The Great Undercliff Landslip of 1839
Over a matter of hours in the last days of December, a stretch of farmland near Lyme Regis broke away from the rest of the coast and slid downward, opening a chasm that reshaped the shoreline for good.
Published July 2026The stretch of coast between Lyme Regis and Axmouth is unusually dramatic even by the standards of the Jurassic Coast, and the reason lies in a single event that took place over the winter of 1839. A section of cliff and farmland, roughly a mile long, detached from the land behind it and moved seaward, dropping in places by tens of metres and tilting whole fields at odd angles. The event became known locally as the Bindon Landslip, after the farm most directly affected, and it remains one of the largest coastal landslips ever recorded in Britain.
What actually happened
The cause was geological rather than sudden or dramatic in the way a cliff collapse is usually imagined. Layers of permeable greensand rock sit above impermeable clay along this stretch of coast, and heavy rain through the autumn of 1839 had saturated the upper layers. Water built up at the boundary between the two rock types, lubricating the junction until the upper layer, weighed down by its own soaked mass, began to slide over the clay beneath it toward the sea.
Locals reported cracks appearing in fields and hedgerows in the days before the main event, and the movement itself, when it came on Christmas Day and the days following, was gradual enough that no one was killed or seriously injured, despite entire fields of wheat and a farmhouse being carried downward with the slipping ground. Accounts from the time describe hedges that had run in straight lines now sitting in broken zigzags, and a chasm opening between the slipped mass and the land that remained in place, in some sections deep enough to swallow a house.
A tourist attraction almost overnight
News of the landslip spread quickly, and Victorian visitors travelled from across the country to see it, arriving by the hundred within weeks and by some accounts numbering in the thousands over the following months. Local landowners, quick to recognise an opportunity, charged for access and guided tours across the slipped ground, and prints and written accounts of the "Great Landslip" circulated widely, cementing Lyme Regis's reputation as a destination worth the journey for more than just its beach.
A second, related slip occurred at nearby Whitlands not long afterward, adding to the sense that the whole coast here was in active, visible motion — a rare thing for the Victorian public to witness directly rather than read about in scientific journals.
What the landslip left behind
The chasm and the tumbled, chaotic ground it created were never farmed again in any conventional sense. Left alone, they became exactly the kind of undisturbed wilderness that supports species pushed out of managed farmland elsewhere, and over the following century and a half the site developed into dense, largely impenetrable scrub and woodland, riddled with smaller, more recent slips as the unstable ground continued to move periodically. This is the origin of what is now the Axmouth to Lyme Regis Undercliffs National Nature Reserve, one of the wildest and least accessible stretches of coast in southern England.
Why the coast here is still unstable
The same geology that produced the 1839 landslip continues to produce smaller slips along this coast on a fairly regular basis, which is precisely why the Undercliff remains largely trackless and why the coast path is periodically rerouted inland where a section becomes unsafe. Natural England, which manages the reserve, monitors the ground and adjusts public access accordingly, and walkers should always check the current status of the path before setting out on this stretch specifically, since diversions here are more frequent than on almost any other part of the Jurassic Coast.
Standing at either end of the Undercliff today, looking into dense, near-impassable woodland that was open farmland within living memory of people who were alive at the time, it is one of the more striking reminders on this coast of just how quickly geology can rewrite the map.