A Designation History - East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural ...

Hobhouse’s Blackdown Hills and Sidmouth Bay ‘Conservation Area’
covered 212 square miles (549 square kilometres) of Devon and
Somerset. In choosing this area the Hobhouse Committee were clearly
impressed, as Dower had been before them, with the landscape beauty
of the incised Upper Greensand plateau of the Blackdown Hills, and the
extension of their ridge and vale topography into East Devon between
the Axe and Sid Valleys.
Farway
On the coast of Lyme Bay the Conservation Area included all of the
striking and varied coastal scenery between Exmouth to the west, and
the Dorset boundary to the east, taking in the Undercliff between Seaton
and Lyme Regis, England’s westernmost chalk cliffs at Beer Head and
Branscombe, the wooded coombe of Branscombe Mouth and the varied
greensand, red sandstone and marl cliff architecture further west.