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Walk Details
Notes: This walk is tidal – please check tide times before setting off. Dogs are welcome but need to be kept under close control on working farmland.
St Audries has become one of the most popular beaches for families with its great amenities and wonderful wildlife and geology.
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Spend the day searching for sea creatures – alive and fossilised – while studying the amazing geology of the area with its limestone pavements and multi-coloured stone.
Points of interest:
Stunning waterfall cascading from the top of the cliff to the beach, fossils including ammonites and Devil’s Toenails, blue lias limestone pavements and ranges of Devonian red sandstone, rock-pools containing sea anemones, shrimps and crabs.
The walk starts in the car park at Home Farm Holiday Centre just off the road to Watchet. Turn off the road at the mock Tudor lodge-house and drive down the hill through a wood known as The Belt, enjoying the primroses, rhododendrons and wild garlic.
You will pass a sign for the Gas House – where the local estate in the Victorian era generated its own gas – and on to an area flanked with former estate workers’ cottages, Home Farm and a holiday let called the Kiln on the site of a former lime kiln.
From the car-park, where there are toilets and a shop, follow the England Coast Path signs to the Beach down a cobbled roadway which leads to a wooden stairway down to the bay.
There are warning signs about the crumbling cliffs and guidance on the variable tides – DO NOT pass the headlands at either end of the bay without knowing the tide times.
The walk is from end to end of this contained sandy bay, which would have once been a private sandy beach for local aristocrats and landowners.
Here there are metal steps to the east to facilitate easy access over the rocky outcrops.
This area reveals the Somerset Jurassic Coast at its best with fossils, particularly ammonites hiding amongst the blue lias limestone “pavements” and ranges of Devonian red sandstone breaking through the stratified Jurassic limestone.
Above the sandy beach the upper beach is littered with pebbles of every colour with sparkling quartz in between. The sea in the Bristol Channel has the second highest tidal range in the world and the rockpools are always teeming with life.
Facilities: Public car-park (£2), toilets and shop.
All information correct at the time of publication.
Nearest Train (or tube) Station(s):
Watchet, Bristol
