The South West Coast Path: Lyme Regis to West Bay
- Aug 2
- 4 min read
Back in the summer of 2024 my family and I started the challenge of walking the entire length of the South West Coast Path - a 1000km path that stretches along the South Coast of England from Poole in Dorset, all the way round Devon and Cornwall to Minehead. In 2024 we completed the section between Poole and Weymouth, so this summer we wanted to do a bit more and spent three days completing the section of the path from Lyme Regis back toWeymouth to join up with where we finish last time.
The South West Coast Path might sound familiar to anyone who has read the book The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. My sister actually found this book in our local book exchange and few months ago so I gave it a read. It is undoubtedly a touching and very well written book. There is, however, a lot of controversy surrounding it, in particular around how much of the so-called memoir is actually the truth. There's a great podcast series uncovering this story called The Walkers: The real Salt Path by Chloe Hadjimatheou from The Observer which I highly recommend listening to if you are intrigued. But read the book before you listen to the podcast, I think thats the way to get the most out of the story and the controversy.
The challenge of walking the South West Coast Path, albeit in sections, is just the kind of goal my parents like to set themselves and something my dad has always want to do, wayyyy before the book came out. I'm always up for a bit of walking, especially when there is some sick geology (as there is a lot of in the South West of England!) so my sister and I have joined in. I was particularly excited about this stretch of the walk as we were starting in Lyme Regis. For anyone who has been living outside of the world of rocks (or under one), Lyme Regis is incredibly famous for its rich diversity of fossils including the ammonite pavement, which I have done a whole separate blog post on, and for being the home of Mary Anning, a very famous 19th century fossil hunter and paleontologist who found the first plesiosaur fossil on the beach in Lyme Regis. So, on a Friday afternoon we drove the two and bit hours down to Dorset, left the car in Weymouth, taxi-ed over to Lyme Regis and checked into a cute little pub/inn for the night, ready to start out walk the next morning.
We then spent the evening walking along the ammonite pavement, having a swim in the sea, and eating fish and chips on the beach which was a 10/10 start to the adventure!
Pics from the ammonite pavement
The next morning we fuelled ourselves with an English breakfast and set off on the first leg of the walk. This was 17km along the Jurassic Coast to end in West Bay where we had a room booked in another pub/inn for the night. The walk though was by no means an easy one! This was an incredibly up and down section of the path, we gained almost 900m in elevation across the 17km just by walking up and down hills, often through cow fields which I have to say my mum was not most pleased about. The route was easy to follow but definitely a test of our fitness. We stopped in Seatown for lunch which consisted of Aldi sandwiches and penguin biscuits ate sitting on a bench by the sea before continuing on to West Bay where we arrived at legs aching and ready for dinner! The walk took us about 5 hours including stops and according to my Garmin watch was 17.29km.
After a quick dip in the FREEZING cold sea (which actually worked really well as an ice bath), we had showers and headed out to find some food. Given we were carrying all our things with us we had minimal clothing options to wear for dinner outside of hiking kit so we opted for a casual pizza restaurant on the beach called The Watch House. It was super yummy and just what we wanted, we ended the evening watching the sunset on the harbour wall before collapsing into bed, ready to do it all again the next day.
In terms of geology, this stretch of the Jurassic Coast is pretty epic! In Lyme Regis itself we saw not only the ammonite pavement but also the beautiful cliffs of Blue Lias it sits in. We walked through Charmouth (home to an awesome fossil shop) which is where you can find the Belemnite Marls (the cliffs I studied samples form for my Master's) and when we ended in West Bay we had an amazing view of the towering cliffs of the Bridport Sands. Having been to this area already on a field trip in my second year of uni I knew a lot about the rocks already and this made it even cooler for me, although potentially more annoying for my parents who were offered them "fun geology facts" when the walking got tough.
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