DOUGAL ON TOUR

ON CHESIL BEACH

Chesil Beach, an 18-mile long shingle barrier beach stretching from West Bay to Portland, is one of Dorset’s most iconic landmarks and an inspiration to many.

This is NOT a place to be driven ashore, as the undertow on the beach is infamous. It is said that the grinding roar of the pebbles being sucked away can be heard miles in land at Dorchester. Image: Chris Noe/Shutterstock

Being centrally located on the South Coast, the Solent is both a favoured destination and a great starting point for voyages both east and west. The latter has much to celebrate, with the delights of Poole Harbour giving way to the spectacular Jurassic Coast, with Lulworth and Chapman’s Pools offering wonderful stopping off points before the welcoming delights of Weymouth.

It is, though, of little surprise that this is as far as many will go, as the glowering bulk of Portland juts out into the Channel, with the perils of the tide race that extends out from the Bill pushing transiting yachts ever further offshore. Even when safely westwards of Portland, the next challenge is the open expanse of Lyme Bay, with the result that, sadly, few sailors get to experience the delights of one of the UK’s greatest pebble beaches, not to mention the views from Abbotsbury, voted by Country Life readers as Britain’s third best view.

LIFE’S A BEACH Chesil Beach is, of course, yet another wonderful feature of the Jurassic Coast, as it sweeps westwards for nearly 30km towards West Bay. Even the name of the beach has its roots buried in our history, as Chesil is nothing more than a modernised version of the Old English word for shingle, ceosel.

There has long been a debate about how the beach, which somehow automatically grades the estimated 180 billion pebbles from big at one end to small at the other, was formed but the consensus today is that it is a combination of the influence of Portland Bill on wave patterns and a rapid rise in sea levels at the end of the last ice age,

However, the stony beach, which in places is more than 200m wide, is far from the only salient feature, as the bank protects a wide, mainly shallow lagoon of salty water known today as the Fleet, though even this name has changed in time as it used to be referred to as the Flete. Thanks to the Fleet being a well-known maritime pasture well stocked with eel grass beds, the area was a popular feeding ground for a wide range of wildfowl.

Throughout history the birds and fish found in the Fleet provided an essential food resource for the small villages that fringe the Fleet, although thankfully today they are safe as the

The great storm of 1824 washed away most of the village of East Fleet and just left this small part of the church as a reminder of the power of the waves. Image: Dorset Life

One of our coast’s most impressive single features, the raised bank of pebbles that together make up Chesil Beach. Image: Joe Dunckley/Shutterstock

The tranquil sheltered waters of the Fleet are protected from the boisterous waters of Lyme Bay by the bulk of the Chesil Beach. Image: Mark Godden/Shutterstock A development of the famous Barnes Wallis ‘bouncing bomb’ was tested repeatedly on the waters of the Fleet behind Chesil Beach. Image: Tim Whaley

J Meade Faulkner’s 1898 novel of smuggling and intrigue is set on Chesil Beach and is perhaps the best story set in that location. It remains a popular text for younger readers through to today. Image: Amazon

area is a well-protected Site of Special Scientific Interest.

The shallow waters are also a safe nursery area for some of our underpressure fish stocks, with baby bass in particular seeing the Fleet as their first home. On the seaward side of the beach there are some choice areas that are rich in fish, but getting afloat through the famous shorebreak would require a very special sort of small fishing boat.

THE LERRET From the 17th century onwards, a specific design of oar powered fishing boat called a Lerret was developed, a 16ft long clinker with a sharp, high sheerline at the bow. So good were the sea-keeping capabilities of the Lerret that back in the early days of the RNLI, the boats were used locally as lifeboats.

These would be busy boats, as Lyme Bay has long been a treacherous stretch of water for boats big and small, as with the prevailing gales blowing in from the Southwest the dangers of becoming embayed, unable to head up to round Portland Bill were very real.

The choices for the crews of these doomed tall ships faced a terrible choice; to either smash into the rocky cliffs of Portland or to get pounded to matchwood on the unforgiving pebbles of the beach. There is little evidence of ships being lured on to the shore, though when a wreck did end up coming ashore, there would be a bounty of flotsam that would spread right along the bank at Chesil.

The long stretch of sheltered water of the Fleet would have other, darker, uses throughout history, as even after the coastal smuggling vanished, come wartime the waters were the testing ground for one of the most iconic of British weapons. None other than Barnes Wallis used the Fleet as the testing ground for his bouncing bomb that went on to cause so much damage to the German Dams in 1943, with an early version of the weapon that looked like an oversized golf ball being tested there.

IN FILM AND BOOK In 1955, when the film of the raid was being made, once again the Fleet would reverberate to the sound of aero engines as some of the dramatic footage was filmed there.

This was not the only time Chesil Beach and the Fleet would surface in popular culture, as the famous Dorset novelist Thomas Hardy used a little artistic licence to rename the Bank ‘Deadman’s Bay’, whilst in more recent times Ian McEwan got a Booker Prize nomination for his 2007 personal and intimate drama, On Chesil Beach.

The defining novel of the area, however, has to be the 1898 tale of smuggling, shipwreck, lost treasure and love in J. Meade Falkner’s Moonfleet. Falkner tells an illustrating story of what life would have been like in a small coastal community in the mid-18th century, with the perils of eking out an existence in the face of weather, the hardships of life and with the added complication of the growing social divide. In his book Portland Bill is known as the ‘snout’, as when seen from the west the southerly slope to the Island looks remarkably like the snout of a basking alligator.

The Isle of Wight, Carisbrooke and the old stone quarries on Portland all play their part in the story, as does the fearsome roar the undertow makes in a storm as it drags the pebbles off the beach with each receding wave, a noise that as Falkner recounts can be heard at Dorchester, which is eight miles inland.

As the risk of ever more severe storms increases due to climate change, the very future of Chesil Beach could now be in some doubt. During the Great Storm of 1824, the hurricane force winds created such a storm surge that the waves were breaking right across the top of the beach, washing away much of the villages of East and West Fleet, but the fear now is that with ever rising sea levels, in time the beach itself could be swept away.

Hopefully this will not happen for many aeons to come, for Chesil Beach and the Fleet are such a part of Lyme Bay and long may they remain so!