Directions
Start: SY 447910 The walk starts at Eype’s Mouth Car Park at the end of Mount Lane. 1 From the car park, as you look at the sea (or west), head right, uphill and past the small holiday cottage on the cliff edge. Follow the coast path with sea views to your left and views to your right across Eype village and chapel. After the cottage, go through a kissing gate with a National Trust sign for Downhouse Farm and Thorncombe Beacon ¾ mile, which looms ahead. You’ll now see an impressive Bronze Age burial mound on the skyline to the right of the beacon, in an imposing position. Keep ahead. Look out for thrift and other wild flowers along the path, with views back towards the Isle of Portland. Swallows skim the meadows here. 60 | Sherborne Times | July 2021
After approx. ¼ mile there is another kissing gate with a National Trust sign. Go through the gate then slight right onto a narrow sheep track across the middle of the field and away from the coast path. Keep on this track, curving around the edge of a bowl-shaped field to your left which now opens out beneath the beacon. You may hear stonechats along this part of the walk. Continue towards the burial mound in front of you. Just before you reach it, you will see a stile on your right to continue the walk but first it is worth visiting the mound and then onto the beacon for fabulous views towards Golden Cap which, at 191 metres (627 feet) is the highest point on the south coast. Thorncombe Beacon was the site of one of many beacons built in 1588 to warn of the Spanish Armada.
