There are fears the clifftop chalet that was pivotal to the hit crime drama Broadchurch is about to plunge into the sea.
The wooden lodge, perched on the Jurassic Coast, was the scene of Danny Latimer’s murder in the first series of the ITV show. Pictures show the cast, including Olivia Colman, standing next to the chalet on land which is no longer there.
Recent rock falls have left it just 15ft from the cliff edge at Eype, near West Bay, Dorset. Local photographer Graham Hunt said: “Storms over the winter have eroded away the cliffs making them unstable.” Last year, terrifying video showed dust tumbling from the cliffside before a huge chunk of rock fell off, landing on the beach below.
Three people stood nearby were forced turn and flee as the rock crashed into the sea and a cloud of dust thrown into the air. Everyone at the beach is thought to have been unharmed.
Sharing the video on Twitter at the time, a spokesperson for Dorset Council said: "Rockfalls and landslips can happen at anytime. These people had a lucky escape. The South West Coast Path above the cliff at West Bay is currently closed."
In May the same year, a similar sight was seen nearby when part of Sidmouth's crumbling cliffs came cashing down. The cliffs at Sidmouth are notorious for crumbling with cliff falls also taking place at both East Beach and Jacobs Ladder. Photos showed huge clouds of red dust along the bottom of the cliffs just moments after the rock fell.
The town's East Beach cliff is gradually falling away into the sea, taking the gardens of the homes on Cliff Road with it. Residents of Cliff Road are losing chunks of their gardens to the elements. Paul Griew lost an entire summerhouse back in 2017 and it was caught on video tumbling into the sea.
Speaking to DevonLive, he said: "My gardener used to have his bonfire there and he had one there half an hour before [the summerhouse] went. The first thing I did was go and make sure his car had gone and he hadn't actually been standing there. When I bought the house, I looked at records of rate of erosion and it appeared that there was between 300 and 1,000 years before it reached the house so it seemed perfectly acceptable. It's increased ten times so possibly 30 years left rather than 300."