The tiny thatched cottage perched on Peak Hill, a 400 ft cliff above Sidmouth in Devon, has unrivalled views of the Jurassic coast – but you take your life in your hands to enjoy them. Following a dramatic cliff collapse last week, which triggered a smaller rockfall below the property, there is now just 40 ft separating the house from the cliff edge. Another rockfall and the garden could be taken out altogether, or worse still, the historic cottage could topple into the sea. “I doubt anyone is still living in it,” says Stuart Hughes, a Sidmouth resident and councillor for East Devon.
Yet, a gardener’s van parked outside the house this week suggests the owners haven’t given up on it. The lawn is mowed, the hedges are clipped and the conical thatched roof – distinctive of Sidmouth’s cottage orné architecture – is in pristine condition. The owners would have known when they bought the three-bedroom cottage in 2011 that it was in a vulnerable position. Pictures of Peak Hill dating from 2008 show the cottage was perilously close to the edge even then.
Nonetheless, the current owners bought it for £675,000. They seemingly took a risk for the unobstructed sea views, hidden position and charming circular rooms. “You’re in the hands of mother nature when you buy a house like that – but this doesn’t stop people from going ahead,” explains Tony Sutherland, of local estate agents, Harrison-Lavers & Potbury’s.
Sidmouth’s deep red cliffs are part of its charm, the backdrop for its castellated Regency hotels and grand cottages. They’re 185 million years old and have always been crumbly due to their sandstone and mudstone composition. If you walk beneath the cliffs separating the town itself from Peak Hill, you’ll see decades’ worth of steel girders and concrete reinforcements.
However, the cliffs to the west and east of the town have no such support and due to wetter winters and rising sea levels, they’re eroding more quickly these days. “There’s been another cliff fall on the east side today, which looks as though it will result in the FP120 Coast Path leading down towards Sidmouth being closed,” says Hughes. “The cliffs are very active due to high rainfall followed now by a period of dry weather in which the Triassic sandstone dries out.” In March, there was another large collapse at Peak Hill, and there were significant landslips at West Cliffs on the other side of the town in 2020 and 2022. Paul Griew has lost 65 ft from his garden on Cliff Road, to the east of the town, over 27 years. He believes the town’s man made sea defences are partly to blame, as they inhibit the longshore drift, which used to deposit protective shingle against the cliffs. The landslips are typically at least 30ft wide and take the cliff back 20ft, he says – which doesn’t bode well for the cottage on Peak Hill.
On Jacob’s Ladder, the beach below Peak Hill, the beach huts are now fenced off and there are large yellow signs warning the public to keep away from the unstable cliffs. “Cliff falls seem to happen after heavy rain – it sounds like a bomb going off,” explains Jan*, who is painting the rock fall from a safe distance with her art group. “People who live here stay away from the bottom of the cliffs, but there are plenty of people who take no notice of the signs. They think they’re invincible but cliff falls can happen at any time here: we were sitting here once and saw someone’s shed plunge into the sea from the East Cliffs.”
As it turns out, it was Griew’s shed. Over the years, he’s lost a summer house and a lean-to as the cliff has crumbled into the sea taking with it the coastal path, which had to be rerouted behind his house. His gardener, David*, who works in the café at Jacob’s Ladder, tells me that he ropes himself to the house when he works at the end of the garden, just in case there’s another landslip. “One morning, we were having a bonfire at the end of the garden – so the smoke blows out to sea – and I suddenly heard a rumble,” he says. “I saw a fissure in the ground, a zig zag. I moved away and a few minutes later the bonfire and surrounding garden fell into the sea.”
Miraculously, there have been no human casualties so far. Although, Maggie Jee, who keeps llamas at the 330-acre farm on Peak Hill says it’s not clear if any sheep went over the edge during last week’s landslip. “There was a part of the cliff we called the sheep suicide path – a barbed wire fence right on the edge with remnants of wool on it – but until they’re counted during worming, it’s impossible to know,” she says. Jee runs a wellbeing business taking llamas to care homes and leading llama walks along the Jurassic coast, but she’ll have to alter the route now the cliff path at Peak Hill has disappeared. “I was so shocked – it was my favourite part of the coastal path looking over Ladram Bay and Budleigh Salterton and now it’s gone. The landslides have always been on the other side of town. It didn’t seem unsafe at all here.”
On its Facebook page, East Devon District Council warns that the cliffs are dangerous and the effects of climate change are likely to accelerate the rates of erosion in the future. Yet for the time being, people are still paying big money for clifftop living in Sidmouth. “It worries some people and not others – even within the past couple of years people have paid a lot of money for houses on the cliffs,” says Sutherland, the estate agent. Clifton Cottage, a Grade II-listed cottage above Sidmouth seafront, sold for £2.1 million in 2023, while a three-bedroom cottage backing onto the cliff edge on Cliff Road sold for £850,000 in 2022. Griew maintains, though, that the houses on his side of the street are now a bargain compared to those across the road, which don’t have an unobstructed sea view.
He can see why buyers might be hesitant to invest in a house close to an eroding cliff edge, claiming erosion has sped up by 10 fold since he moved to Cliff Road, due in part, at least, to the sea defences. Griew says his own garden has receded an average of three ft each year. But he is cautiously optimistic his house won’t be falling into the sea anytime soon, thanks to the proposed £20 million Sidmouth and East Beach Management Plan – designed to protect the cliffs below Cliff Road and prevent the sea from flooding the town. Griew has been campaigning for such an intervention since 2011 as leader of the Cliff Road Action Group, and plans are currently being developed to submit to the Environment Agency. “There’s an outline scheme now and a project manager has been hired,” he says.
The project aims to “recharge” East beach and the town beach with shingle, and protect the cliffs from further erosion with one or more new offshore breakwaters, as well as a new rock groyne, which will help protect the shingle on the beach. “When the sea beats at the bottom of the cliff it leaves a bulge in the middle that eventually collapses,” Griew explains. While the scheme won’t completely stop erosion at the top of the cliffs, protecting the base should help return them to an angle of repose, allowing rain water to run off them. The government has already allocated £16 million and East Devon District Council will provide £2.25 million, with Devon County Council and local residents contributing, too. The Cliff Road Action Group believes the scheme will protect more than 110 homes and 70 businesses.
Hughes is sceptical of the proposal, though, as he believes it should also include drainage and a groundwater control system engineered through the cliffs. Excess rainwater is speeding up the erosion, he says. “You only have to look at the cliffs at Peak Hill. They have a substantial shingle bank in front of them and are at an angle of repose with vegetation growing – they should be stable. It’s climate change and increased wet weather that has made them more active. Eventually the cottage there will also be a victim of climate change.”
Locals suspect there will come a time when the council deems the cliffside cottage too unsafe to live in. Until this happens, though, Sutherland is adamant that it still has a value. “If it was listed for sale tomorrow, someone would buy it,” he says. Griew for one can’t imagine life without the glittering sea at the back of his own house. “I joke that as the cliff erodes the view gets even better,” he says. “And there’s less grass to mow.”
*Names changed to protect anonymity
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