I don’t sleep well above Pendeen Cliff. I keep waking up. I’m aware that other people are sleeping next to me and one person is clinging onto me. I wake up and have that horrible immobility which seems to last ages as I try to move in my twisted sleeping bag. The person huddled up to me is my rucksack. It’s fallen and resting against my back. Oh dear. The strange power of the imagination.
The weather has changed. While yesterday was summer, today is autumn. While yesterday was bright and blue, today is sullen and grey.
I pass the beach at Portheris which is abandoned today. Above the beach there’s some bunting left over from yesterday’s wedding flipping and flapping in the wind. I saw the bride, groom, bridesmaids in matching green and a few other guests walk down the cliffs to have their photos taken yesterday. It seemed like a scene from long ago.
After Portheris I get up onto the heath on the cliff top. Here sprigs of heather shiver in the wind. I could be in the Scottish highlands. Three wild ponies look up at me, their manes blowing in the wind. I reach forward slowly to touch the one who stands at the front but he breathes out through his nose, nods his head once and walks past me – I sense – with disdain.
Near Morvah is a huge stone wall. Cows are lowing somewhere. Rain comes in great screens travelling in front of me across the land and over the cliff. I’m wet but I’m into my stride. I smile to myself at the adventure.
Great towers of rock rise like chimneys flanking the ocean. The rain is really coming down now. I’m soaked through. I get that awestruck confusion of fear and pleasure from the great jutting headlands at Bosigar. It is what Edmund Burke termed ‘the sublime’.
‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.’
Apart from the mooing of the cows I feel utterly alone. I actually appreciate their company when I finally bump into them. Their coats are the colour of ginger nuts, their coats slick and shining from the rain. A mother and a calf block the old stone opening and I have to clap my hands and force them back, the mother’s great udders swinging as she slides in the mud.
I’m worried about the Land’s End and Isles of Scilly map getting ruined. The green ink is starting to smudge. This is the disadvantage of using a paper Ordnance Survey map. I don’t want the memories to blur and fade from last year like my jottings. Kremyl Point, Porthcurno, Porthgwarra. They are still there like snapshots but there are so many names on the map that I try to recall and can’t. I tell myself that the reason I can’t remember great sections of the path is because much of the time I’m in that state of walking dreaming (which is partly true). Perhaps it is time to get the OS map app.
My mind starts to turn to dry clothes, a cup of tea and finding a way back to my car.
The Slow Walker 