Friday 6 August 1993. During the 1990s our usual type of holiday involved lots of canvas, lots of giggling and quite often lots of rain and squelching underfoot... We booked just such a trip with my parents, daughter Gill and one of her friends and headed south towards Sidmouth.
We had started gently for a change. Normally we would have just got up early and driven all the way down, but we must have been feeling a little wanton and giddy because we set off on the Friday, rather than Saturday and spent one night in a cheap B+B in Cheddar. Cheddar Gorge is a wonderful place but almost dead at night. Even at 5:00pm we were wandering around through deserted streets, looking at closed shops until I started to doodle the above sketch, upon which people started to materialise out of nowhere, looking over my shoulder and whispering excitedly amongst themselves...
"What is it?" "Do you think that bit could be a giraffe?" "Doesn't look much like those sewerage works to me"..."
An entire family of five people stayed watching every nervous quiver of my hand until I had finished half an hour later. Now, as mentioned previously, Cheddar doesn't offer much in the way of entertainment at night, but... By 1993 I was just about at the stage where my sketches could be identified as an approximation of the scene before me but I was still very nervous about it and dreading turning out a miserable mess of unrecogniseable cartoony images. Please folks, have a look, offer a word of encouragement and move on. Come back later if you want but please don't hang over my shoulder with your ice cream cornet wetting my ear!!!
Saturday 7 August 1993 finds us setting up our new (to us) 3-bedroom tent on a campsite close to Sidmouth in Devon. Both Dad and I had a Ford Fiesta at the time (we had only had ours three days before this trip!) and whilst you could just about get five people in one, taking six people, with a tent and luggage as well was not an option so we drove down in both cars and had to use them both to potter about Devon for the week. Camp sites tend not to be measured out to the exact inch and the woman from the tent on the next pitch has paced out both hers and our pitches and ordered hubby to complain because ours is bigger... Going to be a fun week for him then!
Sidmouth is a small town on the south Devon coast with a rather refined air about it. The infant Princess Victoria, well before she became Queen was sleeping in a bedroom facing the sea when her window was shattered by a shot that was aimed (so the culprit claimed) at a seagull. I'm not sure who the miscreant was except for the fact that he probably had a large white splodge on his jacket... Whilst it wasn't illegal for the general public to carry weapons at the time, quite what he thought he was doing wandering around Sidmouth beach with a gun anyway is not, as far as I know, recorded... "Fishing" would have seemed a lame excuse, even to the fledgling police force Sidmouth may have had at that time
Sidmouth centre hasn't changed a great deal over the years. It has old pubs, old-fashioned shop fronts and a church a short distance from the seafront. Queen Victoria has since moved on though so don't set your expectations too high.
All along the promenade runs a small wall, around 6-10" tall (I'm not there now so I can't measure it!) which separates the coast road from the Promenade walk. It normally has a row of people sitting on it, as to park your bum on a deckchair draws the immediate attention of an aging deck chair attendant in a once-white jacket and with a smoking ticket machine who will charge you for half a day minimum use but won't save your place if you get up after 5 minute's rest to cross the road to get an ice cream. It may have changed since 1993.
Sidmouth isn't a huge town, so we'll have a look at either end of it. A leisurely stroll from one to the other won't take much more than twenty minutes. At either side, the town is flanked by sandstone cliffs that either withstand the battering the sea gives them twice a day, or collapse suddenly with a cloud of red dust, fragments and dirty great chunks of rock that might put you off your dinner or even breathing if you find yourself under them.
These are the cliffs at the western end of the Promenade. If you approach via the beach or low Promenade wall it is a precarious thing to do at high tide. If you approach from the road, you arrive there on a level with the top of the cliff, through a small park and then descend down a series of wooden steps that, when climbing up, will make you question the wisdom of the attempt! We had a short sit on the benches on top of the cliff whilst on the next bench were a middle-aged couple still in the seaside uniform of the 1930s. He had on a suit and tie and she had a quite severe floral dress with a white wide-brimmed sun hat. He was reading The Times newspaper. "There's still no mention of them apprehending that villain who shot at and broke young Victoria's window..." he remarked. "Oh Herbert, don't be so ridiculous - go and get me some whelks..."
Twenty minutes later, here we are at the other end of Sidmouth. Approaching the eastern end of the town and Promenade we can see one of the original wooden lamp posts with the ornate lantern housings. Sidmouth was one of the first towns to install electric street lighting and they have preserved the original design of lamp post and deserve some credit for that.
At the eastern end is Salcombe Hill, where the sea has direct access to the cliffs and where the River Sid flows out into the sea. This access of water makes erosion perhaps a little quicker than at the western end, not that screams of anguish will occur every day, but just read any warning notices. Our campsite is on top of these cliffs a bit further west and inland - I don't want to drop in on anyone unexpected like...
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments must be passed by moderator before appearing on this post.