Bank Holiday Weekend (part 2)

As prefigured in my previous post, I now have photographs of Exmouth to show you.

The town was a working port for much of its life -- full details of its history can be found in its Wikipedia entry; it also has its own website -- but changed direction to become more of a resort with the coming of the railway, which linked the villages along both banks of the Exe Estuary with Exeter and in due course changed them all into part of Exeter's commuter belt. A train journey down the east bank of the estuary is both v picturesque and an opportunity for close-up views of some serious money (apart from Lympstone Commando training centre, which is surrounded by razor wire fencing and the platform for which sports large unfriendly signs warning that one should only disembark from the train if one has business at the camp).

We went to Exmouth because we wanted to visit the bird reserves -- i.e., the sand banks which bar the mouth of the estuary and the mud flats which become visible when the tide goes out -- but because it was late spring there weren't a great many birds to see: the best time to visit is probably the winter, when many species will have moved down from the Arctic for the duration, or in early spring and late autumn, when many migratory species will be passing through. So instead we had to content ourselves with a walk along the front to the obelisk on the cliff at Orcombe Point east of the town which marks the western end of the Jurassic Coast world heritage area, and then a walk back, stopping off at the model railway (claimed to be the largest in the world) and a car boot sale at which The Wugster hoovered up some cheap jewellery (and would probably have bought Even More Stuff if I hadn't intervened).

A walk along Exmouth's sea front indicates that, like Caesar's Gaul, it is divided into three parts. The eastern section -- the largest section -- is the grocklerama, with stalls (thankfully not many) vending chips and fish to pasty, pudgy people from oop north and their horrible snot-streaked children playing on the sand with their buckets and spades and throwing frisbees for their dogs, with an admixture of size 00 teenage gels with dyed blonde straightened hair and the peculiarly vacant expressions so typical of those who appear to have been surgically welded to their iPods, not to mention their horrible gangly concave-chested shaven-headed boyfriends in scruffy vomit-coloured "shorts" hanging low off their bottoms displaying their manky underwear what a repellent sight it is such dressage would never have been tolerated in my day a few years in the Army would do them a power of good or better yet gas the lot of them and pulp the bodies for use as fertiliser 3 vols surplus rant omitted at this point. The middle section -- the smallest section -- is the refined but slightly decayed Victorian/Edwardian bit: a terrace of three- and four-storey private hotels, with occasional private houses of a similar mien and a hostelry of an obviously reserved kind, set back from the street in its own private garden, with a noticeboard listing forthcoming musical evenings of a type clearly designed to turn away the riff-raff who infest the eastern section. The third section -- the western and most modern section -- is set around what was once the harbour and is now the marina: rank upon rank of nautical-themed po-mo blocks with occasional banners shouting APARTMENTS FOR SALE in letters of an urgency which suggests that the blocks were constructed or came onto the market (were "released", in estate agents' jargon) at around the time the financial crisis of 2008 engulfed the world economy, meaning that the people who bought apartments around then must now be sitting on or in something that's worth half or less than the gigantic mortgage they took out (ho ho ho) and/or that the companies which built the things are now struggling to stave off administration or even insolvency and the consequent fire sale of the po-mo blocks for two-fifths of next to nothing (ho ho ho).

Some pictures follow -- The Wugster leaning against the obelisk which marks the western end of the Jurassic Coast; part of the 250 million-year-old Triassic red sandstone formation at Orcombe Point, the oldest part of the Jurassic Coast; donkeys on the grocklerama part of the beach; one of the many blue plaques scattered through the town drawing attention to its historic links and features (there's a blue plaque walking trail, but we didn't have time to follow it); and a panorama of the Exe Estuary at low tide (it was on the turn as we were leaving).