Paul Theroux - The Kingdom by the Sea - A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain

There was a tower at the edge of the cliff ahead. It stood on its own; it was attached to nothing; it looked like a ruined lighthouse. This was at Kimmeridge Bay. A man with a pamphlet, named Ever-creech, told me that it was called the Clavel Tower and that it was almost two hundred years old. Clavel was a clergyman and also a star-gazer. He had used the tower for his astronomy. It was a delicate structure, and the steeps and headlands of this coast made it seem more delicate, because there was no other building near it.

Just inland there was a parking lot. Most of the people were in their cars, staring out to sea, but some others were tramping around and smiling and looking winded.

I sat down on the grass below the tower. That noise was not the sea — it was the booming of big guns. Just west of the bay my map labeled the next six miles Danger Area. It was another army firing range, and they were at it today — presumably practicing for the Falklands. I walked into Gaulter Gap and saw that red flags were flying at the onward path: no entry.

My detour took me inland, via Corfe Castle and Wareham and some tiny Dorset villages. I found some friends. I ate spaghetti. I drank scrumpy. I listened to the Stranglers — their current hit was about the pleasures of heroin. I made my way back to the coast, stepping onto it again at Lulworth Cover, on the other side of the firing range.

Then it was so steep and tedious that I could not enjoy the odd landscape features — the circularity of the cove, the comic look of Durdle Door, the precipice at Bat's Head. I hurried on the path toward Weymouth, where I wanted to spend the night. But it was a long hike. I headed for the cliffs at White Nothe — flesh-pale, corpselike stone — and then above Ringstead Bay to Burning Cliff, a ledge of combustible shale. John Miles, from the village of Loders, said the cliff had actually been on fire for many years and then mysteriously went out. There was still oil in Dorset. In places it seeped out of the ground. In the 1970s some of Dorset's most beautiful countryside was being eagerly offered to oil companies by local farmers. I once told a farmer that if they didn't watch out, the peaceful valleys of Dorset would be covered with hideous oil rigs. This farmer, Lew Swineham, said, "They be having lights on them, those oil wells," and he smiled with satisfaction. "Like Christmas trees." Somehow, the oil boom missed Dorset, which made farmers like Lew Swineham very cross. For a brief period they thought they might have seen their last of muddy boots and wet silage.

"The bus just went," Roger said at the Smugglers' Inn in Osmington Mills. "That's the last one. Have a meat pie instead."

Weymouth and the Isle of Portland had been in view almost since Lulworth, for ten miles or so. They lay in the distance, through the haze, at sea level. But up here, above Weymouth Bay, there were holiday camps on the bluffs, looking more than ever like prisons. I decided that the posher they were, the more they looked like concentration camps. These were built for strength: solid walls and concrete paths and chain-link fences and barbed wire and signs warning trespassers of guard dogs. On this sunny day, fully clothed people slept on deck chairs. They had scowling, sunburned faces. I could hear them snoring from forty yards away.

Now it seemed downhill, across some cliffs and down a gully to a seawall. I walked on top of the wall the last few miles into Weymouth. I liked Weymouth immediately. It was grand without being pompous. It had a real harbor. It was full of boats. All its architecture was intact, the late-Georgian terraces facing the Esplanade and the sea, and cottages and old warehouses on the harbor. I liked the look of the houses, their elegance, and the smell of fish and beer about them. I walked around. There was plenty of space. The weather was perfect. I thought: I could live here. That thought made me happy, but the next day I left my hotel and just kept walking.

ON THIS PART of the coast it was easy to get out of town — any town, even a large one like Weymouth. A ten-minute walk took me through the narrow outskirts; then there were no more shops. Ten more minutes: no houses. Five minutes: no signs. And then there were only chestnut trees with plumy blossoms, and the twelve-inch path, and the sound of waves.

But here at the hamlet of Fleet there were no waves. It was a silent shore for nine miles, for just offshore, and running from Portland to Abbotsbury, was one of the strangest coastal features of Britain, the Chesil Bank. It was a low ridge of pebbles banked in the sea, a wall of little stones that was perfectly straight and parallel to the shore. The beach was on the other side. On my side, where there was no sound of surf, the lagoon called the Fleet lay still and in places was sour-green and stinking of dead eelgrass. Because of that wall of pebbles (it looked as geometric as a man-made reef, but in fact had been pushed there during the Ice Age) this was the quietest part of the English coast: no wind, no gulls, no sound of water; only the shimmer of sun on the stagnant flats.

I heard a sound — two sounds — a rapid sawing, a high muffled hee-haw, like the harsh hum of silk being woven in a clapping loom. It came closer, strengthened to a kind of breathing, though I could not place it. I listened and looked sharp, and I saw two huge swans flying low over the Fleet, beating their wings — tearing the air with them — and the sound was that of their urgent wingbeats, echoing in Gore Cove. When they were directly overhead they sounded like two lovers in a hammock.

I walked on. Past Herbury I counted fifty-seven swans swimming in the lagoon, and I took a path that led me a little inland, through sunlit woods. I looked very closely at the birds and flowers and trees in this place, and noted their names and variety, and the way the sun slanted on the glade and glanced from the sea. I tried to remember every detail, because someone had told me that a nuclear power station was planned for this place that would wipe it out.

Cutting through a pasture, I did not at first see the bullocks, but hearing their hooves, I turned and saw them following me. I walked faster. They did the same. I ran, and they ran after me, about fifteen of them, making that curious rocking motion that bullocks do when they try to hurry. When they were just behind me I dived over a fence into a bank of stinging nettles and brambles. The bullocks crowded to have a look at me. This was near Wyke Wood. I felt like a jackass, because I was out of breath and scratched and stung, and the bullocks were snorting and drooling. Behind them, down the field, there was a full-grown bull. His feet were planted firmly into the turf, and his head was lowered at me.

I told the bullocks they were stupid and nosy. They moved a few feet away, enough for me to disentangle myself from the brambles. "Don't bother me — stay there — you, too!" I said, and backed down the pasture to the gate while the big bull watched. The animals obeyed me in a reluctant way, but stubbornly, edging forward whenever I turned away.

Then I vaulted a fence and was safe. Perhaps I had never been in danger, but I had felt threatened. They began pushing at the fence as I walked on. And I thought how domestic animals are a much greater nuisance than wild animals — they are dependent and badly behaved and seem willful and obtuse.

After a few more hills I saw St. Catherine's, a lovely ruined chapel on the summit of a hill in Abbotsbury. There was a swannery in Abbotsbury, which was why I had seen so many of the birds on the shore. The village had a monkish gray stone appearance — there once had been a Benedictine monastery here — and the tithe barn and the cottages all looked as though they had been built by friars for the glory of God. In fact, it was now a village of house-proud English people who, at great expense, had restored the place and planted roses.