Visiting Golden Cap.

On Sunday, I finally got to visit Golden Cap, the highest point of the South West Coast path. And the views didn’t disappoint!

The view of Seatown, West Bay and beyond, from Golden Cap.

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As the weather wasn’t the best on Sunday, and we weren’t ready until midday, we decided not to walk the coast path from Lyme Regis, Charmouth or Seatown. Instead we chose to drive to a National Trust car park at Langdon Hill, which has clear signage to Golden Cap. As we are NT members, parking was free, otherwise there is a small fee to park here.

Views of Langdon Hill from the coast path.

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From the car park, we walked along a fairly levelled old Forestry Commission path through woodland, giving us some beautiful views of the surrounding towns and countryside of Dorset. There were a few options of which routes you could take, we decided to first follow the route that took us to Golden Cap, through some fields then up some steps to the highest point of the coast path. There were also options to walk towards Seatown, a small coastal hamlet with a lovely pebble beach. Alternatively, we could have walked towards St Gabriels, a secluded medieval hamlet, between Lyme Regis and Bridport, which also had a beach below Golden Cap.

The walk up to Golden Cap...you can see it in the background.

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Once we had left the path through the woodland, we entered some fields that had grazing sheep in them. From here we could see our destination in front of us, a big hill which hosted Golden Cap at the top. From the fields, it looked like it was going to be quite the challenge, but once we started walking up the hill, it didn’t take us long to reach the top.

The view from the top of Golden Cap. The highest point of the Southwest Coast Path.

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Once we had walked up quite a few steps, we reached the top, it had beautiful views overlooking Dorset, even though it wasn’t the clearest of days, we could still see Bridport, West Bay, Seatown, Lyme Regis, Charmouth and St Gabriel’s. We took in the views from the top, and checked out the trig point beacon they had here. I also stopped to check if there were any geocaches in the area, which of course there were! So we did a few on our way back down into the woods.

Trigpoint at the top of Golden Cap.

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I did feel we had cheated a bit by walking up to Golden Cap via the car park, although we did walk nearly 4 miles in total that day. I have always wanted to walk the coast path from Lyme Regis to Golden Cap. But just visiting it was good enough for now, it’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while, especially when I can see it in the distance along the Jurassic Coast when I do the walk along the Devon Coast path.

Countryside views from the top of Golden Cap.

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As we walked back down the steps towards Langdon woods, we decided to walk a little bit towards Seatown. We entered a field full of cows, I couldn’t resist going over and introducing myself to them!

Making friends 🐮❤️

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The views from here were just as impressive, being able to see Seatown beach more clearly. I haven’t visited Seatown before, mainly because the beach isn’t dog friendly, and most of the time when I’m out walking, I take the dog with me. But it is on the list of places to visit! There seemed to be a lot of walkers heading towards Seatown, and quite a few people walking along the stretch of the beach, so I can imagine it being quite busy in the summer. We have however, visited West Bay a few times, it’s best known for his famous golden cliff face that’s feature on ITV’s drama Broadchurch. West Bay is definitely worth visiting, its a lovely little harbour town with a pebble beach and popular seaside attractions.

Beautiful views of Seatown and West Bay from here, even better views from the top!

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The hill back up from these fields were more steep and hard going than the climb to Golden Cap! I was glad it was mostly downhill once we had reached the kissing gate. From here we then decided to walk around Langdon woods, do some geocaches and head back towards the car park via a circular walk.

A walk in the forest 🌳

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As we walked through the woods, we were treated to the low autumn sun peeking through the trees. It also gave us some warmth on what was otherwise a cold November day. The dogs enjoyed being off lead here, exploring the area and greeting other dogs as they walked past. This area does appear to be popular with dog walkers and families. The National Trust have a map in the car park with ideas on what to do on this walk, as well as an outdoor ‘nature playpark’ for children next to the car park.

The Autumn light, glowing through the trees.

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We arrived back to the car park just before sunset, there were other routes around the woodland that would have been quicker, but we enjoyed exploring the woods, and watching the sunset behind Golden Cap. There are some great geocaches dotted around that take you on a circular route through St Gabriel’s towards Golden Cap. We didn’t do all these today, but hopefully we’ll do them if we visit again. On our way back to the car, we read on the map in the car park about St Gabriel’s being an old medieval settlement. We regret not having time to visit this area. I’m now intrigued, and want to find out more! Unfortunately we ran out of time, but I definitely want to visit again and find out more about this area. I’m just really pleased I finally got to visit Golden Cap, as you can see by my face in the picture below…. (I was searching for geocaches at the time!) :)

In my happy place 🌱 ❤️

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Geocaching around Arlington Court.

Seeing as we have a National Trust membership again, we decided to look at NT places to visit this weekend. After a quick search, we decided on Arlington Court as it’s dog friendly, has lots of lovely walks around the estate, and has lots of geocaches too!

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Arlington Court is a National Trust Estate in North Devon, close to Exmoor. We arrived there yesterday around 2pm. As we were arriving, we saw signs about a Christmas market happening this weekend on the estate. Something we didn’t know about. We soon saw how busy it was going to be, when we saw how full the car park was!

We decided to have a quick look around the Christmas market, even though Jo exclaimed; ‘It’s too early for Christmas: I’ve not had my birthday yet!’ The market stalls were actually pretty good, better than I expected, as they had quite a lot of unique and handmade gifts and decorations, not like the usual Christmas markets you’ll find dotted around towns and cities. After looking around the stalls, we decided to give in to the smell of the BBQ and have our last BBQ burger of the year, along with my first mulled wine of the year!

Once we had filled our bellies, we pressed on to follow a circular woodland walk that surrounds the estate which was mapped out through our geocaching app. For those of you that want to know more about geocaching, it really is worth checking out their website geocaching.com. It’s great fun for children and adults, and it’s made us discover places we didn’t know existed! We even bumped into a geocacher doing his first ever cache with his young son, who beat us to the geocache we wanted to find! We ended up having a quick chat with him about the caches we’ve done, and gave out some tips on some of the place we’ve discovered fun geocaches his son will probably enjoy. The geocaches we did on this walk were linked to National Trust and took us through woodland, farmland and along the river. We walked about 6 miles in total.

It wasn’t long before we had quite a few caches found, this route had some really great cache containers, including the ammo case above. Geocaching is great for kids that love swapping bits and bobs, it’s like a real life treasure hunt. I’ve found over 500 caches over the years! It’s also free to do, and doesn’t require using your data whilst out and about.

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We first walked past a beautiful lake and church by the Arlington Estate, this lead us into some woodland that ran along side a river. Throughout most of the walk, we followed the river around, crossing over a few old stone bridges along the way. This walk was quite steep and strenuous in places, and wasn’t wheelchair/buggy friendly. But of course there are plenty of other walks around the estate to enjoy, that are suitable for everyone. There are maps and leaflets in the National Trust entrance/shop to check out the walks you can do. All these walks are clearly marked out along the routes by public footpath signage. So it would be hard to get lost!

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We didn’t manage to find all the geocaches on this route, as the sun was starting to set, so we tried to press on and do the ones we could find quickly, but not stop to search for too long. By the time we had arrived back at the car park, it was rather dark, and the car park was no longer busy, with only a couple of cars still parked in it. We will probably come back and visit again soon, I’d love to see the house and the carriage museum. There seems to be so many beautiful walks surrounding this estate, and a lot of history about the estate I need to read up on. This walk really was lovely in Autumn, crunching through the fallen leaves, and walking alongside the flowing rivers and little waterfalls. Well worth a visit, and maybe try geocaching whilst you’re there?