The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [108]
Today, the area of the landslip – Goat Island and the Chasm, let alone the lagoon – is abandoned to the elements. They are off limits, both officially to preserve the Undercliff’s status of nature reserve, but also practically, for you would be ripped to shreds by gorse and brambles if you tried to get through on the paths that the Victorian trippers gouged so effectively out of the newly exposed slopes. Coming from the Seaton end to the west, the Landslip area is only about a third of the way to Lyme, and as I stood and read the interpretation board, drily regurgitating the facts and figures, I gazed up at the still-impressive cliffs of the Chasm, now cloaked in green. Gulls and buzzards circled overhead, but their shrieking began to sound like happy visitors clambering in awe over the rocks and terraces. Awe, and possibly a subterranean pulse of lust. ‘Bindon Cliffs: Where the Earth Moves’ – even the interpretation board, decorated with its logos of multiple funding agencies, is slyly titled with a nod to its sensuality.
The Landslip – still marked as such on the OS map – comes right at the outset of the Undercliff part of the walk back to Lyme. It’s a good introduction to the exuberant fertility of the path, which courses through dense thickets of ash, maple, beech, ivy and what could well be triffids. Yet again, the weather had seen fit to act in the most appropriate manner for my route. In this year of paths, it had been uncanny just how perfectly apposite the conditions had been for each walk. Not a drop of rain had fallen on me in eight April days on the Ridgeway (and the Icelandic ash cloud had cleared the skies of planes for six of them). My walk across Wales had taken place in luscious warmth, with decent cloud cover to prevent me burning on the most open or knackering stretches and luminous sunshine when in the lanes, the woods or the ancient holloways. The night walk across Dartmoor had been under a cloudless sky and a full moon, albeit a slightly shy one. Even the torrential storm on the dreaded Coast to Coast had done its job of permitting me to give it up as a bad job. And in the Undercliff, rain the previous night had dampened everything down, but now a searing, steamy heat was wafting round me as I moved quietly through the jungle. It felt, smelt and sounded so exotically unEnglish. To the Victorians, this must have seemed like a taste of the Empire itself.
This was all the more unexpected when the previous couple of miles of coast path had been so tediously Little English. Seaton promenade, a concrete wall between a shingle beach and drab apartments, was deserted at 9.30 on a midsummer morning. The path then climbs up to a golf course, where the potholed car park makes all too clear the local way: the spaces nearest the club house were reserved, in pecking order of proximity, for the Secretary, the Captain, the Seniors’ Captain and the Ladies’ Captain. Behind the doors of Dunroamin or Ocean View down in town, someone was plotting the day when that car-park space will be mine, all mine.
Golfers had been on my mind a lot while I’d been walking. Mark Twain’s immortal observation that ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’ pretty much sums it up for me, and I’d hated the bits of path, particularly on the Ridgeway, that had taken me across golf courses. As I lumbered past, dripping in sweat and weighed down by a tatty rucksack, I could feel the waves of impatience pulsing off the neatly coiffed, time-is-money businessmen forced to wait until I’d gone. On one course in the Chilterns, I’d been told off for going the wrong way.