Tag: SouthWestCoast

Last Post on the Path to Nowhere

“Much has been written of travel, far less of the road. Writers have treated the road as a passive means to an end, and honoured it most when it has been an obstacle;” (Edward Thomas, 1913)

<https://books.apple.com/au/book/the-icknield-way/id1426686781>

We walked the South West Coast Path (SWCP) in UK for two months, almost every day, though we set no record for speed or distance. Gale-force winds and squall forced us to abandon the last two kilometres into Portloe (day 36) and again the last five into West Bay (about 2 weeks later). We cut out the walks in and out of the big cities, Plymouth and Torquay – walking by the side of a sealed vehicular road is no fun at all!

So I guess we don’t qualify for the End-to-End certificate which the SWCP Association hands out to those who have walked the ‘whole’ 630 miles, i.e., 1014 kilometres.

Minehead, where the path officially ‘starts’, is not quite the pits. Nor has it anything to do with mines! The name is an English corruption of an old Welsh word Mynydd, meaning mountain. English chews up other languages. We Indians know that well. Under English reign our Kolikata became Calcutta, Dilli became Delhi. We re-wrote our greatest poet’s name: Tagore in place of Thakur. But I don’t think I would have come to Minehead just out of linguistic solidarity. And really, I can’t think of a single good reason to come here. We came only to chase this footpath, several hundred kilometres down, to an entirely forgettable sandy spot just past a nudist beach somewhere in the south of the United Kingdom!

Our nomad’s life — a different bed each night — ended at Lulworth Cove, where two rocky arms reach out from the earth to hold a fragment of the ocean in a circular embrace. There being no accommodation available along our track past this point, and having secured a B&B in Corfe Castle whose lovely owner was willing to ferry us to and from the path, we resolved to do the final 50 or so kilometres at a leisurely pace as four half-day walks.

A few miles along from the hyper-touristy Lulworth Cove Village, above the drowsily quiet Tyneham Bay, Walking Buddy (WB) settled into his now habitual mid-way siesta, and I was absently musing ‘How do I love thee, let me count the ways’ – addressing SWCP of course, NOT WB!

A bird of prey soared into view from the rocks to our left. Bird-watchers had told us to look out for kestrels around here. If we are lucky we might even see a peregrine falcon. Three flaps of the wing took the raptor up into the glare of the mid-afternoon sun and beyond my iPad camera’s reach. Then it stopped dead in the sky. Two helicopters flew past (not unexpected, here the path borders a military training area). The bird held its place undaunted. Then it swooped, rose again almost immediately, floated like a feather, fluttered so fast that its wings disappeared and for a split second it looked like a giant dragon fly. It rested on the wind for what seemed like an impossibly long time. Finally, at lightening speed it darted towards the earth, straight as an arrow and disappeared from sight past the last visible cliff.

In its dramatic war dance, the falcon seemed to sketch a microcosm of our path across the sky: a thin line between the infinite blue to our right and the strange shapes of the land to our left, it rises and falls, sometimes edgy and rapid; elsewhere it arcs gently and then plateaus and slides quietly down a paddock.

From Minehead, the trail drifts west, at first through the ancient woodlands of the Exmoor National Park, on and off the strangely flat-topped ‘hogback’ hills. It flattens on reaching Devon’s muddy river banks, then becomes increasingly rugged as it nears Cornwall. In North Cornwall the track scales some of the highest cliffs of the Atlantic coast and plunges down to the sandy beaches, again and again, determined to test the walker’s will. Here a hundred or 200 metre climb five or six times in a row is all in a day’s walk.

If you have never climbed a hundred meters, then imagine taking the stairs up a 35 storey building, then imagine those steps are 10 inches wide, slippery, broken and there are no hand-rails. Now climb down those same steps and up 45 storeys… there are no lifts and your bedroom for the night is still three sky-scrapers away.

Land’s End is as far west as you can go, so tourists are here in droves. At dusk the inflatable theme-park wallahs roll up their plastic and most visitors leave with their kids and dogs. The sun sinks into the clouds somewhere between the Cornish west and the Canadian east. There is no landmass in between.

From here the path turns south to The Lizard (nothing to do with reptiles, something Cornish to do with heights), the most southerly headland of UK. The nearest car park is nearly a kilometre away, and the only way to get to the cove is on foot. From here the path turns right back, heading east again. The water to our right for the rest of the way is the English Channel.

As the track turns first south and then east, there is a subtle change in the terrain: the south coast is just a little less craggy. The razor-sharp angular slate shapes of the north coast begin to give way to gigantic stone eggs, cakes and mushrooms! The hills get greener and rounder still as the path reaches South Devon. Finally, in Dorset, the dramatic rocks of the Jurassic coast, red, gold and white, rise in straight walls from pebbly beaches below. This land is fragile as it is beautiful.

A hilarious Bengali satire (Ulat Puran, Re-Versed) imagines what might have been had Indians colonised Britain. I’m pretty sure that under Indian rule, the South West Coast Path would have been filled with Hindu pilgrims. I can see temples and deities rising from the deep. On the soft red sandstone above a beach in South Devon, someone must have carved the profile of a giant Jagannath, the arm-less Lord of the Universe. The Durdle Door (already a tourist Mecca) is undoubtedly the head of the elephant god making waves by sucking up and blowing out the sea in his trunk.

About five kilometres before the little blue marker where the SWCP formally ends, a less arcane signifier: white sandstone palms rise toward the sky in gratitude or perhaps a salutation.

Soon the path disappears into a long white sandy beach, like the one near my house on a far-away coast in another hemisphere. I kick off my boots, shrug off the hike and splash through the lapping water for the home stretch.

Starting and ending unceremoniously, as it does, the South West Coast Path underscores perhaps, that a road is more than any or even the sum of all the places it takes you to; that destinations might be less important than the means and methods we use to get there; that in life as on a hike, the journey is all that matters, the end is neither here nor there.

A Path for Many Ways

The South West Coast path is mostly so narrow you can neither overtake nor pass anyone, without some polite interaction. Mostly the conversation goes like this:

Me: ‘Good morning’

Other: ‘It is indeed. Beautiful. Enjoy it’.

But I have grown bold having walked more than a month, over 400 kilometres right across the top of the Exmoor National Park, and the Counties of Devon and Cornwall. For the record, in this time, we have experienced one misty morning and 5 minutes of drizzle, both in June.

So I add: ‘It is glorious here every day!’ This usually elicits invitations (which sound more like threats) to come back in winter, when the path is a slew of mud and dung, and the ocean is gulping down chunks off the rock face.

Every few days we do indeed find that bits of the path have fallen away, where walkers are diverted further up the hill, into paddocks. 2014 recorded the largest Atlantic storms in 60 years along parts of this coast.

The South West Coast footpath is an important part of tourism infrastructure, providing access to the beaches, coves and historic sites of interest. In Cornwall alone, it generates £300 million a year and supports 7500 jobs (PhD thesis by Claire Siobhan Earlie, Plymouth University). A retired engineer-turned-B&B-host tells us over breakfast that the rate of erosion has been much the same for 10,000 years. Still, Cornwall was one of the first counties in the UK to declare ‘climate emergency’, whatever that means.

For now though, the weather is perfect one day and just a tad warm the next. And thousands of summer revellers are using the path to get to their favourite sunny July activity.

Old and new tourist destinations are dotted along the South West Coast Path. In towns like Penzance, the railway line in the 1800s laid the foundations for summer tourism, with visitors flocking to the beaches nearby, some sandy, mostly rocky, but invitingly warm compared to other parts of Britain. The many rugged parts of the coast have inspired generations of artists, novelists and film-makers. From Rebecca <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_(novel)> to Poldark <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poldark> the Atlantic coast from Hartland Quay to Falmouth has repeatedly starred as the brooding, darkly angsty extension to moody heroes and sultry heroines. Indeed, the morning at the end of June, as we left the Hartland Quay Inn, the last coastal hotel in North Devon, the film crew for the latest version of Rebecca were rolling in.

TV’s Doc Martin has boosted the recognition of Port Isaac. Rick Stein outlets and other eateries have put Padstow on the world’s gourmet map. St Ives even has a Tate Galley to bring in the ‘Culcha-wallahs’ from around the world. Then there are towns like Hayle, which lost everything when the mining boom in Cornwall ended in the 19th century and now depend on the cheap end of tourist and retirees market for their survival.

Near such towns and the many other attractions strewn along the path, you can find yourself in a traffic jam, with dogs off leashes, kids in thongs, beer-guts and couples insisting on hand-holding where you can barely walk in a single-file. For most, the path is merely a means to take the shortest route to a destination where cars cannot reach. So the crowds melt away quickly, leaving most of the 1000 kms thinly populated with ramblers, hikers and trail runners.

Runners pass by like the wind. Ramblers are a hard to define. But it’s a very British thing (see https://www.ramblers.org.uk/) and for some reason most ramblers we have met along the way are white men of a ‘certain age’. Some of the ramblers might also be long-distance walkers, but more likely they have gone over the same ground time and again, so that they know their own parambulating patch like their own back yard. Ramblers stop to chat, encourage and inform. They know every turn in the path and every cove where you might see a seal, or where a boat went down ‘just a few years ago’ (in 1981, for instance, between Mousehole and Penzance).

Long distance walkers are even fewer and further between. We have met, perhaps a dozen who are walking one or two weeks at a time and planning to complete the path in a few years or decades. And have met just 6 or 7 who are trying to complete the path end to end – in one go.

Between Tintagel and Port Isaac, we run into several groups of teenagers hiking and camping for three days as part of their ‘Duke of Edinburgh Award’ <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Duke_of_Edinburgh%27s_Award>. One of them has a special assignment to interview hikers who are going the ‘whole way’ and I am the first one she has spotted!

My young interrogator wants to know why I am walking and what are the ‘key challenges’. The second one is easy: having the discipline to do a hard day’s walk and to get up the next day and do it again and again and again. Unlike tourists, hikers have no sense of destination. Unlike the runners we don’t keep time. Unlike ramblers, we don’t develop that abiding bond and knowledge of the place. Unlike dog-walkers, we are not doing it in the best interest of another being. Why did I set out on a long walk? I’m trying to figure that one out as I go, I tell her.

‘Mal’ (not his real name) is the only English ‘end-to-ender’ we have met. The other half-dozen have all been young Germans. We met Mal about a week into our walk. His rucksack weighs at least 4 times mine. He is carrying a tent, which he pitches wherever he can find a flat bit of land. With enough beer at the last pub on the day’s walk, he can fall asleep anywhere. I can hear him fifty paces away when he is labouring up a hill behind me. I admire Mal, but cannot imagine being without the creature comforts of a bed and a shower at the end of the day. I even have my bag carried when a section of the walk seems too long or too hard.

The South West Coast Path has to please a large and diverse clientele. And thanks to an army of volunteers from the National Trust, the South West Coast Path Association and a myriad of other agencies, it remains user-friendly, for the very few Mal-s at one end of the user-spectrum and at the other, the throngs armed with Trip Advisor’s top-ten lists, out to take selfies at the ‘second scariest cliff’ or the ‘largest Cornish Pasty’ in the world. And, then there’s all of us in between.

Two hundred years ago, this path was part of a crowded, morbid, polluted, industrial corridor, ravaged by centuries of mining for tin and copper and quarrying for granite and other hard stones. Some scars from mining still remain. But with a little help from humans, most of the pits are growing over and blending back into magical wild gardens.

As you walk the path, right on the edge of an ocean that’s rising ever faster, as you scour for the next signpost advising you of another rockfall, another diversion, you have to wonder what will remain of this much-trodden footpath in another 200 years?