Literary Passion · Lyme Regis, Dorset
The Cobb, Lyme Regis (Persuasion & the French Lieutenant's Woman)
One stone pier, two of literature's charged moments: Louisa Musgrove's reckless leap into Captain Wentworth's arms in 'Persuasion', and Fowles's hooded Sarah Woodruff staring out to sea — the most smouldering opening image in post-war English fiction.
More stories at this spot
- Austen's own Lyme holidays, 1803–04
Sources
Nearby on the map
Britain's largest chalk hill-figure, a 180ft naked club-wielder whose 35ft phallus made him a fertility icon; folklore holds that a couple who conceive on the figure will be blessed with children. Optically Stimulated Luminescence testing dated him to AD 700–1100; per NT senior archaeologist Martin Papworth, 'he was created very early on, perhaps in the late Saxon period, but then became grassed over and was forgotten.'
Documented + folkloreScandal & SocietyTiger Bay (Cardiff's dockland demi-monde)Cardiff, Cardiff · WalesCardiff's legendary dockland — one of Britain's first truly multicultural quarters, notorious in its coal-boom heyday for sailors' taverns, dance halls and commercial affection, and beloved by those who lived there as a warm, tight community the papers never bothered to understand. Shirley Bassey is its most famous daughter.
Documented historyHot spotTragic RomanceStonehenge (Tess of the d'Urbervilles finale)Amesbury, Wiltshire · EnglandWhere Hardy's fugitive lovers Tess and Angel spend their last night together, Tess asleep on an ancient stone, before her capture — one of literature's most haunting doomed romances. (Note: Hardy's plot involves violence; on this map we feature only the Stonehenge love-and-loss scene, not the crimes.)
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