We often stay at West Bay Cottage ourselves. Here are some of the things we get up to time and time again on nice and easy days. All just a short stroll away:
Sit on the front garden bench with a coffee in the morning sun.
Walk to the end of the Jurassic Pier and breathe in the sea air.
Pop into the West Bay Discovery Centre to uncover a little of West Bay’s story. They have changing exhibitions alongside the permanent displays so it’s worth going back whenever there is something new.
Stroll around the harbour and look at the boats and all the busy fishing and crabbing activity.
Visit Watch House Café on East Beach for breakfast or lunch. Sit outside with views across the bay.
Walk up and down East Pier and probably take another photo of the cliffs (to add to the hundreds I’ve already taken!).
Visit Sladers Yard and admire the beautiful furniture, art, and craftsmanship.
Eat atRubicon Kitchen harbourside shack. It’s a wonderful lunchtime spot for fresh fish by the harbour.
Relax on East Beach beside the golden cliffs, sitting on the sand with a book and the sound of the sea.
Paddleboard from East Beach when the sea is calm (though this is very occasional!).
Pick up some pasties from the Cornish Bakery for an easy lunch.
Treat myself (or more likely my daughter) to Le Bon Shoppe socks from Sea Purslane. They’re addictive!
Walk along West Beach, listen to the waves rolling over the pebbles. Choose an interesting stone or two to leave in the front garden.
Decide on an ice cream flavour from Baboo Gelato. Eat it sitting by the harbour or in the cottage’s back garden, trying not to attract seagulls.
Have a go on the rope swing in the play area. It says it has an age limit of 99 so it’s practically mandatory.
Wander around the Customs House vintage emporium – mostly tat, but worth a browse if you’ve got time on your hands.
Circle the Welcome Hub looking at all the motorbikes, especially on a sunny Sunday. This one is much more my husband’s thing.
Stop for cake and tea, or earlier for breakfast, at West Bay Tea Rooms. Or drop in for an emergency takeaway slice of carrot cake for revising daughter!
Sit outside on the riverside terrace at The George for an early evening drink.
For a special occasion, splurge a little on supper in an old railway carriage atPlatform Restaurant.
Pick up burgers and cheesecake from Platform, or pizza from The Palour Pizzeria, for a takeaway back at the cottage.
End the day watching the sunset over the sea. A perfect way to slow down and relax.
Drop your own local tips in the comments – we’d love to hear them 🙂
If you fancy doing your own thing in West Bay and you haven’t yet booked accommodation we’d like to welcome you to West Bay Cottage. Take a look inside the cottage, or head to our Book With Us page for availability, the rates and how to book.
If you go down to the Bay this spring you can’t miss the elephants. All together there are more than thirty of them to be seen across several West Dorset locations including Burton Bradstock, Lyme Regis, Bridport as well as West Bay. Each elephant has been painted by a different artist. The public art trail, called Stampede by the Sea, is a collaboration between local charity Weldmar Hospicecare and public art trail producer Wild in Art.
The trail will be running until May 25th, with maps available online and on a Stampede by the Sea app. You can also pick up a map or buy your own knitted elephant at The Trail HQ which is sited at the Salt House in the harbour. In June every elephant will be auctioned by Dukes Auctioneers to raise funds for the charity.
Here are some of the West Bay herd. Which one is your favourite?
Some more spotted in Bridport. This one covered in rope outside the museum is very clever.
I’ve just spent a nice long weekend at our cottage and thought I’d write a little about it here. I’m surprised it’s been so long since my last post. At this rate it will be an annual event. So here’s what’s been going on with West Bay Cottage this year.
The start of 2021 coincided with another lockdown which meant our first visit to the cottage wasn’t until April. We finally took down the Christmas decorations.
In May I had a solo trip to do a bit of painting. In the cottage, not landscapes. After much deliberation I repainted the kitchen cupboards exactly the same colour that they had always been. Afterwards I treated the kitchen to a new toaster and myself to a G&T.
A visit in early June we walked along the cliff path to The Anchor Inn in Seatown for lunch. It was so unexpectedly hot we got quite sunburnt on the walk. The pub is in such a nice spot with great sea views from the terraces. Walking back we wondered why all the cows stand so near to the cliff edge.
Later in June we bravely left our teenage daughter and a group of her friends home alone in the cottage for a few days. I’m glad to say that they, and the cottage, were all in one piece when we returned. Watch this and you’ll see why that’s quite lucky!
On to August and we spent a whole week in West Bay. Apart from going out on a paddleboard a couple of times, the main excitement was the replacement of the front door. The new door looks just like the old one, it has to as the cottage is Grade II listed. Unlike the old one it isn’t full of wood filler. Funnily enough I returned last week to find that Henry, aged 11, had written in the kid’s guest book this summer (big thank you to Henry for his effort) and had a lot to say about the new door. Brute force and and a run up required to shut it!? We were warned that the new draught excluder strip would take a while to compress but it isn’t very hard to close, honestly!
I spent last weekend at the cottage with my friends from college days. See this post for a write up of a similar weekend a few years ago. As ever, it involved lots of food and drink, and a little exercise too. On Saturday we walked the cliff path west before heading inland after Eype to have lunch at Downhouse Farm Garden Café. I forgot to take my phone so no photos but it was very pleasant and the walk means you feel you’ve earned your lunch, and the walk back means you deserve an ice cream from the Baboo Gelato kiosk too. That evening we had a takeaway from S&E fish and chips, it’s practically a tradition. On Sunday we went to the friendly Seagulls Restaurant for a good roast dinner, and couldn’t resist their yummy bread and butter pudding too. Book ahead.
I pottered about for a few days at the start of the week. West Bay was still busy but not as busy as I’d half expected, but of course schools are back now. One interesting sight was this big old ship in the harbour on Tuesday, called the Lydia Eva. It turns out it is quite a historic vessel, see here. Delving a little more I found out it was on its way to Lyme to appear in a Hollywood movie tracing the early life of Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka. It’s going to play the passenger steamer that brings Willy to England. See this link.
Continuing my stroll around the harbour I noticed that the catch from the Top Cat catamaran was being unloaded. I peered to see what they had caught. The crate contained something that looked like it came out of John Hurt’s stomach in the film Alien! Definitely something it’s best not to see until it’s served up on a plate.
My last blog post at the start of the year marked ten years of owning our West Bay Cottage. No one would have guessed what Year 11 was about to bring. A trip to the cottage in early March and then lockdown meant we didn’t go back until July. We decided in May that if we could open the cottage in the summer at all it would be safest to leave big spaces between bookings. Once I’d arranged and rearranged bookings with that in mind it meant there were no gaps left for ourselves! So it was very nice to get down there again last weekend. Plus it gives me a few cottage related bits and pieces to update on here (which is a good thing as I’ve almost forgotten how!).
We had a lovely long weekend at the cottage in July, checked all was all fine, and gave it a late spring-clean. During lockdown we’d had all the windows refurbished by a local sash window company. They’d sent pictures of our renovated windows but it was good to finally see them in real life. They make such a difference to the cottage. A pleasure to open and close and no more rattling on windy evenings.
Another happy sight was outside the cottage. I was so pleased a lovely gardener had started to look after the front and back gardens last year. I hate to think what they would have looked liked left untended for so long. Luckily she loves gravel gardens and has made it much nicer and more colourful than my efforts ever could.
During our July weekend we looked out of the front window late one evening and saw three small badgers running around. They were easy to see as they’d turned on our sensor light. How lovely we thought. Perhaps not so lovely we agreed after we’d got a message from one of our August guests saying badgers were getting into the bins. We hoped it was just a phase they were going through. This Sunday we woke up to find a bin turned over and fish and chips leftovers scattered. I’m hoping two bungees now secured on the lids will put a stop to this unruly badger behaviour. If you stay on our cottage please keep them on the bins and do let me know if you have another messy badger invasion, although we don’t have a Plan B yet.
UPDATE – Our first guests after this reported that the determined badgers made a such a racket in the night they had to bring the bin inside, two big chunks had been taken out of a lid. Bungees not a success. We have a new plan, we are putting the bins in the garage for now.
That weekend in March we ate at The Hive Beach Cafe. They have a shop in the cafe and I couldn’t resist this poster. In July we got to hang it up, half way up the stairs. What is especially nice is that a local Lyme company makes them using seaweeds collected at our beaches in Dorset as well as Devon and Cornwall.
Did you indulge in a little lockdown retail therapy? I told myself it was good to support some independent businesses in a small way but frankly it was more for my own gratification. The excitement of a parcel arriving! So I bought a couple of very tactile additions for the cottage. First, a super soft sheepskin rug. I put it in the cottage’s back bedroom this weekend and your feet just sink into it. I was tempted to bring it back home again. Also, a gorgeous feather duster. Why use a dreary duster when you can be cleaning the cobwebs away with one fashioned from ostrich feathers? When William Morris said his ethos for domestic life – “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful”- he might just have been talking about these two lovelies.
Well, that’s our cottage news. Fingers crossed we can remain open over the coming months, and for now we’ll be continuing with the big empty buffers between bookings for the peace of mind of guests, cleaners and ourselves too.
For us the start of a new decade marks ten years of owning our cottage and running it as a holiday home. If you are reading this perhaps you would like to do the same one day? Here’s how it all started for us, and some things we’ve picked up along the way.
How it all started
We need to go back to the summer of 2009, while we’re camping in Eype, just down the coast from West Bay. No plan to buy a holiday home but I knew there was a cute looking cottage for sale in West Bay. I like to potter around estate agent’s websites occasionally, and we already loved West Dorset, in particular Bridport and West Bay. So we went to look at it, just for fun. We fell in love with it. Furthermore we could see the benefit of having our own little place in Dorset, near my parents. They were getting old and both unwell so it would make visiting them regularly easier. Plus the cottage was running as a holiday let already. We though we could do the same to cover its day to day costs. But really it wasn’t these practical thoughts that swayed us, owning a cottage by that beautiful coast and we’d be “living the dream”! We had to make up our minds quickly, the estate agent told us there were others interested. So we went for it, remortgaging our own house. We were lucky enough to win a nerve-racking sealed bidding process.
It’s ours!
We got the keys to the cottage in early November (see top picture). The first evening we arrived in a howling gale with water coming in under the door! The cottage had been renovated within the last couple of years and we had bought a lot of the contents as part of the sale. We didn’t expect we’d need to do much to get it ready for guests. As soon as we stayed in it we found there were some things that needed improving fast. New beds and hob were first on the list, and stopping the fire alarms going off all the time. This was soon followed by a new TV (and an aerial, as it turned out we were connected to number 3’s one!), some baby stuff, the wood burner, and bits and bobs like mats, rugs, cushions, towels, bedding, kitchen utensils, garden furniture…the list goes on. We refreshed it indoors with a coat of paint.
What do we need to do?
Our knowledge about letting out a cottage was non-existent. I bought a book and found lots of useful information on an online holiday rental owner’s forum, Lay My Hat. We swotted up on the legalities, including a fire risk assessment and booking terms and conditions. I put together a visitor’s book with all the information our guests might need about the cottage, and our favourite things to do in the area too. A couple of simple spreadsheets later and we were ready to keep a track of bookings though the year (oh the fear of a double booking) and record all incoming money and outgoing costs, a tax requirement.
Advertising
We needed a website and were happy the url westbaycottage.co.uk was available. We took some photos and planned the pages and what we wanted to say on them. That Christmas my husband set up a website (luckily he knew a bit about that sort of thing). We kept the same rental fees as the previous owners. A West Bay website advertised local holiday accommodation. We paid for a listing, linking to our website. An early decision was to keep things independent and look after the booking process by ourselves. Mostly to keep the costs down for us and prospective guests. A booking agency might bring in more bookings but we wanted to keep control and high occupancy wasn’t imperative.
The good times
Our website went live at the start of 2010 and it didn’t take long before we had a few bookings. I was nervous before our first guests arrived in March but I needn’t have worried. All was well. I was pleasantly surprised with the numbers of bookings coming in. The cottage was busy that first year, the numbers bumped up with family and friends wanting to stay there too. It turned out West Bay had a lot of fans, and this was before Broadchurch!
As the years went on we learned more about running a holiday home and streamlined the booking process. In 2017 I bit the bullet and created a responsive website. This was new to me but I followed online lessons on how to create a vacation rental website using WordPress. Daunting at first but quite fun. SEO remains a mystery to me but I started to share the odd Facebook entry, twitter comment and Instagram photo from West Bay Cottage. The course encouraged people to write blog posts, so I started to do that too. Mostly subjects I enjoy researching and find interesting about the area, like its history and the films and TV programmes made there. Statistics consistently show that the Dorset apple cake and Dorset knobs posts are the most read from google searches. Food wins hands down!
And a few not-so-good times
There have been a few stress-inducing times over the years. Late 2010 we had noisy builders next door, without warning, upsetting one set of guests. In 2014 a couple staying were very unhappy to find a camera crew on their doorstep. Turned out the Broadchurch team were filming a scene next door! We’ve had a few boiler problems over the years too. Just this New Year’s Eve we had to dash to the cottage to sort out the new “smart” thermostat. Very occasionally we’ve had a complaint. A couple of them with good reason and one or two not so much, a criticism about seagull feathers in the backyard springs to mind. It goes without saying that we want everyone to have a great holiday and find our cottage a pleasure to stay in. Even after ten mostly trouble-free years the worry that something might go wrong, or be found not up to scratch, still gets me. Being an off-site owner doesn’t help. The first thing I do when we arrive back at the cottage is read the comments left in the visitor’s book since our last visit. It’s so nice to read that people have had a happy time and enjoyed the cottage. It makes it all worthwhile.
Has letting the cottage covered the costs?
Yes, letting our cottage has enabled it to “pay it’s way” so far, with some thanks to Broadchurch for making West Bay even more popular. We put much of the profit back into the cottage. Lots has been replaced at least once, including all the kitchen appliances, the tiling in the kitchen and bathroom, stuff in the TV corner, the table and chairs, as well as less obvious things such as the electrics and the boiler. For us the opportunity to keep it as charming and practical as we can is definitely worth it.
A couple of tips for prospective holiday home owners
We’ve learnt that staying there often ourselves is invaluable, although it’s not the relaxing time guests enjoy. We check up on things and do any repairs, replacements, touch-ups or deeper cleaning required. Plus I feel the need to return all the kitchen things to their “rightful” position and move things around on the kitchen shelf!
Anything we might do differently with hindsight? Ideally we’d like to live nearer to our holiday home. The same old car journey gets a bit boring. The expected journey time of three hours expands if the M25 is slow. We reckon the prospect of 90 minutes max travel time ahead would be much more appealing on a Friday evening. But the gripe is not really one to be levelled at our West Bay cottage, it’s more a negative aspect of living just north of London but loving West Dorset!
So my advise to anyone thinking of buying a holiday home is, if you want to do it purely for financial profit, it’s probably not worth it. But if you like making a place nice, running your own business and fancy faffing around with a website, then yeah, just go for it.
Swains Row sometimes has prickly visitors, and I’m not talking about any of our cottage guests! If you go outside late in the evening in the warmer months you may see a hedgehog snuffling around in the front gardens. Number 4 is particularly keen on these spiky neighbours, as you can see above from this plaque on the front of their cottage.
Sadly the hedgehog population is in decline in Great Britain. We’ve lost a third of all our hedgehogs in the last ten years. Pesticide use, habitat loss and roads are all thought to be taking their toll on their numbers. To encourage hedgehogs into your garden you need to make sure they have a safe access in and out. Leave an area to go a bit wild with shrubs, long grass and log piles or compost heaps. You can also pop out a dish of cat or dog food and water each evening.
At the end of the front garden next door you can see a big a pile of apple tree twigs left there to encourage our spiky neighbours. Let’s hope they make a good foraging and nesting site for a hedgehog or two. Perhaps it’s home to a snoozing hedgehog at the moment. A new arrival or two next summer would be lovely. I’ve just read that baby hedgehogs are called hoglets, a term introduced in the 1990s. Cute eh.
