Within a few yards you emerge in the town's midst, a theatrical space opening onto the sea, and almost always swarming with people.



This gathering of ways is traditionally called Cobb Gate. The name is in a sense perverse, and takes a little explaining. Lyme is a seaport, and yet it is almost pinched off from the sea by the ridge whose end you see up to the right, and other cliffs that are around the corner to the left. The place we have reached is the town's opening to the sea. It used to be, literally, the gate leading to the harbour, which shelters under the protective wall called the Cobb. Yet the Cobb is more than half a mile off along the shore. You can see it in the background, that long thick black line under the horizon.
        If you're in a car, you can't stop here; your only options are to bend left toward the sea, as several other drivers are doing; or keep on up the slope with the main swarm, a lorry probably towering and groaning in front of you and another close behind.
        If on foot, you have the same two options, and several others. By the railing ahead is an ugly little bus shelter, and the great coaches pull in here to discharge their loads of holidaymakers. But just now it's twenty-two minutes past the hour, so the green Number Thirty-One bus is standing (or clinging?) on the slope (hiding the details behind it). Quick, run around the bus (the door's at the front left) and jump in! Maybe it will take you almost all the way to your destination without further trouble.
        Or: Too late, you've let it pull away. Revealed behind it is—



A promontory that was once a cliff, now encrusted with human structures. You can climb the steps that twist up to the higher ledge.
        Or take the ledge-like path sloping down to the left.
        (Notice in the chink at shoulder height between the two masonry masses — stair and terrace — a tiny bed where one flower is growing. Whoever made it has even set in a little roof over the flower.)