in their gardens and a pile of cuttings was burning in a back yard. Then it was uphill on a wonderful cliff top path over White Nothe itself.  There were lots of people about today, all taking advantage of the excellent weather, and as we approached two obelisks, day marks actually, the path split into a higher level inland alternative and the lower level coastal path – and at times they were so close to one another that it looked like the walkers had at last gotten their own dual carriageway. We left our lower route to climb up to one of the obelisks where Marge photographed me next to this pillar, the moon still visible over one of my shoulders.

We then descended to round above West Bottom and climbed up Middle Bottom and Bat’s Head. Then there was a toe-twanging descent into the next valley and a heart-thumping rise up Swyre Head. We were very grateful that we could accomplish this roller coaster in dry weather – for the footing was dodgy even now.  From the top of Swyre Head we could see into another valley, the wonderfully named Scratchy Bottom, and beyond it to the famous Durdle Door, a natural arch carved by the sea. Soon we had climbed above this for some superb close views.

Trippers descending from a parking lot above were thick under foot and one of them told Tosh that the route ahead into Lulworth Cove had also been rerouted in an inland direction. This we soon discovered for ourselves as we approached the now forbidden Hambury Tout. A man with a caravan and a generator had just this day set up shop here and we paused for some refreshments – I drank a Diet Coke. Then we had a steep climb up to the parking lot where a Scottish woman in open-toed high heels wanted to know whether she would really have to take a step in pursuit of sightseeing – “So where exactly is this Durr-dl dooor?”

We soon discovered the rutted cattle path round the inland side of Hambury Tout and before long we were making our way down to Lulworth Cove. The others got well ahead of me here, but Harold waited at the bottom of this route. We could see the closed path, getting a facelift in local stone, the erosion caused by so many boots having worn the old path away.

Our evening’s accommodation, where the Lees and Margie had stayed last June, was the Cromwell House Hotel and we entered its precincts at 5:45. We had nice en suite rooms and after unpacking and baths we met in the lounge for drinks. Dinner was not a great success, as far as I was concerned. My lemon sole, in addition to the usual problems of bones, was overbraised. The fancy ice cream desserts (I had champagne and strawberry flavor) had to be rooted out of the freezer (we could hear the struggle in the kitchen) and the hotel was so short staffed that it took forever for anything to arrive. Immediately behind us was a large party of university age folk, who blathered on about the most childishly silly of topics all night long (“So I’ll never forget the time you handed me a banana out the car window at 100 miles an hour.”) We gave our orders for packed lunches, nevertheless, and went to our rooms soon after dinner, tired from our twelve miles of up and down. I fell asleep soon after 9:00.

To continue with the next stage of our walk you need:

Day 58: Lulworth Cove to Kimmeridge