Flora Stubbs spent the first 15 years of her life in a small village in Devon, when Lyme Regis was still somewhere her family jokingly dismissed as “for tourists.” After years living and working in Cambodia and India, she now returns to Devon and Dorset every summer, revisiting the beaches and seaside towns of her childhood with her American husband—stopping for cold-water swims, leisurely lunches at country inns, and fish and chips on the harbor wall.
I grew up on the Jurassic Coast in southern England, a 95-mile stretch of East Devon and Dorset coastline named for its abundance of fossils, and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. As a child, the area’s dramatic cliffs and rolling farmland felt unremarkable; it wasn’t until my 30s, when my American husband declared it one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen, that I started to recognize its virtues.