Along with many another jolly visitor you round the corner into the full view of beach, harbour, and Cobb.
        (You may have arrived here by descending the steps from the Bell Cliff terrace, in which case notice that you are suddenly two storeys down from there.)
and shop comes an inviting flight of steps that is supposed to be a public right of way winding up and through to Broad Street, but someone has locked the gate. Then a brick Victorian house, and another long house with blue trim, and a line of four from the early 1800s under a quaint thatched roof; in one of them, Madeira Cottage, lived for a time Captain Frederick Marryat, author of The Children of the New Forest and Mr. Midshipman Easy and other sea stories. (It was Captain Marryat who in 1836, staying at Raynham Hall in Norfolk, met the ghost of century-dead Lady Dorothy Walpole on the stairs and put a pistol bullet through her head. A 1936 photograph “proved” this Brown Lady ghost to exist, until it was debunked in 2006.)
        Next comes what used to be England's Baths, a sea bathing establishment built in 1833 by the England family, and is now Argyle House. Next, Library Cottage, built in 1834 and opened as a library in 1839, where books and newspapers could be read not only inside but out on a front terrace sheltered by an awning. It too was operated by the Englands. It ceased being a library, and about 1937 its appearance was transformed by a thatched root. It is graced by ornamental lead pipes and trough that came from an earlier building.
        Then, tall narrow Sundial House, built in 1901; four storeys tall on its narrow site, it formed a tower-like end to the row, until the Bay Hotel was built tight against it in 1924. The house is in elegant “Arts and Crafts” style; the details are of ham stone but the walls are a mixture of stones — chert, limestone, lias, and fossils collected from the foreshore, causing “some argument with the Local Authorities” according to an obituary of architect Arnold Mitchell.
        Altogether this series of buildings, though nothing like the solid frontage of old pastel-coloured houses rimming some harbours such as that of Tenby, is (in the words of a friend of ours during a campaign for its preservation) “a rich array of characterful, individual houses, each a reminder of the period in which it was built.”
        About half way along Marine Parade, the series ends with the largest: the Bay Hotel. It was built in 1924, where earlier there had been a kiosk shelter with seats. The Walk widens here, where a ramp comes up from the Cart Road; and offshore is the little continent of rocks and seaweed called Lucy's Ledge. You might sit at a table outside the hotel to take refreshment and watch the world go by. Or go in for a drink in the front lounge, or a meal at the fine restaurant.
        Immediately past the hotel, steep steps climb to gardens.
        Or you can stroll on along Marine Parade's second half.