Past the Bay Hotel, the Walk, or upper level of Marine Parade, continues westward. The lower level, the Cart Road, doesn't — or didn't until the plan to extend the Cart Road in 2005. So here was where the waves delivered their punches right to the concrete wall below you, and on windy days you could play at standing to the railing and then scuttling back before the spray showered down on you.
        When the tide was lower you could get down to the beach by two more sets of steps, facing each other (later mostly buried under the extended Cart Road). One or both of these, I'm not sure which, used to be called the Bathing Machine Steps because this part of the beach was where, in the nineteenth century, those prudish contraptions were deployed.

        Up to the right now is a steep grassy hillside, but structures continue along its foot, with the purpose of holding its “toe” against slippage. There is a long shallow shelter where on Tuesday evenings of July and August the town band plays.

But the best use of this rather strange concrete embayment is that made by boys on skateboards.
        The next stretch is even more strange: its centrepiece is an apparent ceremonial portal with a war-memorial clock over it, but this and the arcades on either side are all boarded up. (Deck chairs, I think, are stored in the cavernous space within.) Then a blank white wall on which, each July during carnival week, children paint a mural — hundreds of little individual pictures in primary colours. Even from out at sea it looks good, harmonizing with the large mural painting that is the slopeside town itself. But each September the wall is whitewashed over, by order of the town council. You can dimly see the children's hieroglyphs through the official whitewash.
        (Footnote: the council must have relented to comments like that. The bright graffiti are still there in December, untarnished by weather; they aren't whitewashed over till spring.)
        And in front on the tarmac, until erased by rains, you can see six hundred rectangles delineated with white chalk, in each of which a child has been allowed to make a drawing: airplanes, ducks, suns, flags, muscles. This isn't, of course, a spontaneous outburst of expression — the white rectangles already give that away — and it disappoints me a bit more to see that some have been marked “1st prize,” “2nd,” “3rd.“..
        The grassy slope above, reached in several places by stairways, is seamed with paths, the lowest of which runs along on the tops of the slope-foot structures, partly on a concrete-legged flyover. Then come an amusement arcade and some places of refreshment, ending with the By the Bay restaurant, with tables out in front for the views over beach and coast.

        You're almost at your goal: only a few yards ahead is the cluster of buildings called the Cobb village, at the landward base of the Cobb itself. Entering the village, the Walk ceases to be just a Walk (as is signalled by a barrier to wheeled vehicles) and becomes a narrow street, though ambling pedestrians still fill it and are surprised to see even a bicycle coming along.
        The first building on the left, now Jane's Café, was formerly Bay Cottage. In Jane Austen's Persuasion, it was the house where Captain Harville lived. About opposite to it was a house where Jane Austen and her family may have stayed in 1803 or 1804. The site is now the Jane Austen Garden. You can go up into it by flights of steps.
        After the garden, the first structure standing on the right is a high hoarding, hiding a space at the foot of the hill and bearing a long proclamation:

What you're looking at could happen to your property. The ruins behind this board were once homes and also businesses. They were evacuated and blocked up under a law that empowers any local authority in the country to do likewise to any buildings it one-sidedly judges a public danger, forcing their owners to pay the costs.
        Here the authority's initial bill came to £67,955. In addition the owners must jointly pay £175 a week for hire of the scaffolding used in making their properties worthless. The hire-charge could go on for ever because the owners are forbidden to demolish the buildings.
        The reason is that the authority fears that knocking them down would set off a landslip. But the reason they were blocked up originally is that the authority feared a landslip would knock them down. What's more, because they were blocked up before a landslip hit them, the owners' insurance companies won't pay up on their policies against landslip.
        It's a crazy nightmare that could suddenly come true for you too. Though you may think your home is your castle, the law says otherwise. And it doesn't take landslips or flooding to trigger Section 78 of the Building Act 1984 which empowers local authorities to trash properties abutting on public places. A one-off geological flaw hidden under your home or business would be quite enough.
        So if you'd like to help yourselves as well as us, when candidates ask for your vote in the general election, demand their pledge that if they win they will press for the unjust law to be changed.
        More details can be obtained from the Safeguard Lyme's Interest Party at Lyme Potters across the road or the Antiques Centre or Amusement Arcade along to the right.

This grievance-notice is something of a tourist attraction. You're not the first to come to a standstill and stare up at it.
        But you're the last! The hoarding suddenly groans, totters, and splinters toward you. You scream and scramble back, to the safety of the Walk. What you are witnessing is a smart example of a Lyme landslip! Hillside and houses come tumbling, until the street is blocked. Well, not quite; the glacis of rubble and mud isn't that high, you could pick your way over it. But you aren't allowed to: a swarm of authorities in yellow jackets and hard hats has already arrived and cordoned it off. You watch their activities for a while, but they're not yet in a mood to answer your questions about landslips.
        Back you'll have to go, and find some other way around to the Cobb.
        (Footnote: the grievance-notice was removed about September 2004. The council had come to some agreement with the owners and taken over the land.. The ground having been stabilised, in 2010 someone bought the site for development.)