Exploring the Bournemouth Coast Path

Barry Gardiner MP, Minister for Biodiversity, Landscapes and Rural Affairs, discussed the Solent coastline when he visited the New Forest to mark its designation as a national park.

The recently redrawn New Forest boundary runs almost to the Bournemouth Coast Path at Milford-on-Sea and embraces the start the Solent Way on Pennington Marshes.

The minister, having received a briefing from the New Forest National Park Authority at Queen’s House in Lyndhurst about the main challenges facing the Park, met key partners including the Verderers over lunch in the historic Verderers’ Hall.

Afterwards Mr Gardiner went on a short tour of the Beaulieu Road area in the south of the Forest led by members and senior staff from National Park Authority. Issues highlighted included coastal access and climate change.

Lindsay Cornish, Chief Executive of the National Park Authority, said: “As England’s newest, smallest and most densely-populated National Park, the New Forest faces a number of unique challenges which we will need the Minister’s help to tackle. This visit gave us an ideal opportunity to show the Minister these challenges first-hand.”

A stretch of the Bournemouth Coast Path has been closed for the Conservative Party Conference.

The sloping clifftop path running from the Highcliff Hotel down to Bournemouth Pier will not reopen until late on Wednesday 4 October.

Walkers from the west are advised to go inland at St Michael’s Road and turn right at the main road to reach the bottom of the hill. The pier is to the right of the roundabout in front of the Royal Exeter Hotel.

The path closure is part of the £1.7m security operation to protect the conference which involves as many as 10,000 people present within the exclusion zone as representatives, observers, journalists, media workers, caterers and exhibition stallholders.

Television channels are planning to use the wide clifftop coastpath with its magnificent Poole Bay backdrop for reports and interviews.

“Detailed planning has ensured that Dorset Police is ready for the challenge of preventing terrorism and other threats through vigilance, high visibility patrols and the effective use of intelligence” says Superintendent David Griffith who is co-ordinating Operation Pegasus 2006.

Dorset Police has been joined by colleagues from Hampshire and the Channel Islands.

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An exhibition at Mompesson House in Salisbury gives a glimpse of the Mudeford coast during Queen Victoria’s reign.

‘A Century in a Suitcase’ is an exhibition of paintings, sketchbooks and painted ceramics by Barbara Townsend (1842-1939), who lived at Mompesson House, in Salisbury’s cathedral close, for nearly a century.

The Townsend family’s seaside house was Gundimore at Mudeford near Christchurch to the south. Gundimore had been built in 1796 for 21 year old poet William Stuart Rose who designed a tented room. There he entertained fellow poets Coleridge and Southey. Sir Walter Scott stayed there whilst writing Marmion.

The Townsend family bought the house in 1859 when Barbara Townsend was a teenager and she continued to visit the seaside villa until her death at the start of the Second World War.

Throughout her life she painted daily except on Sundays and some of her watercolour landscapes were recently discovered in a case by her nephews.

The collection includes Boscastle in Cornwall and a lane in Dorset but several are of Mudeford.

In the Mompesson drawing room, on a table laid for tea with a fruit cake, there has long been a plate featuring a view out to sea with a tip of the sand bar to the right. It is dated 5 August 1886.

This is just five years after the Mudeford spit had begun to grow by turning west at the Black House, by the present Christchurch Harbour entrance. Eventually the long sand bar ran parallel to the Mudeford beach as far as Highcliffe Castle.

This created a long narrow harbour entrance which until a storm washed it away in March 1935, the year after Barbara Townsend inherited Gundimore at the age of 92.

The special exhibition now provides further views showing the spit and the Isle of Wight. One view painted in 1880 from the beach depicts the very new sand bar beyond a deep channel.

The Gundimore garden seems to have merged with the beach. All pictures look out to sea and one on a tile shows trees, with maybe pink blossom, on a very low cliff. Another has two garden chairs on the beach.

One watercolour called just ‘Gunnery Practice 1881’ showing ships on the horizon may well be Christchurch Bay. Another, labelled Mudeford, shows a moonlit scene with what appears to be tree stumps on the beach giving the impression of a henge.

The 1880 view is on sale as a postcard.

‘A Century in a Suitcase’ exhibition is at Mompesson House, a National Trust property, until 29 October; Sat-Wed 11am-5pm; admission £4.40.

Near the start of the Bournemouth Coast Path is Poole Head which is the beginning of the seven mile long Poole Bay cliff. The first house is Chaddesley Gate which was the home of Oswald Bailey, founder of the outdoor shops.

This year the Oswald Bailey chain is celebrating its centenary with grandson Stephen Bailey as managing director.

Oswald opened his first shop in Birmingham in 1906. The Bournemouth shop did not open until 1930 but it was soon followed by branches in Poole and Southampton. The founder’s house was built for him in 1937. He retired, having opened fourteen shops, in 1948 and died in 1962.

Today the headquarters is at Boscombe, further along the coast path, and the twenty branches include shops not only in and around Bournemouth and Birmingham but also in Bath, Bristol, Gloucester and Salisbury.

This month staff members are marking the anniversary by climbing Ben Nevis.

Three beach huts on Mudeford’s Sandspit have gone on sale with a £80,000 price guide.

The huts are just inside the Christchurch borough boundary where the council’s annual site licience is £1,784. Overnight sleeping is only allowed between 1 March and 31 October.

Nearby there are public toilets with showers, a standpipe for drinking water and a shop.

The first huts were erected in 1929 and now the 350 tiny properties are the country’s most expensive beach huts.

Bids must be placed with local estate agent Richard Godsell by Friday 2 June.

Fisherman’s Bank, part of the winter route for the Southbourne-Mudeford section of the coast path, has been designated as open access land under the new Countryside and Rights of Way Act.

This means that walkers on Stanpit waterside are not restricted to the footpath but can stand anywhere on the Bank and even stop for a picnic on the grass.

The designation comes after a long campaign of nearly half a century by Mudeford fisherman Mike Parker who has maintained that this stretch of Christchurch harbourside is a common registered when the land was within Hampshire.

“People think because they have bought adjacent property that they own the land down to the water and they have put up fences and signs to stop other people going there,” says Mr Parker who has had the backing of Stanpit and Mudeford Residents Association.

The Association is calling for clear waymarking at each end.

Swanage Museum has moved into a seafront building after having to vacate the 17th-century Tithe Barn which was in a poor state of repair.

The opening ceremony was performed by Dorset archaeologist Julian Richards who presents the BBC series Meet the Ancestors.

“Swanage has a great richness, from the geology and fossils of the Jurassic Coast to the industrial archaeology of the Purbeck quarries. Bringing it all together under one roof is a great achievement” said Julian.

The move has been made possible by a £49,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund and £5,000 from the World Heritage Site funds.

The new museum in The Square is open from April to October; 10am to 5pm; admission free.

The New Forest National Park Authority takes up its full duties on 1 April 2006.

Lindsay Cornish, the Chief Executive, said: “From 1 April the National Park Authority becomes the local planning authority within the Park boundary. We will give grants for innovative projects from our Sustainable Development Fund and work with partners on conservation, recreation and information projects. And we will provide a unified voice to champion the Park at all levels.”

The new boundary restores some land to the New Forest including Pennington Marshes and its coast path. So the first leg of the Solent Way is now within the New Forest

The National Park Authority’s interim headquarters is at South Efford House near Lymington.

See Exploring the Bournemouth Coast Path: Walk 7 Milford-on-Sea to Lymington.

Environment Minister Elliot Morley chose Studland Bay as the most appropriate place to launch the government’s new guidance on shoreline management plans.

The Dorset Coast Path runs along the beach where the National Trust has already begun to abandon sea defences. NT Head of Sustainability Rob Jarman warned that the beach was going to change.

He added: “Every storm brings new changes to the beach which is gradually moving further north towards Shell Bay. There’s a limit to what can be done. It’s a waste of money to try and keep things as they are.”

The Trust has twice moved Studland’s beach huts and plans already exist to move the cafe and visitors’ centre as they will be flooded within twenty years.

Mr Morley acknowledged the natural resistance that people feel towards change, but emphasised that coastlines are dynamic and that it’s not a realistic option to preserve the whole coast exactly as it is indefinitely.

Several clifftop gardens are opening this summer as part of the National Gardens Scheme. One belongs to a house in Cassel Avenue where the garden is half an acre on the side of Branksome Dene Chine. Nearby, across the Alum Chine suspension bridge and up a tempting short cut footpath, is a Milner Road garden which has mature holly, rhododendron hedges and a driftwood conservatory. In Boscombe the 1872 garden of Lord Portman’s seaside house, now Wentworth College, has been restored ready for two open days. Above Avon Beach at Mudeford is the garden of Windy Willums which has featured in Gardners’ World magazine. Most gardens are serving teas.

The garden openings are listed in the 2006 edition of The Yellow Book (£7.99) and on www.ngs.org.uk