Day 3 - Moor and Coast

Day 3 –  Plymouth to Weymouth

Arriving in Plymouth on a Saturday evening is no accident. In fact, everything I had done so far had been planned to ensure that I was here for 9.00am on a Sunday morning. 

When I began planning this journey, I'd fully expected that some bus services might be infrequent - one every couple of hours, perhaps, or three or four a day, or perhaps even one a day if the area was especially remote. I certainly didn’t expect to be standing in the middle of a heavily populated city waiting for a bus that only ran once a week.

The 82 service from Plymouth to Exeter is an oddity in that it only runs on a Sunday, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. It might seem a little obtuse to have arranged my entire journey thus far just to bring me to the 82’s bus stop in time to catch one of its two weekly runs, but the 82 is different from the other 12 services to Exeter because it is the only one that runs across the top of one the UK’s most bracing wildernesses, the mighty Dartmoor.

In an ideal world I should probably be going to Exeter by electric tram, thus marking in my own small way today's 129th anniversary of the running of the first electric tram in Lichterfelder, near Berlin on the 16th May 1881. Unfortunately, the last tram to operate in Plymouth did so in 1945 and it didn’t go to Exeter.

Bretonside bus station

The day starts badly – as, I'd guess, any day might if it started at Plymouth's Bretonside bus station. Built under a noisy main road, Bretonside is possibly one of the least attractive bus interchanges in the UK. It's subterranean concourse is a grey sea of cracked, fluid-stained paving against a background of aggressively-shuttered shops. It feels positively feral and I can't wait to leave. Unfortunately, I can't because my bus, despite actually starting out at Bretonside, arrives late. Maybe its driver is just as reluctant to be here as his handful of passengers – and, frankly, who could blame him. 

Once aboard we are quickly out of the city and by the time we reach Roborough the countryside has morphed from city street to gorse-scattered heathland with the slopes of Dartmoor beyond. Here, I'm afraid the open moorland views have to be taken on trust because everything is completely obscured by an atmospheric Dartmoor fog. Fortunately, the murk lifts the higher up we climb until the archetypal Dartmoor views of rocky tors and wiry moorland grass interspersed with groups of damp Dartmoor ponies finally swims mistily into sight. 

Halfway across the moor I take the chance to fill my lungs with clean moorland air when our driver Geoff pulls over at Postbridge and pops out to fill his own lungs with tobacco smoke.

“Funny,” he says, lighting up. “I’ve never known this bus so quiet. We usually have 20 or so walkers on, but there’s only three of 'em today.” He looks around into the mist and spits.

“Must be the weather,” he concedes.

Short pause at Postbridge

Geoff has a five hour lay-over at Exeter before he brings his bus back to Plymouth, though he’ll also be on stand-by in case another bus breaks down or a driver doesn’t turn in.

“ Some drivers take their missus with them and go shopping in Exeter,” explains Geoff with a shudder. “No me,”, he says. “I have a nice flask of tea and a book. I’m looking forward to putting me feet up for a bit.”

We clamber back on the bus and we’re soon out on the high moorland road, then dropping down the other side past signs pithily thanking drivers for ‘Taking Moor Care’. We had begun the long decent into Exeter, pausing briefly at the pretty village of Morehampstead, where I spot a public toilet (the first today) and jump off for a swift strategic pee.

Exeter arrives quite suddenly. One moment we are in green wooded countryside, the next we are running through Exeter’s busy streets and into its airy bus station. I thank Geoff as I get off and he wishes me bon voyage. I throw my rucksac onto my back and… 

“Hello, Iain. I thought it was you…”

I find myself staring into the smiling face of Sarah, a former work colleague from Newcastle who must have got on whilst I was employing destroyer tactics at the public loo.

“Oh my God!” she suddenly splutters. “Are you doing your journey? I mean, right now?”

I’m astonished and delighted to see her, and actually a little flattered too because I don't recall ever telling her about my trip yet she appears to know all about it. Perhaps this is what it's like to be famous, in a (very) small way.

Anyway, after a few more excited pleasantries and a quick parting hug (but no request for an autograph, I notice) I’m off in search of a lunchtime sandwich. On the way I discover a fine, well-ordered city which is impossible not to like. It’s a pleasing jumble of ancient and modern and remarkably pristine for a busy city centre. Mind you, the city seems littered with a fair number of ruined churches, so perhaps it's a bit more boisterous than it seems.

Cathedral Close, Exeter

I chew happily on a cheese sandwich in the neatly lawned precincts of Exeter Cathedral, gazing up at its massive west front which, I'm told, boasts the biggest display of medieval sculpture in the country. Actually, it looks a bit like a medieval bus queue though that might just be me. Behind the west front sits the longest unbroken length of medieval gothic vaulting in the world apparently, but that will have to wait for another time as I have another bus to catch. I retrace my steps along the High Street past the oldest Guildhall in England jutting picturesquely out over the pavement and back to the bus station on the edge of the city centre.

The X53 Exeter to Poole service is a smart, swish coach-seated double-decker which is soon taking me south again through a quintessential English landscape of lush fields trimmed with hedges, grand oaks and stately sycamores, even an immaculately painted AA telephone box at the side of the A3052. All we need is a scattering of Alvises and a few tweedy old ladies and we’d be slap-bang in the middle of an Agatha Christie novel. We are more or less running down the Exe towards the sea, but we skirt away from Exmouth and head instead towards the encouragingly-named village of Beer and my first glimpse of the coast.

The X53 takes passengers along the whole length of the Jurassic Coast of East Devon and Dorset - so called because of the wealth of big and important fossils this coastline has produced over the years. It’s a coastline peppered with chocolate box villages and wide views of the English Channel. No wonder the bus is so busy with day-trippers.

It wasn’t always this way, though. In 2003 this service was really struggling with barely 300,000 passengers a year using it. Some operators might have seen this as a no-hoper and scrapped it, but First Bus took a different view. They ploughed money into it by introducing expensive new double deckers and giving them a distinctive Jurassic Coastliner livery. They worked closely with Devon and Dorset councils to promote the service, not just to locals but to the tens of thousands of car-borne holidaymakers who flock to this coast each summer. The result was that passenger numbers tripled inside 12 months.

And it’s soon clear why. You don't have to be a transport buff to enjoy this journey – its absolutely stunning. Every village we pass through seems even more implausibly beautiful than the last, real jaw-dropping, gasp out loud gorgeous with a picture post card view around every corner. It's incredible. How can one part of the country get to have so much beauty in so small an area? It doesn't seem fair, somehow. 

Take Beer, for example (as I regularly do, and if you’re asking mine’s a pint). This is an exquisite little village with streets so picturesquely narrow that our bus can only get half-way in before running the risk of becoming wedged between a fisherman's cottage and a smuggler’s pub. We have to reverse, turn around and go back out the same way we came in.

Beer

We climb up out of Beer and down into Seaton, a prosperous-looking town of white Victorian terraces and sea views bounded by huge cliffs disappearing to left and right. There’s an electric tramway here which looks fun, but it’s designed purely with the tourist in mind so I snootily ignore it and stay on the bus as we head for the Dorset border.

Lyme Regis, the very first Dorset village we come to, is a bustling and attractive place of twisting streets dotted with grand Georgian homes, thatched cottages of local stone and brassy Victorian terraces. The village centre, which is filled with fossil shops, overlooks the harbour and the Cobb, the village's harbour wall which played such a prominent role in John Fowles’ novel ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman’.

Beyond Lyme, the land takes on more of a downland appearance. But just when you think that the best bits of today’s journey are behind you, you get your first glimpse of the extraordinary 13-mile long Chesil Beach from high above Abbotsbury and, if you are like me, you are rendered utterly speechless. The bus provides one of the finest views of one of Britain's most unusual natural phenomena, and viewed from the top deck of a bus high on the downs it's almost like an aerial photograph. It ends the day with a bang and I genuinely think that this view alone is well worth the price of the ticket. 

Eventually, more than three hours and no less than three driver changes later, our Jurassic Coastliner bus pulls onto Weymouth's elegant Georgian seafront. It's been a breath-taking trip, but the West Country is disappearing behind me now and frankly I'm sad to see it go. 

Weymouth's elegant seafront... with chips

Rucksac shouldered, I make my way along the seafront to my guest house, which the owners saw fit to name “A Knight’s Rest”. It turns out to be clean, functional and entirely adequate, but probably not the kind of place habituated by the titled gentry. It’ll do, though.

Washed, rested and rucksac unpacked, I make my way back into town for what I have promised myself will be a supper of fish and chips eaten on the beach whilst I gaze reflectively out to sea. The weather has other ideas, though, and I'm forced to shelter from the rain in a seafront fish and chip restaurant. Well, there are worse places to shelter.

All told, it’s been a cracking day. Only two bus journeys but more scenery than you could shake a stick at. Big scenery, too – wide moors, sweeping coastlines, chalk downland, medieval churches, pretty villages by the score, the shingly finger of Chesil Beach… And I haven’t had to shout at a single motorist, or scrabble about for change for the car park, or worry about whether I left that camera on the back seat, or anything.

Blimey, why on earth don’t more people travel like this…?

NEXT Weymouth to Lymington – where I experience queuing for a bus on the beach, take a trip across Poole Harbour on a ferry powered by rope, and witness views of the English countryside that render me utterly speechless.

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Map courtesy of those awfully nice people at Google