Dorset is Full

Looking across Lyme Bay from Charmouth

(not so much chilling as getting chilly on the beach)

You expect Dorset in August to be lively with holidaymakers, and the roads to be busy, but I hadn't expected it to be quite as lively or as busy as it has been this summer. We were staying in a cottage near Beaminster with our son and daughter and their partners, and one afternoon headed to Lyme Regis in a two-car convoy. Knowing that the traffic was very bad on the A35, we took the "scenic" route, negotiating the maze of narrow sunken lanes and potholed, under-signed backroads, eventually approaching Lyme Regis through its less-used back door at Uplyme, and headed straight for the Holmbush car park, well away from the seafront. After so many visits over so many years in the area, we know the ropes.

However, to my amazement, Holmbush was full; there was not a single parking space available in the entire 400 capacity car park, which is unprecedented. In the past, at any time of year on any day of the week we have simply pulled in, and taken the most convenient space in the first few rows of an otherwise empty car park. To be honest, I had no idea Holmbush was so big; I had never had cause to explore its full extent before. So we headed for the fallback position: that is, to what I have always considered the semi-secret Woodmead car park, tucked away up a steep backstreet, and relatively expensive into the bargain. But it, too, was full... Crazy stuff! At which point, we gave up and headed for Charmouth, where we managed to squeeze into a couple of recently-vacated spaces on the rugged field that serves as a seafront car park. It's official: Dorset is full.

I suppose it's obvious what has been going on. Thousands of people who would normally head for the beaches of the Mediterranean and beyond in August have opted for a domestic seaside holiday instead, not wishing to endure the expense and inconvenience of multiple Covid tests and the possibility of a ten-day quarantine on return. As a result, coastal counties like Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall are jam-packed, and everything is under unaccustomed pressure: apart from a birthday celebration we had pre-booked weeks ago, we could not find a single restaurant with a free table all week. Which, again, is unprecedented. Dorset, with its unpredictable weather, few indoor entertainments, and mainly stony – not to say hazardous – beaches is normally the preserve of the hardier holidaymaker, wellington-booted and waterproof-clad. We may be few, we may look ridiculous, but we do know how to make our own entertainment, come rain, come shine. On a wet day – and it was very wet indeed on our first few days – Dorset has little to offer anyone whose idea of a good time is to stretch out in the sun with a succession of long drinks from a beach-front bar, in anticipation of a long night ahead clubbing. I suspect that many of these Dorset newbies won't be back next year, Covid willing, unless they've acquired the necessary tastes for long walks, National Trust property visits, and eating fish and chips in the rain.

Charmouth beach

The area around Lyme Regis has been given an added boost for some by the fact that Mary Anning has been having a moment: there's a film, Ammonite, a proposed sea-front statue, and a certain amount of accompanying hoo-hah about her alleged obscurity and neglect. This is almost entirely factitious. Doubtless, there was injustice in her treatment at the time, mainly due to social class and gender, but – like any child with an interest in natural history and fossil-hunting – I have known about Mary Anning and her role in discovering the marine reptiles in the cliffs at Black Ven since I was about eight years old, nearly 60 years ago. Frankly, I would have said she is and has always been more widely and enduringly celebrated than establishment figures like William Buckland or Gideon Mantell, or even William "strata" Smith (also studiously ignored by the palaeo-toffs, and whose pioneering geological maps have recently been made available in a magnificent book). Sadly, the practical upshot has been a great deal of pointless and dangerous whacking of rocks and even the notoriously unstable cliffs with blunt instruments by assorted ill-advised idiots. Quite apart from the hazards to unprotected eyes from flying rock fragments and to bare feet from the consequent jagged edges left lying around – wear wellies, people! – it seems pretty certain that yet another major cliff fall must be brewing, given the alarming amounts of water and liquid clay I saw seeping out of the cliffs at Charmouth. To climb ten feet up the cliff and bang away with a hammer at the hard layers is to invite disaster. Even more so than those Streep-inspired meme-seekers, following Lyme's previous moment in the 1981 film of The French Lieutenant's Woman, who used to stand perilously on the end of the Cob in stormy weather.

A curious aspect of our rented cottage was that the walls were hung with a number of very large limited-edition prints by Elisabeth Frink. Frink is no longer as famous as she was in the 1960s, and I have to say her obsessions with fascistic male figures and badly-drawn horses are not to my taste, but it's not often you find a holiday let decorated with such upscale artwork. Maybe the owner didn't really like the prints much, either, and decided to stash them somewhere out of his daily sight. Whatever, I couldn't resist checking out their value, and managed to discover that a copy of one of them – from a series of lithographs of "green men", about 30" x 18" in size and all pretty hideous – is currently available from a dealer for £3,500. It's funny how knowing that causes one to scrutinise the ugly thing more closely for hidden virtues... Maybe the overall composition is strong? Do the muddy colours work well together? Or perhaps the draughtsmanship is good? Or even just the underlying idea? But, nope, none of the above; it was still irredeemably grim, and to my mind that price-tag is an inflated overvaluation of what is surely the result of no more than 30 minutes of Dame Elisabeth's time; a lot less, anyway, than the time and effort that would have been required from whoever did the actual work of printing the edition of 70 lithographs (certainly not Frink herself). Mind you, in a future post I will show you something I saw in Bristol recently that really expanded my conception of "overvaluation". It's a shocker. Stay tuned.