A rite of passage

‘There’s a vegan café in Seaton,’ said Frog on Thursday morning.

    He’d read about it on Facebook where he spends quite a bit of time each day – at least I think that’s what he’s doing when he’s down in his ‘den’ and there's no sign of him listening to music. I don’t venture down there very often as the room’s semi-underground and makes me feel faint. My room is carved out of the loft. We call it my ‘eyrie’. Frog only comes up to my eyrie when he wants to crawl into the eaves of the house through the small door behind my desk in order to check some pipe or cable.

Frog in his den

My eyrie

We try to go out one day a week - it’s our way of reminding ourselves what’s important – and today was looking like that day. I’d suggested one of our usual itineraries but now Frog, completely uncharacteristically, was suggesting something different. I grabbed the opportunity, and suggested that we could combine a lunchtime visit to this new café with an exploration of the coast path east of Seaton, somewhere we’d never been before. We try to keep everyone happy. Ellie likes the bright lights, Frog likes food (even if it’s vegan), and I like exploring the countryside.

Seaton – which we hadn’t visited for 42 years – turned out to be a pleasant, quiet town in a wide bay with stunning white cliffs.

Seaton

Tourism was low key but lots of people milled around and the vegan café had no space for us. We found somewhere else and sat in the baking sun eating prawn sandwiches (me) and a tuna and cheese panini (Frog). A long way from vegan, but jolly nice. A man on the esplanade sang songs from musicals to original backing tracks. ‘Feed the birds . . . Tuppence a bag . . . ’ Ellie hoovered up crisp fragments under our feet and tried to make friends with everybody who walked past. One of the waitresses gave her a biscuit and we could see Ellie adding Seaton to her mental list of Places She Liked (Glastonbury being another). 

Ellie eating out at Glastonbury

The route to the coast path took us up a steep but thankfully shady lane and then through a golf course, which wasn’t on my map. Walkers were tolerated so long as they kept to the designated route which was, I presumed, the old footpath. Small pockets of rough grass . . .

 . . . had been left among the manicured lawns . . . 

Lovely view but . . .

. . . and I silently mourned what the hillside must once have been. Why would you pay £25 for a round of golf when you could walk for nothing? (Joni Mitchell would agree with me.*)

We reached a proper footpath and then we saw this.

This was more like it, I thought. Frog looked slightly green.

Even though Devon didn’t change to Dorset until you got to Lyme Regis, the soil - as the white cliffs indicated - was now chalky rather than red sandstone and the landscape was completely different - drier, greyer, less lush. I felt as if I was in a different country.

There were few wildflowers around. Just this Old Man’s Beard (a wild Clematis) which likes chalky soil . . .

Old Man's Beard

. . . and this lovely (Small?) Scabious, another chalk plant.

Scabious

Scabious (and bee), to try and show you the size of the flower, which is about 3/4 inch diameter

The sun beat down and the one small bottle of water we’d brought was nearly finished. There were no puddles or streams for Ellie and she had to share our bottle, drinking from Frog’s cupped hands.

 After about an hour, we arrived at this.

The board was covered with warnings about the dangers of the wood we were about to enter . . .

. . . and strict exhortations to Keep to the Waymarked Route.

It said that the next five miles took most people at least 3 1/2 hours to complete, repeated the information that there was no way out either inland or down to the sea and added that there was no mobile-phone reception either.

So far we’d met one other walker but he was too serious to stop and talk, and a runner who was too exhausted to do more than nod his head in our direction. We wondered if they’d come all the way from Lyme Regis. No doubt we appeared to them like rank amateurs, Frog in his sandals and me in my sneakers.

This stretch of the coast path was starting to feel like one of those rites of passage like crossing the Nullabor Plain in Australia (when I went there in 1975) or the Camino de Santiago, the Spanish pilgrimage Frog’s brother had done.

   ‘I think we ought to turn round now,’ I said, knowing that if we didn’t Frog would be put off the area for life.

   Frog nodded gratefully.

   ‘But we could always come back another day,’ I continued. ‘After all, we only have to go as far as we want and then we can turn back.’

   ‘Indeed,’ said Frog, surprising me for the second time that day. ‘And I’ve got my ship-to-shore so we could always contact the coastguard if anything happened.’

   He brought his marine-band radio whenever we walked along the coast and amused himself listening to ships from all over the world calling the ports, conversations in French from just over the Channel, and two potty-mouthed fishermen who whiled away their days at sea complaining to each other.

   ‘We could even go all the way to Lyme Regis,’ I pressed on, ‘and get a bus back.’

   ‘We could,’ said Frog, sounding almost excited.

*'Big Yellow Taxi'