Channel Shore

by Tom Fort

  Unlike Tyneham.

  It is a sad story.

  West from Kimmeridge Bay are, in sequence, Hobarrow Bay, Brandy Bay and Worbarrow Bay, which Treves considered the most beautiful in Dorset. A path leads inland from its eastern side beside a little stream, the Gwyle. After a mile it reaches a cluster of ruins: roofless cottages of Purbeck stone, the walls smothered by vegetation, the derelict old schoolhouse and post office, further on the shattered remains of the Elizabethan manor house. Only the church is intact, although no one has taken the sacrament there for seventy years.

  This is, or was, Tyneham, and its story is well enough known. When war came in 1939, Tyneham was trapped in a semi-feudal time warp. Every house and all the land around belonged to the Bond family, who had lived at the manor house for centuries. Just before Christmas 1943 the villagers and their overlords received a letter from the War Office telling them that Worbarrow Bay and the entire estate were needed to train troops for what would be the Normandy landings. They had six days to leave their homes, the only homes they had ever known. They were told – or thought they were told – that they could return when it was all over. A notice was pinned to the church door asking the military to look after the buildings and treat the village kindly. The War Office did neither, and in 1948 annexed Tyneham and the estate for good by means of compulsory purchase. The houses fell into ruin and the villagers never came back.

  Belatedly its fate has been to become a visitor attraction. Most weekends the Army allows people in to stare at the ghost of the village and walk down to the sea where the fishermen used to wait for the coming of the mackerel shoals. But on the day I cycled past, the gates were locked and the warning signs were up. The best I could do was look down into the valley where the grey shells of the houses peeped through the trees, and across to the forbidden heights of Flower’s Barrow. It was silent, incredibly tranquil: not a gun, not a vehicle, not a voice. The paradox – as the good doctor in Kimmeridge had explained to me – is that by annexing Tyneham, the Army had, in all probability, actually saved this unreal peace and idyllic beauty from being blighted by some kind of holiday development.

  Not that the Army cared.

  The valley of Tyneham is part of the Lulworth Ranges, seven thousand acres of uninhabited coastal wilderness, virgin and unspoiled but for the tank tracks, targets and blasted earth and rocks. Lulworth Camp itself – the home of the Armoured Fighting Vehicle School of Gunnery – proclaims the usual military contempt for notions of pleasant design or harmony with the landscape. Blocks of functional semis face the road from behind the wire and the high-voltage lights. There are no gardens or screens of trees – the only decoration is provided by the ornamental tanks. Inland, looking towards Wareham, is another Danger Area, of heathland scarred by tank tracks and artillery fire. Like Tyneham it was entirely silent when I passed by. I watched a group of fallow deer moving through the gorse at their leisure. Nearby, the rusted corpses of two tanks lay clasped in the embrace of the undergrowth.

  The Army finally surrenders control just east of the perfection of Lulworth Cove. Geologists love this exquisite pale bowl in the cliffs, and the stretch of coastline beyond, almost as much as the visitors who swamp it in summer and the walkers who look down into its clear, aquamarine waters from the coastal path. The sea has made wonders here, scooping out the bedrock to form the cove itself, creating caves and arches and stacks and sheer cliffs either side. There are layers of chalk, limestone, sandstone, oil sand, lignite, pebble beds, clays, marls, quartz, grits, ancient soil and tree remains, and within them fossils, stromatolites, ostracods and a host of other exciting treasures promiscuously laid down over the aeons.

  Lulworth Cove is overwhelmingly lovely in the evening light when the crowds have gone and the car park is empty and even the geologists have packed away their tools. The enclosing cliff faces, the blue water darkening as the light fades, the pale pebble beach, the wide sea beyond, the boats shifting at anchor together form an extraordinary composition. But you are aware of its impermanence, that you are there at a moment in an immense history of erosion, the sea eating away at what the sea itself has made. And should you forget, there are signs everywhere: DANGER. KEEP AWAY. ROCKFALLS. UNSTABLE CLIFFS.

  Frederick Treves had a singular experience here. On 7 September 1892 an eleven-year-old girl, Edith Leckie, fell 380 feet from the clifftop onto the beach. Treves was staying in a cottage nearby and was summoned to the coastguards’ boathouse to attend her. Amazingly she was not merely alive, but had suffered no disabling injuries, which Treves attributed to the fact that she had fallen with her back to the cliff so that her clothes caught on its rough face, slowing her descent.

  Nothing so interesting happened to me, but I did watch a crabbing boat come in to the shore. I wanted to see if there were any crabs and maybe chat to the fisherman, so I went and offered to help drag her up the shingle. My offer was refused; rather brusquely, I thought.

  Inland from the cove is West Lulworth where there is a very handsome late Victorian church of Purbeck stone. Treves was old enough to remember its tiny and dilapidated predecessor which served the village before the red-brick villas and lodging houses appeared. The choir was accompanied by violin, bass viol, flute and an early version of the tuba which Treves refers to as a serpent, otherwise known as the ophi-cleide.

  A bridle path cuts away from the road behind West Lulworth, close to the Durdle Door holiday park. It is a lovely cycle ride. Inland a patchwork of cultivated fields reaches into the Downs. Towards the sea, grassland rolls like breakers between Durdle Door and White Nothe, each trough opening a view of the sea itself. At White Nothe a huge landslide of chalk ends the sequence of sheer cliff drops. The undercliff is a rough tangle of blackthorn, hawthorn and privet overlaid by honeysuckle and ivy. There are patches of reedy bog created by seeping groundwater, and grassy clearings where various shy orchids flower.

  The ancestors of the foxes that roam through this wilderness were much admired for their boldness and cunning by the writer Llewelyn Powys, who for several years in the 1920s lived in one of the row of gaunt coastguard cottages on top of the Nothe. He knew it as White Nose, invoking the authority of Thomas Hardy who declared that it had always been White Nose because it was shaped like a nose, the nose in question being that of the Duke of Wellington. Nothe or Nose, for isolation and wind-blasted discomfort there can have been few places to beat it. Powys related how windows were sometimes blown in by the force of the wind, and clumps of seaweed flew over the clifftop to join the slates plucked from the roof and dispatched inland ‘as though they were sycamore leaves’. At other times sea mists would roll in, smothering everything, and the foghorn on the Shambles lighthouse across Weymouth Bay would boom.

  They were an odd literary brood, the Powys brothers, John Cowper, Theodore and Llewelyn. They all wrote voluminously in their own, intensely individual ways, disdaining popularity and inspiring small, loyal bands of readers who regarded them – and still regard them – as touched by genius. John Cowper Powys is perhaps the best-known of them today, although there cannot be many with the stamina and dedication to survive Wolf Solent or A Glastonbury Romance, let alone the 1600 pages of his Welsh bardic fantasy Porius, which true devotees – including Powys himself – considered his masterpiece.

  Weymouth

  In childhood they spent happy holidays with their grandparents in Weymouth, which they loved and which John Cowper Powys repaid with a novel he called Weymouth Sands. The sands were looking a picture when I pedalled past, the sunshine infused with the warmth of the south, enough to suggest that a proper summer might not be far off. I found myself being surprised again by how many people of school and working age managed to get to the beach on school and working days. Weymouth’s esplanade was thronged and the beach was well-populated with the usual loungers, scroungers, sunbathers, dog-walkers and philosophers.

  I watched an elderly gent coming out of the sea. He wore Union Jack trunks repaired in a couple of places with sticky tape
. He got a towel from his beach hut and rubbed himself vigorously. He was in amazing shape for someone of his age, which was over seventy: lean, muscled, tanned from summers past, the skin a little loose. He told me the water was between nine and ten degrees Celsius. I shuddered at the thought. He said it had been between four and five in February, and I shuddered some more.

  He swam most days, then ran to the eastern end of the esplanade and back. He liked Weymouth well enough. I said it must have been a proud moment when the Olympics came to the town. His face darkened and he embarked on a lengthy tirade against the council for having got rid of the seafront’s well-loved Victorian fairy lights and replacing them with a laser display called Veils of Lights. ‘They called it regeneration,’ he said derisively. ‘I call it degeneration.’ He laced his trainers and pounded off, leaving me feeling distinctly slothful.

  Weymouth is still a delight. Its sand is golden and its seafront retains much of its original Georgian elegance and jauntiness. The beach huts are outstandingly attractive, the esplanade is wide and welcoming and cheerful in the slightly vulgar way esplanades need to be. The harbour, with its quays and old brick warehouses, offers an agreeable diversion, and there are little streets all around which are a pleasure to wander. Weymouth has an excellent old-fashioned sweet shop, a fishing tackle shop and a decent secondhand bookshop, all reliable indicators of a place that has not entirely lost its soul.

  Of course Weymouth, in common with other seaside towns, suffers from having its economy so heavily skewed to tourism and being therefore at the mercy of factors over which it has little control, principally the weather. It has too much traffic in the wrong places, a railway station at the end of the line, plenty of boarded-up shops and struggling hotels, an abundance of drunks and oafs, and a stack of intractable social problems. Nevertheless it has charm, even beauty, and an enviable capacity to provide a jolly day out at the seaside, which is a great asset.

  George III liked it very much, even in the throes of the porphyria that darkened his life and robbed him of his dignity. The diarist Fanny Burney, a member of the royal entourage, left a deliciously vivid picture of that first, famous royal visit of 1789.

  At a welcoming reception the Mayor advanced to be introduced to Queen Charlotte and astonished all and sundry by taking her hand and kissing it but failing to kneel. ‘You should have knelt, sir,’ hissed one of the equerries, to which the Mayor answered that he could not on account of his wooden leg. Regrettably the other, two-legged Weymouth worthies took their cue from the Mayor and treated the Queen in the same grossly familiar manner.

  Despite this faux pas royal approval was bestowed on Weymouth, and the town did very well out of it. The King bathed daily from a specially constructed bathing machine; an illustration shows him entirely naked, without even his wig on, closely attended by the Royal ‘dippers’. According to Fanny Burney this ritual was accompanied by renditions of ‘God Save the King’ by musicians concealed in a neighbouring bathing machine. She was much struck by the displays of popular enthusiasm. Patriotic labels were stuck in shop windows, in children’s bonnets and labourers’ hats and loud huzzahs greeted the Royal family wherever they went.

  The King and the itinerant court returned to Weymouth most summers over the next decade. Apart from the prescribed sea-bathing, George liked outings: watching the pony racing on the beach, going to the theatre, visiting the sites of shipwrecks (including the Halsewell), dining on the celebrated Portland mutton at the Portland Arms. One excursion was to Maiden Castle to watch rural sports, which included ‘a Contest of cricket for a Round of Beef . . . a Pound of Tobacco to be Grinned for, a good Hat to be cudgelled for, a handsome Hat for the Boy most expert in catching a Roll dipped in Treacle and suspended by a string . . . a Pig to whoever catches him by the Tail.’

  The King’s health collapsed again in 1801. His last visits to Weymouth were in the summers of 1804 and 1805. The mood of the nation was adversely affected by hysteria over the threat of French invasion. George wore a green eye shade and was clearly in a poor way. In 1806 a local newspaper lamented: ‘It is with much concern we now generally believe that his Majesty and the Royal Family will not honour us with their presence this season.’

  They never came again. But the town consoled itself as best it could with a permanent and prominent reminder of royal favour in the shape of a painted statue of the King in his robes and Order of the Garter next to ‘an antique table’ with his crown on it, a pile of books, a ‘very bold cornucopia’ and his sword and sceptre. This peculiar composition has aroused much derision over the years – Betjeman called its colouring ridiculous and Treves described it as ‘an object of ridicule to the easily amused . . . only of interest as a sign of the times.’ But Weymouth has stuck by it, and standing where it does on the seafront – now accompanied by a replica of the royal bathing machine – it enhances the general cheeriness of the scene no end.

  14

  HALF-COCK

  The tidal race off Portland Bill is one of the most notorious navigational hazards along the Channel shore (so I’ve read – I wouldn’t go near it myself). The Bill thrusts south from the mainland in the shape of a tear about to drop, provoking a whirl of eddies along its eastern and western sides which collide off the southern tip and meet the flow of the tide over an extended submerged ledge. The resulting mêlée is made worse by the influence of the Shambles, an evil sandbank to the south-east of the Bill.

  At spring tides the speed of the tidal race can reach seven knots, sometimes even more, and if the wind is head on, the sea is lacerated into steep and fearsome waves. There is a passage about all this in Jonathan Raban’s seafaring memoir Coasting, which made me feel uneasy sitting by the fire in the living room. Seven knots, Raban points out, may sound comfortable on a bicycle but is a ‘wild and dangerous speed for a body of ocean water . . . the water stands on end in foamy pillars . . . it seethes and hisses and growls . . . it can reach out and grab any boat ass enough to be in sight of it.’ And plenty have been so grabbed, hence the name for the curve of sea between the Bill and Chesil Beach: Deadman’s Bay.

  The fortunes of the Bill itself have always been bound up intimately in its stone and its harbour. Frederick Treves characterised it as ‘ever windswept, barren and sour, treeless and ill-equipped’ and its natives ‘recluses of unpleasant habits . . . exceedingly jealous of strangers . . . they married only with their own folk and possessed curious laws and still more curious morals.’ The virtues of Portland stone – a species of limestone that is both durable and workable – were exploited by James I’s chief architect, Inigo Jones, who used it for the banqueting hall at Whitehall Palace and on the old St Paul’s. When London was rebuilt after the Great Fire, Portland stone was the material of first choice for public buildings and has remained so, its strength and grandeur displayed by such buildings as Somerset House, the British Museum and County Hall.

  So much was shipped to London that it was said there was more of it in the capital than left on the Bill. Nevertheless, the supply remains healthy; new quarries are still being opened up as the old ones are worked out and turned over to the heritage business.

  High above Portland Bill is All Saints Church, Wyke Regis, whose graveyards have swallowed many of those destroyed and spat out by the murderous seas below. Scores of ships came to grief on one side of Portland Bill or the other, events that tended to be regarded by local people more as economic opportunities than tragedies. To the so-called wreckers, appropriating valuables came before offering help to the hapless victims, particularly when so many of them were dark-skinned foreigners without a word of English. One of the most notorious displays of callousness followed the wreck of a Dutch merchant ship, the Hope of Amsterdam, at the eastern end of Chesil Beach in January 1749.

  She was carrying a fortune in gold and jewels, and word of her fate soon spread. The men of Portland, Wyke and Weymouth were first on the scene, followed in the course of the day by treasure-hunters from all over Dorset. The wreckers organis
ed themselves into groups of twenty or so to scour the wreckage, ignoring the plight of the crew of the ship, seventy of whom managed to save themselves by their own efforts. Over the next ten days the crowd swelled to several thousand, and they defied all attempts by customs men to remove them. Some got away rich men, others died of exposure in the extreme cold.

  The spectacle provoked a wave of national revulsion. But only two of those involved were ever brought to trial, and they were acquitted on the curious grounds that the Dutch were no more than pirates who had plundered the gold from the Spanish, and it must be lawful to plunder pirates.

  Among those commemorated in the church is Captain John Wordsworth, brother of the poet, who – with more than 250 others – was drowned in February 1805 when the Earl of Abergavenny was steered onto the Shambles at the direction of an incompetent local pilot. But the majority of those buried in the two graveyards by Wyke Church were never identified. They were nameless, storyless nobodies, often picked up as hands in some faraway port and discarded, mangled and lifeless, on a storm-battered Dorset shore. But even where the names were known and recorded, the lettering on their gravestones has generally been eaten away by time, assisted by the salt spray blown on the wind; unless by chance their stone was arranged to face inland, away from the sea.