The Undercliff is a wooded coastal tract created by a vast landslip on Christmas Eve 1839. On the walkers’ route inland from Lyme Regis, it is both a geological aftermath and an enveloping passage through a landscape left to grow on its own terms: a place where a sudden rupture has become a damp, many-layered wilderness.

Formation and destruction

On Christmas Eve 1839, eight million tonnes of soil slipped towards the sea, opening a huge chasm. The collapse swept away sheep, rabbits, a tea room and an area known as goat island. Yet the destruction did not move everything: a field of wheat slid intact and was harvested the following summer. The contrast between the ground’s sudden movement and the surviving crop gives the landslip a particularly stark scale, measured not only in displaced earth but in the different fates of what had occupied it.

A landscape left to grow

In the years after the slip, the abandoned ground naturalized into seven miles of ferns, ivy and trees. Rainwater dripped and oozed through the vegetation, while plants grew without being shaped into a formal design, free to twist, seed and take their own forms. The Undercliff’s wildness is therefore not simply an untouched state: it is the living consequence of a violent change that left the land to develop on its own.

The passage on foot

After leaving the sea, the walkers entered the woods carrying fossilized ammonites from the beach, relics of lives from other millennia. The trees closed behind them as they entered the damp, eerie terrain. The path was the only way in or out, and it wound on for eight miles before they finally emerged into the light. The seven miles of naturalized ground and the eight-mile walk describe different aspects of the place: the extent of the transformed landscape and the length of the route through it.

Narrative significance

The Undercliff gathers several scales of time into a single walk: the ammonites carried from the shore, the immense movement of soil in 1839, and the continuing growth of vegetation in the abandoned slip. Its enclosing woods and sole path also make the landscape a physical passage rather than a distant view. The walkers must follow its winding route before they can return to open light; the place’s force in the narrative lies in making its history something traversed step by step.