A neat perfectly formed weekend-sized break in Dorset. Plenty to do, and not all of it weather-dependent. We enjoyed our first family YHA stay, too.
We loved: Beer and Lyme Regis beaches, the Dinosaur museum and Beer Youth Hostel.
Day 1: Beer YHA
We’ve been meaning to try a family room at a Youth Hostel For ages and Beer YHA was a top choice for the weekend. It was brilliant! Big family en-suite room with a view, communal kitchen, garden for a kick around, lounge downstairs, and Risk!
Started our day with a hop to Beer beach for some lunch, beach-combing and wave jumping. The beach was breezy, pebbly and slightly grey — so beautiful in a very British way! There was even the obligatory seagull perched on a fishing boat.
We were keen to cook in the hostel kitchen so shopped for supplies in the village stores and then cooked our random choices in the communal kitchen before our first family game of Risk.
Day 2: Lovely Lyme Regis
We had such a gloriously sunny day in Lyme Regis. One of those days you take a million photos (see above and below) just because the sun is shining and the sky is blue. Oh, and you’re somewhere beautiful too.
Mostly today we walked and played on the beach. We walked along Town Beach, where thousands of tonnes of pebbles were imported as part of the coastal protection scheme and placed on top of the pebbles originally there. When you get near the harbour and the Cobb, Town beach becomes sandy with sand was imported from France. Plenty of kiosks, takeaways, cafes, restaurants and pubs bordering this section of the beach too— we even ATE LUNCH on the beach — in December!
Did us some fossil hunting, too. We walked along the new Church Cliff Walk to the fossil-rich East Cliff Beach (warning — this gets cut off at high tide) to search for fossils. Although we didn’t find any amazing fossils, there was plenty of beach-combing to be done; due to landslides here, quite a lot of old rubbish had recently arrived on this beach.
As it started to get dark we popped into the marvellously quirky Dinosaurland Fossil Museum. This private museum, owned and run by Palaeontologist Steve Davies and his wife Jenny, feels like stepping back a century, to display cabinets of stuffed animals, fossils and bones. It’s housed in a magnificent grade 1 listed building which was once the Congregational Church. The pioneering fossil hunter Mary Anning, who discovered the first Ichthyosaur on the beaches here in 1811, was baptised there.
Useful info
We stayed at: Beer Youth Hostel
We ate at: The Anchor Inn, Beer
We visited: Dinosaurland Fossil Museum
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