Lyme Regis sits at the far western edge of Dorset, where the county runs out and the Devon border begins. The town tips down to the sea in a series of steep, narrow streets, and at the bottom is the Cobb — the curved stone harbour wall that has held the bay since the medieval period and reaches into Lyme Bay like an arm drawn back. People have travelled here since the eighteenth century, when sea-bathing brought the Georgians. The town has kept the scale and the manners of that era better than most.

The houses are the record of it. Georgian and Regency fronts line Broad Street and Silver Street, rendered and painted, with sash windows and the occasional bow added to catch the light off the water. Behind them, the older town is a tangle of cottages on lanes too tight for two cars — flint, brick, weatherboard, slate. Marine Parade, the seafront walk locals call the Front, carries a run of bay-windowed houses that look straight down the Channel. Climb away from the centre and the streets open into Victorian and Edwardian villas with gardens, then a scatter of newer houses on the slopes above. Few sit on level ground; almost all face the sea.

What surrounds the town is, by some distance, its defining fact. This is the Jurassic Coast, England's only natural World Heritage Site, and the cliffs either side of Lyme are among the most fossil-rich in Britain. Mary Anning made her discoveries on this foreshore in the early nineteenth century, and people still walk the beaches after a storm to read what has fallen out of the rock. To the east the land slides into the Undercliff, a wooded landslip running toward Charmouth and on into the Axe valley — a long, overgrown ribbon of woodland with a coast path threaded through it. The light is western and soft. The weather arrives off the open sea.

Those who live in Lyme tend to have chosen it deliberately. It is a town rather than a resort: a population that holds through the winter, an artistic and literary streak going back generations, fishermen still working out of the harbour, and a steady draw for people leaving cities for somewhere with weather and walking and a sense of place. Second homes exist, as they do all along this coast, but the centre keeps its own life. The town fills in August and quietens by November, and many prefer it then.

It is the most distant of our Dorset towns from the fast roads, and that distance is part of the price and the point. The A35 runs along the top of the hill, linking west to Honiton and Exeter and east to Bridport, Dorchester and beyond. The nearest stations are Axminster, a few miles west on the London Waterloo line, and Honiton; both put London within about three hours. Exeter, with its airport and faster services, lies further west. You do not pass through Lyme Regis on the way to anywhere. You arrive because you meant to.