Sidmouth, East Devon

This post is full of landmark moments for me as I have now reached the south coast of England for the first time in the lifetime of this blog. As I continue my "antidote for winter thematic 2009 south west trip", I turn back the clock to my very first weekend in the digital experience after converting from film. The second and third images may be familiar to you as they are shown in the right hand sidebar which I inserted at blog construction. Lastly, as time moves on and circumstances change, I wasn't to know that this could have been the last time I visited the place. It's not the easiest place to visit in Devon for me from the north and I have replaced film prints with digital images.

Sidmouth, historically was a small fishing village that due to it's location had no adequate facilities for harbouring boats and consequently remained that way for some time.

The village eventually grew into a small fashionable, quiet and exclusive town during the late 18th century becoming a place of rest and relaxation for the rich and famous of that time. It was well documented that Victoria, the future Queen, visited here as a child for several weeks.

As a example of quietness and peacefulness, by Victorian tourism standards the railway was comparatively "late in arriving" in 1874 and didn't manage to survive past Mr Beeching's infamous 1960's Axe. Somehow the town escaped the mass tourism that other seaside locations have had to endure which can be characterised elsewhere with an evolution of exclusivity, progressive exploratory tourism, flooding of the market and lastly ...  Hen and Stag weekends  or "why did I come here?, it's not how I remember it" !

Two years earlier when I last visited Sidmouth, there was a news story occurring about Pirates in the English Channel. Not the fictional sort with swords, hooks and eyepatches but people rescuing contraband for their own benefit from a shipwreck of The Napoli. This kind of story encouraged more tourists to visit the town and watch the stricken ship from the seashore.

The East Devon and Dorset coastline is a natural World Heritage Site known as the Jurassic Coast due to the magnificent cliffs, rock structures and coastline, the most famous being Durdle door, Lulworth Cove and Chesil Beach.

The two exciting things happening here this weekend according to the brochure were a World War II display and ... a scrabble competition !! Apart from the classic cliffs, the two things that I associate with the town are an ageing retirement population and ...... the small and short term stay car parks ! Yes, you did read that right.

One of the problems when visiting Sidmouth for a day is that the council with their car parks do not allow enough time to visit the whole town. Most people spend the short allocated time (3 hours) looking around the shops with enough time maybe for some refreshment before leaving for another place.

This was the third occasion I was here and it seemed like a good idea to stay overnight from my base in Bristol so as I didn't repeat the activities of the two previous occasions.

Berwick House had a warm welcome and all the facilities that you would expect from something in this category at what seemed to be a reasonable price at the time.

It was a good to be able to walk along the sea shore to the west end and explore Connaught Gardens...

... where the peace and tranquility was even more in evidence here than at the seafront

Even the seagulls respect the peace of the town.... and if you believe that, you'll believe anything. He's just eyeing up my lunch of Fish and Chips !! ....

"Sid" keeping his "mouth" closed

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1st February 2016 ... As a postscript to these images, I was a little naive and digitally uneducated back in the day when this post was published. By chance I unfortunately discovered via Google images that one of these pictures had been taken without permission by a website designer and placed on The Sidmouth Harbour Hotel website.

I knew it was mine because this was my first weekend with a digital camera and the horizon wasn't straight. A few e-mails later, an apology, removal of the image and an offer of a cream tea, I took a blogging break to work out how to watermark images. It has taken me a few years to return to this post to finally update the watermark. It may seem a bit long winded to photographers but I had to vertically straighten the image first in photoshop before I could rotate it clockwise to maintain the pole of the left boat and the shadow of the one to the right. A simple cloning of sea and sky repaired the peripheral defects. A lesson learned the hard way ... never overcrop the composition of the original image !