And Budleigh is still there
Sunday 28 October, 2018
It was, as I discovered, the end of the season and the cafes and kiosks were opening for the last time. I took the train down to Exmouth, looking at the estuary once we got out of the string of council houses along the railway out of Exeter Central. The penny dropped during the day that Budleigh had been on an abandoned branch line that went from Exmouth round to Sidmouth, long swallowed up after the Beeching Report (and hasn’t history proved him wrong).
It’s easy to see the attraction of Exmouth on a sunny day, even in the depths of autumn: the families with their dogs on the long strip of sand and the promenade above it. I wouldn’t care to be a life guard, looking at the tidal sweep and the currents!
The lifeboat was practicing launching and recovery, using some very smart kit indeed: a tracked prime mover with a tracked trailer, as you can see from the compilation of photos at the end of this post. I walked along the Jurassic cliffs and climbed up the cliff path to Sandy Bay and Budleigh Salterton. I was on the South West Coast Path for the first time.
It’s about 10 or 11 kilometres walk along the path, and it takes you past the salubrious Sandy Bay Caravan Park. I remember something like this at the end of the Coast to Coast – like a bunch of alien mobile homes squatting above the beach. I’m sure this was the target of Ronnie Delderfield’s scorn in the last volume of A Horseman Riding By.
Budleigh, by contrast, is completely unspoilt – I’m sure its a nightmare in summer and I think I lowered the demographic when I arrived, but even the new builds are sympathetic with the Victorian and Edwardian sea-front. It was pretty cool, maybe 7 degrees, and the wind had a bite, but there were seven or eight middle-aged swimmers sans wetsuits plonking along the length of the beach, each towing a bright orange buoy. I presume this was to aid forensic recovery…
I grabbed a sandwich at one of the kiosks at the Limekilns end of the beach and admired Lady Rolle’s Pines. There’s a great walk, apparently, up the Otter valley past Otterton (of course) and Ottery St Mary. It would make a great Coleridge tribute one day. Amazing that Budleigh was once a port, before the river was shifted by the shingle bank moving east.
The bus got me back to Exmouth for the train and a perfectly-timed arrival at the Cathedral for Evensong, followed by a wander round admiring what is a very ancient building. Last time I missed the restored Reconcilation Chapel, destroyed in the Baedecker Raids, now a sign of peace. The cathedral was bedecked for the Harvest Service at 7 pm, but I’d done my bit and headed home. It was an afternoon that I would have liked to have shared with Dad, just as the morning is one that I can share with Mum.
