The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [107]
By 1839, the fashion for the picturesque was everywhere. Scenery should be wild, noble and dramatic, and what could possibly be more dramatic than land that had ripped itself asunder with a mighty roar and a bone-stirring shudder? Even the mountains of Scotland, Wales and the Lakes couldn’t compete with that. Visitors came in their droves, on foot, by pony and trap, and by chartered pleasure steamers from Weymouth, Exmouth and Torquay. Locals hired themselves out as guides, embellishing their stories of That Fateful Night a little more with every threepenny bit proffered. But the greatest entrepreneurs were the two farmers on whose land the slip had occurred. The paths that soon grew up to steer the visitors around the Landslip – one for the gentlemen, and a less vertiginous one for the ladies – deliberately passed through both farms, and visitors would be efficiently divested of a shiny sixpence at each. Some tried to escape the charges and find their own way, often straying on to the land of a third farm, Little Bindon. The farmer there also charged the going rate of sixpence. Look-outs were employed to ensure that no-one escaped.
The Tourism Enterprise Award for 1840 must however go to James Chappell, the owner of Bindon Farm, on whose land the majority of the Landslip had occurred. By the summer after the slip, up to a thousand tickets a day were being sold, but he saw the potential for even more, and organised a fair for 25 August, culminating in a celebratory reaping of the corn that had continued to grow on Goat Island, the section that had sheared off his fields and now sat in strange isolation hundreds of yards, and a yawning chasm, away. As an added incentive to spectators, the most buxom young ladies were chosen to wield the first scythes, and, by the end of the day, you could purchase – and plenty did – a framed certificate with a few ears of the special corn affixed to it by sealing wax. Through the day, the many beer tents and food stalls, the jugglers and balloons all did a roaring trade, and the evening resounded to the sound of music, dancing and, as darkness fell, no doubt other kinds of merrymaking in the more secluded corners of Goat Island. According to the Dorset County Chronicle, 10,000 people had come that day. The Landslip was a goldmine.
So much the worse, then, when the owner of Pinhay Hall, newly built a mile or two from the Landslip towards Lyme, suddenly closed the Undercliff path that linked the town to its cash cow. Although it had been used for centuries by fishermen, stone quarrymen, farmers, labourers, smugglers and Preventive Men, those employed to hunt them out, Mr John Ames of Pinhay was having none of it. He had ideas about building his own arboretum, and didn’t want to see it ruined by a daily invasion of erotically charged ’Erberts and ’Arriets. He threw up a wall across the path, declaring that it was not now, and never had been, a right of way.
Lyme Regis seethed. A townsman, Joseph Hayward, decided to take Ames on in the courts. Three different cases took place in swift succession in Exeter, eventually coming down on the side of Hayward and the town. Ames had built a huge bonfire, to be lit as a final two fingers to the townsfolk on his expected victory, but instead he was landed with a court bill of £10,000. Hayward’s costs of £1,500 were soon wiped out by an active fundraising programme from amongst Lyme’s grateful population. In fury, Ames instead threw up eight-foot-high flint walls through his estate and funnelled the now legally proven right of way through the dank little gap between them.
The Landslip’s fame and allure lasted well into the twentieth century. When the tiny little branch railway from Axminster to Lyme Regis was finally opened in 1903, its only intermediate stop was near the hamlet of Combpyne. The station was proudly christened ‘Combpyne for Landslip