I am walking the South West Coast Path very slowly. I started a clockwise route from Studland 3 Summers ago. I met someone last Summer who was doing it in 3 weeks. 630 miles. That’s pretty quick. I tell myself, however, that for me it’s all about the revelling in the time spent amongst people and places that I encounter en route not the feat of having done it. Where will the joy be then when I’ve stopped doing it? No, it’s the little surprises that each twist and turn throw up.
It’s the transitions, the changes that I often enjoy the most: walking up and down steep, chalk cliffs on the Jurassic Coast before suddenly entering an army range and the ghost village of Tyneham (it was requistioned by the government in 1943 to be used as firing ranges. 225 people were forced to leave their homes), walking past deckchairs and amusements on a wet day in Weymouth before crossing the harbour by ferry (one man in a rowing boat) and then starting a quieter, greener part of the path, crossing over the thin neck of Portland Bill and exploring the mysterious cliffs before arriving at the bill in sea fog, the light house sending out a haunting ‘HOOOOOOO’ which echoes into the wall of fog above the sea, climbing a stile and going into the cool, green of a wood or climbing a stile at the other end and coming out into the openness of fields, sky and sea.
It’s easy to make the obvious comparisons with life and the changes, successes, failures and micro dramas that mould us into the people that we are. For me, it’s even easier to feel how landscape is also instrumental in that moulding process.
So, I am picking the path up at Whitsand Bay just after Rame Head.
The night before I stayed at The Devon and Cornwall Inn in Millbrook. I eventually start just before 10 (England were playing a Quarter Final of the Rugby World Cup). The air is cool in these sunken lanes where the banks rise steeply up from the roadside and the meadows continue in strange angles up towards the sky. It’s cosy.
Just out of Millbrook I take a road map marked just as a white way ===. It’s a road because it was tarmaced once but when? There’s no way a modern day vehicle would be wide enough to make it along here. The tarmac is covered with moss and leaves and it winds its way up a hill past Wiggle Farm and eventually to a crossroads where it meets another, more accessible lane. The Autumn sun is stronger and warmer now and to the East lies Plymouth and the humped Loch Ness monster arches of the Tamar Bridge.
I have one of those rare moments where I return to the debate I have had with myself for so much of my adult life – solitude v loneliness. My solitude is not complete – I spend a lot of time with family and friends – but I do spend a fair amount of time alone. Often it’s thrilling and liberating and at others depressing and frustrating. This morning – after a week of not seeing many people and feeling quite alone – this moment makes it seem worth it.
I am on the top now walking towards Whitsand Bay. Rame Head is to my left, the squat chapel on its perfect little hill, even from a distance away showing the light that comes from the windows that are open on both its North and South sides. If I twist my neck further to the left I can see headlands that I’ve passed earlier in the year: Start Point sticking right out into the Atlantic and closer Stoke Point and the rugged little peak of The Mewstone, one rock half a mile off the Devon coast.
I meet a Devonian dog walker with his black and white lurcher. He must be in his seventies. He tells me he grew up in Newton Ferrers on one of those headlands that I was just looking at. His grandfather ran the lifeboat there on the Yealm estuary just with a small boat ‘with one sail’ so he tells me. I wonder how many times he risked his life to save others’.
How thought gets louder and more immersive when walking. I’m aware of the lane ahead and the rise of the land on the right and the drop to the left and then I’m aware of a new line appearing at the end of the road. My mind has misinterpreted it. After a split second what I expect to be another hill is the blue grey of the sea stretching to the horizon. I have a brief sense of vertigo and the excitement I would get as a child seeing the sea for the first time.
And here is the path. I normally slap the wooden sign that signals the next bit of the path as I did when I last left it (I am meticulous about starting the path where I left it – always pausing to take in the exact location of where I am before I leave that section). However there isn’t one this time. So I just give myself a little whoop and carry on.
The lone walker. A group of 8 or 10 walkers with dogs loudly chatter about a mutual friend. I am happy for them but I want to live the walk, the view, the air, the colours without interruption – absorb myself into that picture – and so I pretend to look at the map and let them pass. A chance meeting never to be repeated.
The path is narrow and snakes through the gorse and past the small chalets that nestle in the cliffs over Whitsand Bay with names like ‘Happy Days’ and ‘Blue Haze’. They look like they could be blown off but I’m probably wrong.
The path joins the road that links Kingsand / Cawsand to Freathy. The sun is warm now. Freathy passes. And now I am getting near the shooting ranges of Tregantle Fort.
The slick black outlines of surfers waiting on boards in the sun glitter.
Tregantle Fort is fearsome in its size and design. I wonder what it must look like inside. Huge MOD signs warn walkers not to leave the path. Gravel beds with numbers 1 – 6 look like golf driving ranges but are actually for firing.
I leave the range behind the path and I now bend myself along green banks towards Portwrinkle, clouds clustering into banks or masses – lines of the land, lines of the sea, lines of the cloud banks.
Wind, sun, sea. And nothing else. I am tired by the time I reach Portwrinkle and I don’t know why: probably the beer and a fitful night’s sleep the night before.
The Slow Walker 