It’s February half term and I’m back in Cornwall, back on the coast path. I’m staying at The Tinners Arms pub in Zennor in a little room next to a dead end lane which looks directly onto the small, squat tower of the church and an ancient wall made of great blocks of granite so overgrown that it appears to be half wall, half hedge.
With boyish excitement I realise that this will be the first time I will be using the Ordnance Survey map app to guide me around the Cornish coast.
There was an item on the radio earlier about the OS map app as I drove along the M5 through Devon. They were talking about how or what to update. A woman from Bristol who leads hiking groups for women was saying how they should mark places that are at risk of flooding – very much something of our times. She also hoped that it would tell you what sort of fields you’re walking through. The man from Ordnance Survey was saying they make thousands of updates everyday.
Of course the best thing about it is that you can always see where you are and even what direction you’re facing with the help of the little red arrow. I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve had to try to work out my position on paper maps by looking at landmarks around me or roads or paths and then trying to relate this to the map. This is a great skill in itself – orientation – and I wonder if it’s something that I and we might lose the ability to do.
At the cottage in Somerset I have a box with a stack of the iconic pink Landranger maps that have covered all the parts of the coast path I’ve walked so far: ‘Taunton and Lyme Regis’ – falling apart from so much use; ‘Dorchester and Weymouth’ – some of the most beautiful countryside I can imagine and Thomas Hardy’s homeland; ‘Exeter and Sidmouth’ – the hill climbing up to Sidmouth was one of the steepest and most strenuous I can remember but with a heart stopping view of the coast stretching miles and miles to the east; ‘Plymouth and Launceston’ – full of reminders and memories of that crazy year I lived by the sea and slogged away at my teacher training; ‘Land’s End and The Isles of Scilly’ – the end of the land, bleak and dramatic.
On those worn pages in green ink I have charted my tramps each time noting the date and where I started and ended each section. It’s my own journey with my own points of reference put on top of the markers that are already there. Sometimes there is a brief note ‘swim’ or ‘slept here’ so that I can revisit it one day and remember. An app can’t record my journey like this – even if I do so here – so I make a mental note that I must still chart my journey with green ink on paper maps even if I’m now mapping my route electronically.
I am reading Ronnie Blythe’s last book ‘Next to Nature’ at the moment. I read like I walk: slowly. And I follow it as he records life at Bottengoms Farm, his home from 1977 until he died there in January and the inspiration for much of his writing. The book is set out chronologically month by month starting in January and ending in December. And I keep time reading January in January, February in February and so on. Yes, it takes me a month to read a chapter.
In ‘map-readings’ Ronnie says how reading a map when ‘one is still is sheer happiness.’ He empties his old OS maps onto his table – that ancient old table always piled with books – and welcomes them warmly as he did with anyone who cared to visit him.
‘The maps, young and ancient, slither on to the table. What dear, crumpled old friends..The magic when these are spread out, the endlessness of places!’
Oh yes, how right you are, Ronnie, and how your eye sees or saw so many things in that extraordinarily perceptive way of yours. I went to see him six times in the last two years before he died. I wish I’d known him earlier in his life but how invaluable those meetings were and when he finally departed in January I realised that there was something truly great about him that defies description. In another era he might have been a saint.
On the way from Zennor to Carnelloe it is blowy and cold. I can feel it in my fingers. I don’t think I’ve walked the coast path this early in the year before.
At Carnelloe a stream rushes past a tall bush of bamboo. One light intermittent rush of noise above a deeper, richer and more constant rush of noise. Shhhhhhhh. It could induce a trance. Gorse is flowering everywhere although most other plants seem cloaked in the brown of winter.
I can’t find the path at Carnelloe. The little red arrow goes back and forth turning back inland and then returning towards the sea again. The path forks further west than it says it does on the map. Bullocks chase each other through fields above Porthglaze cove. There is no one else here. There is an intense beauty at play over Gurnard’s Head but the enormous age of the land around me – its permanence and my impernanence – suddenly makes me shudder.
My father used to say there was something frightening about the Cornish landscape. This from a man who never said he was scared of anything. But today I feel that too. I walk another mile or two and then turn back inland for a hot shower and a pint of Tinners Arms ale.
The Slow Walker 