ON CHESIL BEACH..

Did a bit of exploring last week - just a bit; nothing too strenuous - and one of our explorations took us to West Bexington on the Dorset coast.  We had been looking where to book a cottage for our holiday and one of the locations that popped up in our search was West Bexington.   It looked quite inviting - a small village on the Dorset coast with access to the beach, a beguiling name and a feeling of `away from it all.`  In the end, for one reason or another, we decided to look elsewhere and ended up hiring a lovely house in Charmouth.  Just as well.

On the day we visited West Bexington (after failing to locate the beaches at Burton Bradstock and elsewhere along the coast) we found the car park on the beach and it was there that I encountered the most complicated car parking machine I have ever come across.   It advertised a couple of hours stay for 60p which I thought might do us and I noticed that there were various ways of paying the fee - by mobile phone, by card or by cash.  Of course I opted for the cash option only to find that it was the most difficult to understand and, of course, it offered `no change given` so I parted with a pound coin, finally retrieved the ticket but lost  40p in the process.  There should be a law.

I took the above photo of the beach on what was a fairly gloomy day, so I suppose we didn`t see the beach at its best.  It is, however, part of the 18-mile long Chesil beach which runs from West Bay to Portland in the east and it is alleged that you can always tell where you are on the beach by the size of the pebbles - the further east you go, the bigger the pebbles become.   Those at West Bexington were pretty small, so we had to be close to the western end of the beach.

It`s a great place for fishing though - renowned for cod and such like - and it seemed that the only other people attracted to West Bexington that morning were determined fishermen.   Here they are doing their stuff:-

Now a good friend of mine has walked the entire length of the south west coast path - all 630 miles of it from Minehead in Somerset round to Poole in Dorset - and so he must have walked past West Bexington and trudged his way across all those miles of assorted pebbles.  We managed a bit of the path each side of the village but found it hard going but at least I can claim to have walked a bit of the coast path along this famed stretch of beach.  (Over the years I have developed the knack of ticking off stretches of the coast path by the simple process of claiming that seeing round the next corner should be sufficient rather than having to walk it all but in fairness we have actually walked most of the Devon and Cornwall stretches. It`s just the Dorset bit that has largely escaped us.)

Despite its fame through the works of Thomas Hardy. as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Jurassic Coast and its features in film and television productions, I think we must have visited one of Chesil Beach`s least prepossessing locations.   Or maybe it` just me?