Friday June 10
Seatown to Abbotsbury, 11.1 Miles
Sue and I started the day by cheating: we rode the bus three miles to rejoin our companions in West Bay (so that they wouldn’t have to wait for us, natch). Once back on the path, we were in the largest sense already on Chesil Beach. The great beach, that runs for eighteen miles between West Bay and Fortuneswell on the Isle of Portland, has names for smaller sections; we started our walk on Cogden, a National Trust property. This is a view looking back at West Bay from the top of the first cliff.
The path here starts with the steepest single section of the walkout as we ascended West Cliff: short but almost vertical. And it brought us to…a golf course.
The path rose and fell over low cliffs as we watched the golfers!
We walked over a couple more moderate cliffs with opening views of the seemingly endless stretch of Chesil Beach in front of us. Is Sue licking her lips at the prospect of a swim? Perhaps not, since the water temperature is perfect for hypothermia.
We followed the path a ways inland into the lovely old stone village of Burton-Bradstock, chock-a-block with thatched cottages.
From the village, the path led us across some fields and then right down onto the beach, where we encountered a somewhat perplexing junction not mentioned in any of the guides: the coast path sign pointed straight along the beach as the “winter route” and up into the hills as the “summer route.” We took the low road…and soon regretted it. The entire beach is made up of a deep layer of pebbles about 1/4 ” in diameter, which make for very slow and aggravating walking. We tried walking at the high water line, but that was no better.
We then hobbled along at the rear edge along a marsh, separated from the beach by a high berm. We did encounter one encouraging sign.
For the first few days we hadn’t taken a real lunch break, but after wading through the gravel for a long stretch, we were very glad to find ourselves at a place called the Club House in West Bexington.
Serendipity had brought us to some of the best food we’d had on the trip; I had a spectacular fish soup and the others all pronounced themselves very happy (it turned out that the place is in the Michelin guide).
We were at another junction, this time with some guidance from our guidebook: we could continue to slog along the beach all the way to Abbotsbury, our goal for the day, or we could take on a fairly steep ascent of just over a mile up Limekiln Hill and join the South Dorset Ridgeway, a long distance path that features a number of Neolithic monuments. We chose the Ridgeway.
This turned out to be an excellent decision. The Ridgeway follows a chalk ridge from which the land falls away on both sides, affording wonderful views, both back over the beach and sea and inland through some lovely countryside.
The Ridgeway passes by what is said to be the largest collection of Neolithic, Bronze and Iron Age, and Roman sites in England. We paused to take in the view from the remains of what is called Abbotsbury Castle, an Iron Age fortress. The site housed, much later, a beacon, part of the warning system for the arrival of the Spanish Armada.
But what made this a real adventure was the wind. It had been a stiff breeze along the shore, but up here it became a gale! Here is Sue about to go airborne and be blown off the ridge. Needless to say, we all had the chin straps on our Tilley hats battened down tight.
After a few miles of very pleasant ridge walking we looked down at the western edge of the Fleet, the tidal lagoon that separates a great deal of Chesil Beach from the rest of the coast; we will be seeing a good deal of the Fleet tomorrow!
We had walked a bit more than ten miles when we got our first glimpse of Abbotsbury in its valley above the Fleet.
We had seen a number of charming villages, but Abbotsbury was the most interesting. The whole area–and a great deal of Chesil Beach–is in private hands; the Strangways name is everywhere, as is the title of their holdings, “The Ilchester Estate.” The village itself is built of a honey colored local stone–and lots of thatched roofs.
That’s the town hall (Stangways Hall) you see at the end of the street.
The village is dominated by its ancient church (fourteenth century), Saint Nicholas, and by the ruins of the once great Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter that gave the town its name.
The abbey was torn down in 1539, part of Henry the Eighth’s dissolution of the holdings of the church. All that is left today is the end wall of the monks’ refectory and the magnificent tithe barn where the tithes of the parish were stored.
Abbotsbury is known for one more thing: its Swannery. Oddest fact of the trip: the Queen of England owns every swan in the United Kingdom or rather almost every swan. Swan was apparently a favored repast in the Middle Ages; the Abbotsbury Swannery was in fact established as part of the abbey to provide provender for the ravenous monks. In order to protect England’s swan population, the monarchy declared ownership. Exemptions were of course granted…to the aristocracy. At any rate, there are only three institutions in the UK permitted to own its own swans, and Abbotsbury is one of them. We didn’t visit the swannery itself for lack of time, but we did see these escapees on the Abbey pond.
The common rooms of our pub for the night, the Ilchester Arms, are full of character, and we enjoyed a glass there before dinner.
Dinner itself was very good: I had my first of several fish pies (think Shepherd’s Pie, but with fish in a wine and cream sauce; heaven for mashed potato lovers; sorry, Viv!)
The rooms could use some updating: the bed was perfectly comfortable, but the bathroom was cramped and the plumbing not exactly new