Another springlike day started, as usual, with Sarah taking the dogs for a long walk at whatever silly o’clock time Mabel could no longer keep her itchy feet in bed. Melek and I voted to stay in bed until a more sensible hour, unfortunately, being a dog, Melek’s vote doesn’t count, so out he went too.
Last night Sarah spoke to her Uncle Geoff, who confirmed, amongst other things, that West Beach Littlehampton was where Sarah and her family used to come when they wanted a sandy beach on the South Coast, from their home in Croydon. So the plan was hatched to walk from our campsite to the West Beach and along the beach, possibly as far as the Black Horse Inn at Climping for lunch. A quick look at the Ordnance Survey map indicated about 4 miles and off we set.
The first half of the journey was through the outskirts of Littlehampton, which although looking more prosperous (and expensive) than St. Leonards, wasn’t the world’s best hiking country! However we eventually reached a large footbridge over the River Arun, and crossed over to it’s west bank. The bridge itself was interesting, as instead of being raised of swung to allow large vessels to pass up the river, it has a sliding mechanism to allow it to be moved lengthways on rails to leave a gap for boats.
The footbridge and River Arun
A strange boat/car hybrid we saw on the ropewalk
The next section of our walk was more interesting, along the bank of the River Arun which still has many boats on it, but which Andy and Jan told us yesterday is no longer used much as a commercial harbour. An information board told us that at one point in the 19th century Littlehampton was actually used as a base for ferries across the English channel to Le Havre and elsewhere. Part of the route was along an old ropewalk, which many nautical towns possess and where long lengths of hemp, or other material, would be laid out before being twisted into rope. This blog is nothing if not educational!
We eventually reached the beach at the point where the river reached the sea. The Arun is one of the fasted running rivers in England and as the tide was coming in there was a small maelstrom where the incoming tide met the outgoing fresh water.
The beach is now disappointingly stony, like much of the English south coast, certainly at high tide as we saw it. We commenced our walk along the beach on a walkway build through the dunes, next to an old fort built to defend Littlehampton port during the Napoleonic wars. A noticeboard told us that the dunes were a nature reserve containing certain rare flora and fauna, including sand lizards, although at 9 degrees and with a stiff breeze, they are probably still sensibly hibernating.
Remains of Napoleonic era fort
We descended onto the stony beach, which luckily has a sandy path next to the dunes otherwise I don’t think we would have progressed much further with Melek, who hates walking on anything rougher than a billiard table! The open beach and sandy dunes instead enlivened Melek as usual. Regular readers will know that Melek is a reluctant hiker but when he’s let off the lead on beaches he suddenly thinks he’s an olympic athlete and at one point he had me running after him as he disappeared into the dunes in friendly pursuit of some other dogs.
West Beach
The walk along the beach was further than we anticipated and so I rang ahead to the pub, who kindly agreed to keep the chef until we arrived. The Black Horse Inn, a few hundred yards inland from the beach, was quiet, to say the least, but we had a pleasant lunch and a half or four of various fermented beverages.
Our drinks, for some inexplicable reason, made us a little tired and after lunch we chickened out of walking home and instead decided to catch a bus. Unfortunately this took us bacl into Littlehampton, which still left us with a two mile walk back to Basil, where Sarah did our first wash of the trip and I “relaxed” to get my creative juices flowing to enable me to write the blog.
* My apologies for the photos today. I forgot to take my camera with me and so relied on my iPhone.