Saturday Snapshot #3

Saturday Snapshot is a non-book related meme hosted by Alyce. 

Although it is St Patrick's Day I will not be posting an Irish photo, mostly because it is a country I have yet to travel to. 

Instead I will keep to my personal theme for this meme - a book related photo (or 2).

Today's journey will be to Lyme Regis. 

I visited Lyme Regis in 2007 when my partner and I traveled to the UK for the Rugby World Cup. I was happy to schedule our trip around football games ....as long as we visited a few of my favourite literary places along the way! Lyme Regis was high on my list for two very important reasons:

Persuasion and The French Lieutenant's Woman. 

View of the Cobb from Monmouth Beach

The young people were all wild to see Lyme.
After securing accommodations, and ordering a dinner at one of the inns, the next thing to be done was unquestionably to walk directly down to the sea." 

The Cobb itself, its old wonders and new improvements, with the beautiful line of cliffs stretching out to the east of the town, are what the stranger's eye will seek; and a very strange stranger it must be, who does not see charms in the immediate environs of Lyme, to make him wish to know it better. 

(chapter 11 Persuasion by Jane Austen)

The real Lymers will never see much more to it than a long claw of old grey wall that flexes itself against the sea. 

To the west sombre grey cliffs, known locally as Ware Cleeves, rose steeply from the shingled beach where Monmouth entered upon his idiocy....It is in this aspect that the Cobb seems most a last bulwark - against all that wild eroding coast to the west. 

 (chapter 1 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles)

Sunrise over the bay 

They went to the sands, to watch the flowing of the tide, with a fine south-easterly breeze was bringing in with all the grandeur which so flat a shore admitted. 

(chapter 12 Persuasion by Jane Austen)

If you get up at such an hour in Lyme today you will have the town to yourself. 

(chapter 29 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles)

Brona testing Lousia Musgroves steps out for herself 

She lead him to the side of the rampart, where a line of flat stones inserted sideways into the wall served as rough steps down to the lower walk.'These are the very steps that Jane Austen made Louisa Musgrove fall down in Persuasion.' 

(chapter 2 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles)

There was too much wind to make the high part of the new Cobb pleasant for the ladies, and they agreed to get down the steps to the lower, and all were content to pass quietly and carefully down the steep flight, excepting Louisa; she must be jumped down them by Captain Wentworth. 

(chapter 12 Persuasion by Jane Austen)

Sunrise over the Cobb looking west towards Monmouth Beach 

There runs between Lyme Regis and Axmouth six miles to the west, one of the strangest coastal landscapes in Southern England....People have been lost in it for hours, and cannot believe, when they see the map where they were lost, that their sense of isolation...could have been so great.  

 (chapter 10 The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles)