Bill Bryson - Notes from a small Island

It is twelve miles from Lulworth to Weymouth. In Kingdom by the Sea, Paul Theroux gives the impression that you can walk it in an easy lope and still have time for a cream tea and to slag off the locals, but I trust he had better weather than I. It took me most of the day. The walking beyond Swyre Head was mostly along mercifully flat, if lofty, cliffs high above a cadaverous grey sea, but the footing was treacherous and the going slow. At Ringstead Bay the hills abruptly ended in a final steep descent to the beach. I rode an ooze of flowing mud down the hill to the bay, pausing only long enough to belly into boulders and carry out a few tree resiliency tests. At the bottom I pulled out my map and, making calipers of my fingers, worked out that I had only covered about five miles. It had taken most of the morning. Frowning at my lack of progress, I shoved the map into a pocket and moodily trudged on.

The rest of the day was a dreary, wet tramp along low hills above a pounding surf. The rain eased off and turned into an insidious drizzle that special English kind of drizzle that hangs in the air and saps the spirit. About one o'clock Weymouth materialized from the mists, far off across a long curve of bay, and I gave a small cry of joy. But its seeming nearness was a cruel deception. It took me almost two hours to reach the town's outskirts, and another hour to walk along the front to the centre, by which time I was tired and limping. I got a room in a small hotel and spent a long time lying on the bed, booted and still condomed, before I could summon the strength to change into something less obviously mirthmaking, have a light wash and hit the town.

I liked Weymouth a good deal more than I'd expected to. It has two claims to fame. In 1348 it was the place where the Black Death was introduced into England and in 1789 it became the world's first seaside resort when that tedious lunatic George III started a fashion for seabathing there. Today the town tries to maintain an air of Georgian elegance and generally nearly succeeds, though like most seaside resorts it had about it a whiff of terminal decline, at least as far as tourism goes. The Gloucester Hotel, where George and his retinue stayed (it was a private house then), had recently closed and now Weymouth didn't have a single decent large hotel, a sad omission in an old seaside town. But I'm happy to report thatit does have many good pubs and one outstanding restaurant, Perry's, all of them in the harbourfront district, a tartedup neighbourhood with fishing smacks bobbing on the water and a jaunty nautical air that makes you half expect to see Popeye and Bluto come loping round the corner. Perry's was crowded and cheerful and a joy to the spirits after Lulworth. I had local mussels from Poole after three days of hard walking it came as a shock to realize that Poole was still local and a highly creditable sea bass, and afterwards retired to the kind of dark and lowceilinged pub where you feel as if you ought to be wearing a bulky Aran sweater and a captain's cap. I enjoyed myself very much and drank so much my feet stopped aching.

To the west of Weymouth stands the fiftymilelong arc of Lyme Bay. Since the landscape just west of Weymouth is not particularly, or even fractionally, memorable, I took a taxi to Abbotsbury, and began my walk midway along Chesil Beach. I don't know what Chesil Beach is like towards the Weymouth end, but along this stretch it consisted of great drifts of small, kidneyshaped pebbles worn to a uniform smoothness by eons of wave action. They are nearly impossible to walk on since you sink to your ankletops with each step. The coast path is on firmer ground immediately behind the beach, but leaves you unable to see over the stony dunes. Instead, you just hear the sea, crashing into the shore on the other side and sending endless successions of pebbles clattering along the water's edge. It was the most boring walk I've ever had. My blisters soon began to throb. I can stand most kinds of pain, even watching Jeremy Beadle, but I do find blisters particularly disagreeable. By the time I reached West Bay, early in the afternoon, I was ready for a good sitdown and something to eat.

West Bay is an odd little place, spread out in a higgledypiggledy fashion across a duney landscape. It had something of the air of a goldrush town, as if it had sprung up hurriedly, and it looked poor and grey and spraybattered. I hunted around for some place to eat and happened on a nondescriptlooking establishment called the Riverside Cafe. I opened the door and found myself in the most extraordinary setting. The place was heaving. The air was thick with shrill Londonstyle chatter and all the customers looked as if they had just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren advertisement. They all had jumpers slung casually round their shoulders and sunglasses perched on their heads. It was as if a little piece of Fulham or Chelsea had been magically wafted to this Godforsaken corner of the Dorset coast.

Certainly I had never seen this kind of tempo outside a restaurant in London. Waiters and waitresses dashed everywhere trying to fulfil what appeared to be an inexhaustible demand to keep the customers fed and, above all, supplied with wine. It was quite extraordinary. As I stood there, trying to maintain my bearings, Keith Floyd, the food johnny, wobbled past. I was impressed.

It all rather went to my head. I'm not usually much of one for lunch, but the food smelled so wonderful and the ambience was so extraordinary that I found myself ordering like a trencherman. I had a starter of scallop and lobster terrine, an exquisite fillet of sea bass with green beans and a mountain of chips, two glasses of wine, and rounded it off with coffee and a generous slab of cheesecake. The proprietor, a jolly nice man named Arthur Watson, wandered among the tables and even called on me. He told me that until ten years before the place had once been just a normal cafe doing roast lunches and burger and chips, and little by little they had begun introducing fresh fish and fancier foods and found there was a clamour for it. Now it was packed out every mealtime and had just been named the Good Food Guide's restaurant of the year for Dorset, but they still did burgers and they still did chips with everything, and I thought that was just wonderful.

It was gone three when I emerged from the Riverside with a light head and heavy everything else. Taking a seat on a bench, I pulled out my map and realized with a snort of dismay that I was still ten miles from Lyme Regis, with the 626 feet of Golden Cap, the highest hill on the south coast, standing between me and it. My blisters throbbed, my legs ached, my stomach was grotesquely distended and a light rain was beginning to fall.

As I sat there, a bus pulled up. I got up and put my head in the open door. 'Going west?' I said to the driver. He nodded. Impulsively, I lumbered aboard, bought a ticket and took a seat towards the back. The trick of successful walking, I always say, is knowing when to stop.

I SPENT THE NIGHT IN LYME REGIS AND PASSED THE FOLLOWING morning poking about in the town before catching a bus to Axminster and a train on to Exeter, a process that consumed considerably more time than I had expected. Daylight was fading by the time I stepped from Exeter St David's into a light but annoying rain.

I wandered through the city examining hotels from the street, but they all seemed a bit grand for me, and eventually ended up at the central tourist office, feeling mildly lost and far from home. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing here. I looked through racks of leaflets for shirehorse centres, petting zoos, falconry centres, miniature pony centres, model railways, butterfly farms, and something called I jest not Twiggy Winkie's Farm and Hedgehog Hospital, none of which seemed to address my leisure requirements. Nearly all the leaflets were depressingly illiterate, particularly with regard to punctuation 1 sometimes think that if I see one more tourist leaflet that says 'Englands Best' or 'Britains Largest' I will go and torch the place and they all seemed so pathetically modest in what they had to offer. Nearly all of them padded out their lists of featured attractions with things like 'Free Car Park', 'Gift Shop and TeaRoom' and the inevitable 'Adventure Playground' (and then were witless enough to show you in the photograph that it was just a climbingframe and a couple of plastic animals on springs). Who goes to these places? I couldn't say, I'm sure.