The story of West Bay’s struggle against this insidious enemy is an old one. In 1722 the Bridport authorities procured an Act of Parliament empowering them to restore and rebuild the haven and port, the piers and landing-places, in order to bring the town to that ancient and flourishing state whence it had declined. The preamble stated that by reason of a great sickness and other accidents, the wealthy inhabitants had been swept away and the haven choked. But although the Legislature had given authority for the work to be done, it did not indicate whence the funds were to be obtained, and so it was not until 1742 that the pier, authorised twenty years before, was built, nor was it until another fourteen years had waned that the pier and harbour were enlarged. Mr. Hardy in _Fellow Townsmen_ thus describes West Bay: “A gap appeared in the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the sunlight, the companion cliff on the right side being livid in shade. Between these cliffs, like the Libyan Bay which sheltered the shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the passer-by as only requiring a little human industry to finish it and make it famous, the ground on each side, as far back as the daisied slopes that bounded the interior valley, being a mere layer of blown sand. But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course of ten centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with sand and shingle as soon as completed. There were but few houses here: a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a residence or two, a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief features of the settlement.”
The harbour road, along whose mile and a half, the domestically unhappy Barnet went to see his Lucy at various intervals of time, leads into the corporate town of Bridport, which, after long remaining, as far as the casual eye of the stranger may perceive, little affected by the circumstance of being on a railway, is now developing a something in the nature of a suburb, greatly to the dismay of neighbouring residents who, residing here because of its isolation on a branch railway that brings few passengers, and to landward of a harbour that has no commerce, now can glimpse at the end of a vista of years some prospect of the ancient peace of Bridport being genteelly disturbed.