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Finally heading to Lyme, a full 25 years later, I came from Woody’s house on the edge of Exmoor, and decided to take a look en route at some of the east Devon resorts that had also long been names to which I wanted to put faces. Not really knowing my Exmouth from my Sidmouth, or my Ottery St Mary from my Budleigh Salterton, I decided to trust in the map to tell me. On the OS Explorer, Budleigh Salterton looked appealing: there was something about its leering cliffs, crooked lanes and genteel detached villas that drew me in. Not marked on the map, but even more of a pleasure to discover, was the town’s nudist beach. That’d be a symbol I’d like to see on the Explorers. Far more useful than a picnic table or yet another cruddy visitor centre. They could even differentiate in the pictograms whether it’s a nudist beach where you have a chance of keeping your dignity, or very firmly not. Budleigh Salterton’s would be in the latter category. It’s a steep shingle beach, so that if you go for a swim, you have to get out by catching a wave to crash you on to the pebbles, and then scramble on your hands and knees to safety before the next wave gives you an unexpected enema. By the universal law that most of the people on a nudist beach are the ones you’d least like to see naked, it’s not a pretty sight.

The OS version of Seaton, by contrast, showed it as spreading away from the sea in a splurge of what looked like inter-war housing estates, a tedious delta of Acacia Avenues and Wordsworth Drives. Even the prom looked moribund on the map, and when I arrived there next morning on the bus from Lyme, in order to walk back through the Undercliff, the notion was proved depressingly right. Lyme looks terrific on the map, and so it is. Tight knots of alleys, cuts, tiny streets and warehouses tumble down assorted hills to the beach and to the outstretched claw of the Cobb, the town’s massive medieval harbour wall. It was there that we first meet the French Lieutenant’s Woman herself, swathed in a jet black cape as she stared out to sea and the waves crashed all around. And if you’re not picturing Meryl Streep at this point, you’re probably remembering the Scottish Widows advert that shamelessly plundered the movie.

In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, the path into the Undercliff is ascribed an undeniably moral, or rather immoral, quality. To the monstrous Victorian archetype, Mrs Poulteney, it is, quite literally, the road to ruin. To Charles, it is a way of such beguiling temptation that he is unable to resist parting its ivy fronds and plunging in. You get the picture, I’m sure, and Fowles ladles it on (‘an English Garden of Eden’) with lip-licking gusto.

It is not just the uniquely jungle-like atmosphere that gives the Undercliff path its heady scent of musky eroticism. History has only augmented the sensation. On Christmas Eve 1839, the greatest landslip of modern times ripped this coast apart, as eight million tonnes of farmland, in a tranche nearly a mile long, detached itself and slid two hundred feet down towards the sea. When it finally juddered to a halt, it had created new chalk cliffs and stranded grass-topped pillars, their freshly exposed whiteness dazzling all who came to see. A vast chalk canyon half a mile wide separated the mainland from the sheared-off section, which quickly became known as Goat Island, a Satyric invocation to a place beyond the rules. A natural lagoon formed at the bottom of the landslip, and Parliament even debated building a deep-water harbour there, though it soon filled with rocks and earth from the initial slide and its after-shocks.

For the tourism business of Lyme Regis, the 1839 landslip could not possibly have come at a better time. The Regency finery of Jane Austen’s era, when Lyme came alive as the postscript to the season in Bath, was a fading memory. The Cobb had been spectacularly ruptured in a storm of 1824, blowing five ships out to sea. Although soon rebuilt, better and deeper harbours were springing up all along the coast. Modern seaside