The actual coast, for the six miles between Lyme Regis and Seaton is a roadless, and in parts an almost trackless, stretch of strenuous clambering among rocks and tangled thickets; among landslips old and new, and undercliffs overgrown with such a wilderness of trees and shrubs and bracken, and blackberry brakes as only Devon can produce. But for all these difficulties, perhaps because of them, the way is preferable to the hard high road that goes, a little way inland. Here, at least, “exploration” is no straining after effect, no misuse of the word. When you have left the Cobb at Lyme Regis behind and passed the coastguard station, you have come to sheer wildness; the deserted cement works, standing amid a waste of wrecked earthy cliffs, themselves forming a not inappropriate prelude to the perfect abandonment of nature. Here the low promontory of Devonshire Point ends the Ware Cliffs; and the tangle, with the gaping fissures between the rock and earth half hidden by grass and bushes, becomes so nearly impenetrable as to render a retreat up along the boulders into Holmbush Fields absolutely necessary; Holmbush Fields, with their rustic stiles and hedgerow timber, and the winding footpath across, giving a sober and graceful interlude; and then you come upon a mile or so of wonderful pathway, roughly shaped amid the wild jungle that here has overgrown a tract of oozy and boggy undercliff, formed by a century or more of continual landslides. There surely is no more beautiful wilderness of the particular type in England, than this: a very great deal of its beauty being due to the happy circumstance that neither Lyme Regis nor Seaton are as yet large enough to admit of it being overrun. Hardy pioneers have beaten out the devious pathway, and the few who have followed in their footsteps have kept it from being again overgrown. Spring—the month of May—is the ideal time for this part of the coast; when the birds have again wakened to song, and the young foliage is tender and the landsprings have not been dried up.