Keeping Watch, Lyme Regis (AW36)

This Regency villa, known as Belmont House, overlooks the Dorset seaside town of Lyme Regis. For nearly four decades it was the home of the increasingly reclusive author John Fowles until his death in 2005.
Here he found inspiration for his third novel, The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Fowles later explained he had had a recurring mental image, just before drifting off to sleep, of a woman in Victorian dress standing on The Cobb and staring out to sea. The Cobb is a massive breakwater that can be seen from the garden at Belmont.
He didn’t know why she was there, he said, so wrote the novel to find out.