First day of hiking. Getting out of Falmouth proved more difficult than expected, as gale force winds meant ferries didn’t run as scheduled (and made the ride all that more interesting once on board, with coast guard helicopters suspended in the air above us).
The path, once we got on it at Place (the place is actually called Place, and I’ll leave it with you to imagine how bored a city planner has to be before naming a place Place), wounds its way along the coast, hugging that thin strip of land between the fields and the rocks below. The vegetation is surprisingly lush, with brambles, ferns, nettles, sloe and strangle weed forming a dense thicket on both sides, scrambling over each other and intertwining, sometimes closing over the path. Thorns snag you, nettles sting you and brambles trip you up, and you feel resentful towards the vegetation – the National Trust would be well advised to rename the path Sleeping Beauty’s Castle Gardens, I muttered – but then suddenly you come upon a clearing, and you realise that you’ve been walking next to a sheer drop of fifty metres or more, and that yon vegetation has been the only thing between you and becoming as one with nature. 27 kilometres of that today. More tomorrow.
Day 2
Set off from Portcoe into a sun-kissed and decidedly surreal landscape. Normal rules don’t apply: Gulls sailing on the thermals quite some distance beneath you, long abandoned mines right on the water’s edge (They mined for tin here, and the seams apparently often ran out underneath the seaboard. I can all too easily imagine the strange and above all short-lived moments when a gallery suddenly turned into a giant lobster tine.), and sometimes when you round a bend a whole stretch of the path will suddenly be gone, replaced by nothing but vertigo.
They say it’s due to flood damage and erosion, but sometimes the trail cuts so deep into the top soil as to create a virtual fault line (Nature gently reminding us it’s important to deviate from the norm on occasion, since if you just follow the beaten path and perish it will be your own fault…).
Add to that the soundtrack to my journey, as belted out by the Teutonic Titan trailing behind me (a medley of Sarah Bernardt and Meatloaf), and you will understand why I started to look for Alice in every rabbit hole we passed. Or maybe it’s just dehydration. Well, that’s nothing the publicans around here can’t rectify.
More ramblings anon.
Day 3
Someone pointed out to me that I was a tad harsh when describing the landscape yesterday. I still maintain that the downs are deceptive – it’s easy to think that those gently undulating hills are gentle, but all that means is that you are constantly ascending or descending. Add to that a never-ending supply of stiles (in a nearly endless variety of styles) and you have the mother of all obstacle courses.
But I’m happy to concede that the climate is heavenly. It is surely no coincidence that Project Eden is located in Cornwall – we missed it by a mere four kilometres today – but there is also the rather older endeavour of a similar ilk, which we passed yesterday, namely Caerhay, the 150-year old Williams family estate that harbours one of the greatest magnolia collections in the world (we missed the display by a mere four months).
You can understand why the Williamses got hooked. Magnolias – flowering trees so old they were around in the Jurassic – thrive here, and it’s easy to see why. When you descend into one of the hidden vales, wedged in between steep rocks, as I have just done, the air is thick with chlorophyll, dappled sun light makes the mist rise and palm trees and outsized bracken make it even more primeval, to the point where you might even believe that those rather large chicken are in fact velociraaaaAAARRGHH—–
Day 4
Ok, so I fibbed yesterday. I wasn’t devoured by dinosaurs, but I had a close encounter with a chicken Tikka Masala (ancient Hindi for Innards Wrenching) that Spielberg wouldn’t have managed a PG-13 rating on. Interestingly though, apart from that most British of institutions, the Indian curry, there is very little sense of Cornwall feeling British. The Cornish are a proud old people who had their own kings long before the Normans and the Saxons came along, and the Cornish flag (silver cross on a black field, since you ask) is prominently displayed most everywhere. The Union Jack is conspicuous only by its absence.
The Cornish have their own culture, as evidenced by their cooking – we live on Cornish pasties (not a derogatory term for sunbathers but a kind of meat pie) and Cornish ice cream – and their own language, which makes place names utterly incomprehensible, and which is spoken by the locals. “I speak it well enough when I’m drunk and mad” as one meaty fellow put it.
Against this background you’d be excused if you suspected the authorities of being a tad nervous. In fact, from Henry VIII’s buttered fortresses to the contemporary artillery firing range which we will pass through in a day or so, the subtle message may well be, look, we’re good guys, protecting you from the Roman Catholics/Romanian plumbers, but these cannons pivot, see, we can turn them around too, nifty, eh?
So far it seems to have worked, but if the Scottish secede, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cornish were hot on their heels.
Day 5
Today we were going to hike through the Cornwall Army Range, Propelled Artillery and Rocketry, Cornwall. Those who have been following my slog log will understand that this held no fears for me; at least British officers and gentlemen will signal before trying to blow you away so as not to inconvenience you unduly.
The same cannot be said for the weather, which is notoriously fickle. I have an uncanny ability to get it wrong, too. Once I suggested we sit down and enjoy the sun only to have to make a mad dash through the brambles to seek cover from a thunderstorm under a rocky outcrop (which we then promptly discovered had been split asunder by lightning at some point), another time I hadn’t finished the sentence “I think it’s going to rain all afteno—” before it was sunny again. But I digress.
The reason I was keen to see the C.A.R.P.A.R.C. was that oftentimes no man’s lands of this kind become a haven for wildlife, and I was looking forward to seeing an abundant – if slightly shell-shocked – fauna. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to look remarkably like the many golf courses we have passed on the way. (“Look, links!” I would cry each time, to which my German companion would reply “…und Rechts!” Oh, how we laughed. Entertainment is scant on the trail.)
It is to be hoped the armed forces perform better than the golfers we have seen, though. A thousand years from now marine archaeologists trying to piece together clues from our long-lost civilisation will gather that these golf courses were cult places where Nimby, the god of denial, and Exxon, the vengeful god of greenhouse gasses were appeased with gifts of small, white spherical objects placed in sand pits in their hundreds.
Day 6
We arrived in Plymouth last night, and after the idyllic scenery of the last five days it’s vast urban sprawl was a shock to the system (although the gin helped), so we couldn’t wait to get out of there. Even so, it took us the whole morning to traverse the harbours and docks – the best thing to be said for it is that it’s easier on the feet than on the eyes.
Plymouth is otherwise best known for another group of people keen to leave it; the Pilgrims set off from Plymouth on the Mayflower over 350 years ago. Their importance is vastly overrated – in fact they only became known to the general public through the publication of a poem that got most of the facts wrong – but whatever else they were, they were comically inept. They didn’t pack a single plough but several tea cosies, and between them they had neither a doctor nor a carpenter. (The one important – but oft overlooked – thing the Founding Fathers did right was to bring along Founding Mothers… At least they realised women would be necessary to found a colony!) They would have been well advised to take a leaf from the book of Francis Drake, who was not only a privateer and swashbuckler extraordinaire, but also mayor of Plymouth. It was from here he set out to vanquish the Spanish Armada, but when he got knighted for services to the crown (the aforementioned armada and – allegedly – buckling the royal swash) he got out double-quick, headed for balmy Devon. And so do we.
Day 7
Two features of the coastal landscape strike me as almost magical; rivers around here are all tidal, meaning that twice a day they simply disappear, leaving a natural causeway that extends for kilometres inland. If you arrive at one, as we did today, you have only to wait, watching the water drain away as if someone had pulled the plug on the world’s greatest (and grimiest) bath tub before you can ford it. Or you plough through the stream long before it’s safe (why yes, we ARE quite gung-ho, thank you for noticing!).
Islands on the other hand are easy to imagine as little paradisiacal microcosms, untouched by the rest of the world. Of course estuary islands are sometimes reachable by foot at low tide, such as Burgh island at the end of today’s hike, which is also a.k.a. Agatha Christie’s inspiration for the setting of And Then There Were None (formerly Ten Little Niggers), her best murder mystery.
Mewstone island, just off the coast of Devon, which we passed yesterday, is much more inaccessible, in spite of being just off the coast. In 1744, a peasant convicted of a petty crime was sentenced to deportation to the island for seven years(!). One imagines the local magistrates may have favoured another bestseller, namely Daniel Defoe, whose eponymic hero’s exploits had been published in 1719 to huge popular acclaim.
So much for islands being idyllic!
Outro
And so my journey’s at an end. Instead of lacing op my boots and setting out on the trail, I find myself on a train bound for London.
Having never tried sustained hiking before, I didn’t know what to expect, but I’m glad to say that it has been a great and very meditative experience. In total we did 200 km this week, and climbed up 8,800 m and down again, or the equivalent of 25 Empire State Buildings. Now, the South West Coast path is 1,050 km altogether, so I haven’t done more than a fraction of it, but – to paraphrase the ebullient Bill Bryson – I hiked it in rain and sun, I hiked it on the beaches and on the cliffs, I hiked it laughing, I hiked it crying, I HIKED the SWC.
The lasting impression of the coastal path is one of great natural beauty, and it’s surprising to me that there were so few hikers on it. (Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy we were alone most of the time, as the experience wouldn’t have been the same otherwise!)
The one person I couldn’t have done it without, whose adventure this really is, who was on the trail two weeks before I arrived and still will be for two more after I’ve gone, is my staunch hiking companion Florian. You set me on the path and pointed me in the right direction and for that I owe you. Happy trails!