Tag: Tarka Trail

Leaving Tarka

After some 70 Kilometres of soaring and plunging with the cliffs above the Bristol Channel, the South West Coast Path (SWCP) moves down to the coast. From Woolacombe on, the path passes through a series of seaside suburbs with miles of sandy to muddy beaches, that I had never imagined in England. The water is mostly shallow, warm and inviting. Dogs and children everywhere with ice creams melting faster than you can lick. It isn’t Bali or Goa or even Western Australia. You can imagine how desolate it might get here in winter. Right now, however, happy holiday makers are taking full advantage of a rare sunny day, baking themselves red as lobsters, seemingly undaunted by monstrous jelly fish which have come ashore and melted into the sand like gelatinous blobs with multiple limbs.

But no one flies from the pristine swimming beaches of Australia to the UK for sand or sun! Over the next 50 kilometres or so, I am chasing Tarka, the most famous otter in the world. See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarka_the_Otter> for more information or better still read Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers, 1927 novel by naturalist, broadcaster and writer Henry Williamson. There are films and tomes of readings and writings about Tarka. And since 1987, there’s even a walking trail to commemorate Tarka’s travels up and down the rivers Taw and Torridge.

Half a day’s walking brings us from the beach suburbs to Braunton Burrows, where the Tarka trail folds into the SWC path. Abundant signage informs all visitors of the rich flora and fauna of the region. The Tarka track is set up for tourists and families. In the small patchy sections of forest, you can imagine a baby otter running ‘among buttercups and cuckoo-flowers and grasses bending with bright points.’ The blackberry brambles still arch over the narrow track, with fluffs of wool from grazing sheep along the edges of farming tracts. In a thicket, feathers on the ground and what looks suspiciously like a foot without the rest of the rabbit, provide evidence of a mortal struggle the night before. Williamson’s Tarka prepares one for all of this. Tarka is no cute fluffy animal of children’s picture books. He is descended from ‘hunters in woods’ and he lives and dies as much amongst birdsongs and butterflies as amongst creatures who survive by eating each other.

Though otters are no longer hunted (banned since 2004) and people in Braunton and nearby villages will tell you they are plentiful further up-river, no one seems to have seen these shy creatures in a while in this part of the track. Much of the walk into the town of Braunton is through a heavily used golf course and in and out of a military training area, then on to a dead straight sealed path called American Road, in memory of the US soldiers who trained here before the allied landing on the Normandy beaches. We had been hearing the tell-tale put-put of shooting for some time, then suddenly we were standing before what looked like a rehearsal for a film shoot: dogs barking and camouflaged men running around playing with guns. But ‘No ma’am, you cannot take photos’. And ‘yes, ma’am they are real guns’ and though the cartridges might be blanks, they can hurt you. Of course, it is perfectly safe to walk as long as we stay strictly on the marked walking track.

Tarka grew up knowing the dangers of dogs and men with guns. His parents were killed by hunters and he himself faced off with the hounds time and again. Though Tarka himself was courageous even vicious, it is hard to imagine his kind showing up near here.

The rest of the walk into Braunton is on an artificially raised embankment, much of it quite a distance from the riverbed. Tide is out. Mud banks are hosting several groups of feeding birds. Closer to the path, strings of boats, which look like they have been stationary for several seasons. From Braunton, Instow is another 25.7 kilometre flat walk, through bike tracks and farms on the banks of Taw. This is too close to salt-water for otters, we are told by a woman who sounds knowledgeable. To see otters, she says, we need travel up-river and away from the sea.

On the mudflat the scenery barely changes from one bend of the river to another. Flat walks are often kind of boring. So we decide to take the boat across the Torridge from Instow to the tourist town of Appledore, then walk just 8 kilometres, back to the coast, to a strangely named town called Westward Ho! (written always with an exclamation mark – but that’s another story), where the Tarka trail and the SWCP part company.

No otter sighting. But drifting, a tad listless on Tarka’s tail, lets my mind wander into my favourite childhood holidays, reading beautifully illustrated English children’s books, amongst them, of course, Wind in the Willows conjuring up every child’s dream forest-resort. I read Bengali, too. But the English books were so much better produced and with colour prints which our own books never had. Thus England’s stories and images fed my generation’s imagination on ‘strawberry, sugar and cream’ long before any of us tasted our first berry, let alone saw the first wild berry bush. We knew, fancied and fantasised the foods, the meadows and dells, the flowers and animals of England, more than anything in our own real surroundings. Not finding Tarka, bizarrely and precisely evokes that childhood, five thousand miles away in Kolkata and Delhi, spent chasing things that were always going to be manifestly unreal for us.

South West Coast Path: Indian Take-Away 1

The South West Coast Path starts on the northern ridges of Exmoor National Park, follows the coastline, past the park, westward to Land’s End. Then it the turns right around with the coast and moves east along England’s southern seas, through Cornwall, Devon and Dorset. When the sky is absolutely clear (which is rare here even in early summer) you can look right across the Bristol Channel from the north of Devon to the southern coast of Wales, 30 miles away. We’ll be doing 500 to a thousand metre climbs up and down most days.

On day three, little west of Lynton, we had stopped to catch our breath and admire the vast expanse of the sea when a local greeted us. We were very lucky to get a day so bright he said. ‘I walk ‘ere most everyday. First time for me to see Wales’. ‘Whales? Where?’ says my walking buddy (WB) excitedly. He is having a little trouble with local lingo. ‘W(h)ales? NOO, they doon cum doon soo far in’, says the confused man. By now WB has tuned in. ‘O, yes, of course, Wales’, he recovers. The following day, though, we do see seals swimming around rocks some hundred meters below us. ‘Well he could have seen whales’ WB insists. Nope. If there was any chance of whale sightings the tourist brochures would have alerted us.

Mostly when we meet other walkers (dozens on some days) we gush about the wonders of the coastal cliffs plunging into the sea, its rugged beauty and the giddying sensation of walking on the edge when the land falls away from the path, sudden and precipitous. At other times, the path is barely the width of your hiking boots and overgrown. If the light is poor, you see little beyond the next step. But the micro scenery surrounding each human step is teeming with life. Tiny caramel coloured mushrooms, or massive toadstools larger than the width of the path, emerald coloured beetles, tiny wild flowers and holes of different sizes all over the ground, hinting at the network of burrows under the silty soil. Elsewhere, when the path is wide and gentle through the meadow, the hills are rounded, the clouds billowy, cattle and sheep grazing, you realise that this land and sea, in fact, have long been domesticated. These dells and slopes are planted with the white daisies and pinky-purple bell heather flowers from the English fairy tale books of my childhood. You can believe in pixies in these wild gardens.

Exmoor National Park is criss-crossed with walking trails. More famous authors than you can count have lived or visited somewhere around here at some time and written about its pubs and paths and combes and coves. Every bit of this coast has been well-trodden, mapped and inscribed. Some of the realities of this landscape have followed fiction: the Tarka trail has been laid along the life cycle of an otter called Tarka , from a 1920s children’s novel by naturalist and author Henry Williamson. The Tarka Trail, merges with the South West Coast Path as the latter moves inland down River Taw. We will walk in the fictional Otter’s footsteps and waterways for 3 days.

And every Dick and his dog is walking here – really they are. Day hike with anywhere between one to four dogs seems to be the de rigueur in this part of England. Most people on the trail can tell you every turn on a twenty kilometre radius from wherever you run into them. But few have ventured too much further. There is a small handful who are doing a few days at a time and plan to do the whole coast path over several years. So far, we have met just one walker who is trying, like us, to hike the whole thousand kilometre path in one go.

Near the coastal holiday villages (and we get to one of these for most nights) we encounter keen walkers, daily ramblers, families of picnickers, and groups of friends, young and old, all walking. But even here, the idea of walking right around the top and bottom of Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, tends to produce a ‘Wow, you are crazy’ or some variant thereof, although a small number do confess to harbouring a dream of some day walking the whole trail.

Still, despite the people and the books and the organised road signs, for the post colonial Indian (eg. Me), used to London and other big cities of England, this feels like a road less travelled. I am used to being the only Indian on long walks in Europe. But this trail and its surrounds seem determinedly mono-cultural: white, English. So far on the walk we have met just half-an-Indian – yes just half, mum English, dad Indian and absent. And there is a Sri Lankan selling curry from a van on a beautifully sheltered beach in the very popular surfing village, Woolacombe.

I can’t help wondering: has any Indian walked the South West Coast Path? You have seen the Empire Strikes Back (movie 1980). You may even have read the Empire Writes Back (book about post-colonial literature, 2000-ish). Now for the Empire Walks Back?