Hello and thank you for following me as I wander. This blog is about walking but also what happens to me when I walk. That is – like with many of us – I drift, not off the path, although that often happens too (and that can be sometimes rewarding or challenging). No, the ‘drift’ that I’m referring to is the thoughts that occur as I walk. I like to refer it as slow walking. The priority is not so much the exercise or reaching the end but the experience: what I sense, think and feel.
First and foremost I love the experience of walking. The landscapes, topography, plants, wind, light, wildlife and people I meet are a never ending fascination to me but also the experience often (not always) can inspire memories, thoughts, stories and physical happiness. And sometimes I get wet, cold and miserable too. Yet that is all part of it. I’m never sure what there’ll be. It’s all about the novelty of the adventure. I hope you enjoy it too.
It’s 9am and I’m at the car park in Treyarnon. There is only one other person here – a young surfer with a red sweat shirt and green jeans checking out the surf while humming a tune to himself. It’s still icy cold on the hands and face but the clouds have now disappeared and unlike the uniform grey of yesterday, the land and ocean are lit up.
As the coast path leaves Treyarnon grass covered ground stretches to the edge of low cliffs. Between the line of the path and the land’s edge there are several benches in a row staring straight out to sea waiting expectantly. Coming towards them from the south west, tightly packed lines of surf rise and then crash onto the rocks at the base of the low cliffs. I pause and listen. A gentle roar. And the low hum of the wind. And my heart beating.
Beyond Treyarnon Point, Constantine Bay unfurls itself, a great sweep of golden sand which rises gradually from the sea up to the sea dunes that wall it in like a Roman amphitheatre. Where is the tidal pool mentioned in Roger Deakin’s wild swimming classic ‘Waterlog’? I seem to remember Deakin swimming in it with someone who lives locally and their black labrador. I furiously try to search for it on my phone but there is no signal. This is a good thing. Although I’d love to know where it is.
When I cross to the other side of the beach there is a great tangle of fishing netting. It’s at least 6 feet long with 3 or 4 ropes and a mass of nylon fishing line. I remember sailing around the Hebrides last summer on board the Dutch ketch, Steady and her Dutch skipper, Willem, saying how the majority of the plastic pollution he sees when sailing around the UK seems to come from the fishing industry.
Constantine Bay leads into Booby’s Bay from where I start the climb up to Trevose Head. I am stopped by the unmistakable cadences of a skylark peeping away in the cold air above me. Wow, he’s keen. And surely way too early? But let’s hope he finds the one. It’s a little taster of spring and I sense that I’m starting to feel that sense of expectation.
At Trevose Head I look back to Towan Head and Kelsey Head, only just visible now while thinking about the passing of time. When was it I passed there? The memories can blur, especially with so many mental images of the coastline. Here – Trevose Head – is an exposed bit of land that reaches out into the Atlantic like a small growth on the knee of the Cornish peninsula that tapers away from the rest of Britain and ends at Land’s End. The land turns east after here and I’ll turn my back on all the headlands I’ve done since going back to St Agnes Head that I went round in May of last year.
Trevose Head protruding from the ‘leg’ of Cornwall
On the point is the gleaming white tower of Trevose Head lighthouse which was built in 1847 as a guide for vessels in the Bristol Channel. It became automated in 1995 with the last keepers to oversee the lighthouse being withdrawn just before Christmas of that year. This was not long before the very last lighthouse keeper left a UK lighthouse at the North Foreland Lighthouse in Margate in 1998.
Trevose Head Lighthouse
Above Merope Rocks is a seat that looks like it’s floating in the air. It is perched on a point that seems to disappear beyond the seat. With its back to me and the great expanse ahead of it, it has something of the drama of a Caspar Friedrich painting. It also reminds me of the recurring dream I used to have when I was young of me standing on a platform the size of a foot mat hundred of metres above the sea.
I sit on this bench wrapped up against the cold easterly that is blowing straight into me. The bench is dedicated to Pat and Alan Hayward ‘who loved this place’. I can see why. The land falls away on all sides so I do feel like I’m hovering in the wind above the sea;I could be sitting on the edge of the earth.
Ahead of me I have a grand vista of the Cornish coast stretching for miles to the north east. It is also a view of a journey – one of many – that will engage me for months and probably years to come. More headlands protrude into the blue green of the sea with names that will haunt and excite me as I carry on: Padstow Bay, Pentire Point, Start Point and Tintagel Head. It’s so clear today I can see these places lining up, each protruding bit of land a bit fainter than the one that lies before it.
Bench at Merope Rocks with Pentire Point and other headlands beyond.
I am now turning south down the eastern edge of Trevose Head and soon curving round to Harlyn Bay. It’s a stunning beach and one I remember well from my twenties when I used to come and surf at Polzeath with a great friend who had a caravan up at Trebetherick. We used to come to Harlyn Bay just as a place to unwind in between surf sessions.
I remember finding a faded Polaroid photo someone had taken of the beach which for years I kept in one of my first journals when I was living in London. I still have the notebook but not the photo. One person’s memory lost and left on the beach to be taken by another person who held onto it for a while before also losing that same memory.
Standing on the beach I know I’ve reached the end for today. I suddenly have one of those unthinking moments of suddenly feeling a place. It’s probably only 10 seconds but I feel like it is much longer when I come round from it and try to write it down:
A stream emptying onto the beach. Riffling over slate. Sun glitter on moving water. Hushing of waves drifting in and out of earshot. A dog barks. The brief distant scream of a child. A plane briefly overhead. Then the wind. Then the stream. And again the waves.
It’s almost three and a half months since I was last here. It’s not that I don’t like walking in winter. I love it, unless it’s heavy rain but other things have been happening and hey, as always, what’s the rush? At my girlfriend’s house I have a favourite mug with a picture of a sloth on it saying ‘Live slowly’. This mug and its advice has more benefit and wisdom in it than several sessions with a life coach or psychoanalyst but if only I could implement it. Walking the coast path seems to be the one area of my life where I do seem to have some success at being slower and thereby calmer.
My weather app is saying the daytime temperature in Cornwall is struggling to climb above freezing and the sky is the featureless blanket of grey that can often be the default setting of English weather, especially so at this time of year when a whole week can pass with the same unchanging dullness in the outside world.
At Porthcothan beach there are only a handful of people on the beach, all wearing bobble hats and two excited spaniels with lolling tongues and tails that are wagging so fast they could be motorised. There is no sound apart from the gentle repetitive lapping of the waves on the sand. I expect most people are watching the rugby. It’s in stark contrast to the busyness and holiday vibes of October half term last time I was here. This is low season at its lowest.
The thought sends tingles through my arms and neck, an inner warmth at being utterly alone in the landscape that is hard to describe. It is an emotion I’ve always associated with adventure, or more accurately being alone with nature in its rawest form. It’s I guess what the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke referred to as the sublime. A strange and powerful thrill derived from awe and fear of nature.
In “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful” Burke wrote:
“The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror..”
Even after all these miles walking around Cornwall the sea here still has the power to stop me in my tracks. There is no sunlight but the water colour is breathtaking, a luminous pale green like the jade ornaments that I remember seeing a few years ago in the National Museum of Taiwan. Foam in the sea meanders mysteriously along the coast in parallel lines like a track or pathway across the water until I lose sight of it.
It’s so quiet that all reminders of human activity seem incongruous and redundant like one of those post-apocalyptic films that inevitably feature zombies or the city scenes devoid of humans we can remember when we were first forced to ‘stay at home’ during the Covid lockdowns. At the water’s edge above Fox Cove a lonely bench and life buoy look out to sea at the perfect straight line of horizon and a bank of cloud that rests above it. I sit on the bench and stare at the lines – of foam and horizon and cloud. And think of nothing.
Bench and Life Buoy, Fox Cove
At Treyarnon Point, the light is starting to fade and I start imagining my hotel room at Mawgan Porth and a cup of tea. The road can lead me straight back to Pothcothan Beach.
The Bedruthan Hotel and Spa is a huge white modern block built on top of the cliff overlooking the beach at Mawgan Porth. The room was reduced and the spa might bave sold it to me (I do love a good spa). It’s only later that I read some of the hotel spiel which surely is designed to entice the likes of me. When describing the spa: “Slow down and stare over the gentle blue.” It sounds great although I seem to do an awful lot of that already (or try to). They also have something called a ‘Wanderlust’ package: “When you’re feeling exploration’s call experience our wanderlust escape”.
When I arrive at hotel it is pandemonium. There must be almost a hundred cars spread out in four separate car parks. It feels a bit like arriving at an airport. I manage to squeeze my car in a corner next to a hedge. At reception there are queues of people with dogs. Both restaurants are fully booked. A staffie with a frowning big bearded owner holding on tight to its leash unleashes a volley of rapid barking at me in the corridor on the way to my room. Both owners look at their dog incredulously as if to indicate to me this never normally happens. I smile at them. After a whole day of being alone next to the sea, Bedruthan is something of a wakeup call.
Outside below the hotel I find a terrace with an incredible view over Mawgan Porth. The only other people is a lady in an overcoat in her seventies and I guess her granddaughter, probably about 8.
As I walk past the grandmother she turns to me and says ‘Have you seen it?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The whale.’
‘No, no I haven’t’.
I imagine there’s some wooden whale that the hotel have for kids to play on.
‘There’s been sightings of a humpback whale all week between here and St Ives. Apparently you can see it clearly from here.’
‘No way. Thank you for telling me. I’ll keep looking out there for it’.
Here I am still staring at the sunbeams that lance downwards onto patches of Towan Head, the small finger of land that points out to sea west of Newquay, the green of the land brighter inside those shafts of light. I think back to Newquay and the empty road train rumbling along the High Street, the wonderful white washed huer’s hut gleaming in the autumn sun and my funny little sleeping pod inland at Newlyn East. On the coast path you can see your past, in this case lit up like a spotlight onto a stage as if a divine hand is making me aware of what came before and appreciate what I’ve seen. It’s been like this all the way round, looking back and trying to remember what had come before and where. Is it going to be 10 years next year since I started it? Can that be right? Or was it 2016? I can’t remember and it doesn’t matter.
I’m brought out of my reverie by dark figures walking menacingly along the cliff edge. There are four or five huge black birds with thick necks and large bills swaggering self consciously, their bodies leaning from side to side with each step they take, Putin-like. They are ravens, the largest of the crow family.
Not long ago I was listening to Radio 4’s series of 2 minute guides to birdsong ‘Tweet of the Day’ (surely one of the finest pieces of radio broacasting anywhere ever). This particular one was about ravens and narrated by Sir David Attenborough. Attenborough made a play on William Blake’s immortal line from Jerusalem by referring to them as having ‘dark satanic bills’. He also said you might see them on a beach eyeing you up as potential prey! I have to admit that seeing them close up like this, with their imposing size and beady eyes, did make my stomach give a little lurch.
At Park Head a family of four look thoughtfully out to sea. The daughter, who looked about 12, said in that curious way of teenagers: ‘What’s it called when two people..?’
The parents say seriously: ‘Bigamy. It’s illegal.’
The mother emphasising ‘Very much illegal’.
I pass them with a smile and set my gaze on Park Head.
Park Head is a great flat expanse of short grass that tapers down to a sharp hooked point that looks north west into the Atlantic across thousands of sea miles towards I imagine somewhere like Nova Scotia or some other such chilly place in North America. The earth here is so flat and comfortable underfoot and the view so striking that I sit down on the cliff edge like a teenager on a school field. From this angle I can now see small islands to the west of Towan Head: they are known as The Goose and The Chick. Although they appear to be next to each other they are at least a mile apart. The Chick sits south west of The Goose off the end of Kelsey Head near Holywell Beach where I slept outside the night the Aurora arrived unexpectedly in the sky over Cornwall and stunned people all over southern England with its dreamy, hazy colours. That was May.
Much closer to me but across Mackerel Cove sheep lie nonchalantly on the cliff top, their heads facing away from the sea. Do they have good awareness of being too close to the edge? Or are there quite often sheep casualties on the Cornish cliffs? It definitely seems that some are happy to take the risk.
Sheep near Park Head
Walking away from Park Head I see a bird that looks like an oversized blackbird with a longer curved beak. An orange beak. No, more like pink. No red. And the penny drops. And there is another and another. Then two more appear. Choughs again, and five of them this time. Once again a meeting with that elusive emblem of Cornwall. The only time I’ve spotted them on all my wanderings around the perimeter of Cornwall has been in this corner of the county, between here and Holywell. They mill about seemingly unperturbed by me, pecking away with those flashy beaks before flying away to Park Head.
At Porthcothan I have a slight sense of trepidation before going into the sea from the small beach. The sign warns of strong currents but the water is too blue, too alluring, tempting me in like the mermaid of Zennor seducing young Mathey Trewala so that he left his earthly home and went to live with her under the waves. Or so the Cornish story goes. Maybe like him I’ll disappear into that watery world and never been seen on dry land again. The waves slide and collide sideways into each other and I bob about without thought just feeling the coldness of the water stinging my legs, my eyes wide open staring out to sea and my breath like the sound of the waves on the sand behind me. I’m totally ‘absent’. And at last – for the first time today – the sun appears and lights up Trevose Head with its white lighthouse.
When I come out smiling inanely like a madman, I’ve totally lost track of time. It’s a dash to get changed, hopping about to get into jeans, getting sand out of toes, struggling to pull socks on and into my boots. It’s a turbo walk to get to the village and finally at the end of a sand track between thick hedges I suddenly spill out onto the road. I get to the bus with 2 minutes to spare.
Up to see Jane, me squelching and slipping up the path between the tennis courts. Danni is there making tea and coffee for us.
I wait in the kitchen while I hear the buzz of her stairlift as she comes down the stairs. She is now 94. Before Christmas she told mum she really felt her age and she was getting fed up.
When I told her that I was walking lots and writing a book about it she said ‘He who walks alone walks the farthest’ which I took figuratively to mean he who walks alone discovers the most. It’ll do well as a blessing for the book.
We talked about the farm and she told me how busy it always was. ‘There were always people in the kitchen’ she told me. Not workers but tradespeople or those commercially connected to the farm. She told me about two brothers who came from New Zealand every year to help shear the sheep. One of them carried on doing it even though he was allergic to the lanolin, the waxy substance that comes from sheep’s wool. He eventually died relatively young, she thought as a result. There was also the haymaking and the netting of elvers (when they still existed in numbers), all the nets hung up to dry in the old barn at Bowden’s Farm, where Richard now lives.
As she talked sometimes it seemed a struggle and she forced the words out sometimes with her eyes closed as she cast her mind back through the years. And I felt bad for asking. Normally I stay til Danni comes back at 12.30 to make her lunch but after I’d gone to the loo about 12 I got back and Jane was asleep and I told her I’d leave. I wonder if she’s coming to the end of her own epic journey.
I sleep soundly in my little cabin near Newlyn East until I am shaken awake at 4.30 by a cockerel crowing about 2 metres from my head. It’s still raining, the pattering constant on the leaves in the trees surrounding me.
I find the breakfast room, a small whitewashed barn – or probably an old dairy – with old surfboards resting on the rafters and an aquarium bubbling away in the corner. One end of the room is a kitchen and there are plastic tubs of cereal, a kettle and a fridge for guests to make their own breakfast. Bits of printed A4 are stuck up around the place. One tells of how a local film was shot here called The Chocolate Club. Another tells the local story of St Newlina.
Apparently she was a local girl betrothed to a nobleman but refused to marry him as she was ‘pious and god fearing’. Apparently he flew into a rage and struck her head off. The story goes that where her head fell a spring appeared. ‘It was said he beheaded her a quarter of a mile due south of St Newlyn East. The sacred spring at Penhallow House is believed to be the exact spot where she was most brutally murdered and its waters are said to have healing properties as well as magical abilities for nourishing, wellness and fertility.’ The church in the village was rededicated in 1259 and since has been known as St Newlina.
A wren comes in briefly to watch me having my breakfast before flitting off. A superstitious person might suggest the wren is my spirit guide. One appeared beside me on the path yesterday just as I joined it above the Watergate Bay Hotel. It seems everywhere I go there he is – the wren – landing close by, twitching, turning, watching before flying away, his short, sharp squeak emanating from some hidden place.
I arrive at the small village of Trevarrian to pick up from where I left off yesterday. I wait in the car thinking of nothing until a shower rains itself out.
On the way across a field to the path campions shiver under a hedge, their pink star-shaped flowers shiny with rainwater.
Less than half an hour later I’ve gone round Berryl’s Point and am looking down at Mawgan Porth. When I stop on the side of the cliff it seems I am surrounded by typical sights and sounds of the Cornish coast. A small blue fishing boat out at sea heaves from side to side, the pink bubbles of its buoys visible on its stern. Below there are distant screams of children in the sea – half excited, half alarmed – barking dogs and the indistinct burble of a tannoy on the back of a white RNLI pick up in the middle of the beach. A mass of beginner surfers with multi-coloured boards stand in the surf while 4 more experienced guys are taking waves from a break that starts from a large rock at the south end of the cove below me.
Light seems to be gathering strength in the sky and the wetness of the path starts to turn a pale blue as I descend.
The beach is thronging with half term activity. Dogs hurtle to and fro doing that most doggy of pastimes: chasing sticks. At the back of the beach a family sit quietly on deckchairs in front of a purple tent that declares ‘Trespass’. Good advice that. A boy and a girl are both stuck into books while an elder boy at the front eats a roll and looks out to sea. A mother sits amongst them drinking coffee from a Thermos mug. They all look to be lost in their own thoughts. A fourth child in a yellow beanie and grey hoody is building an enormous sand dam that curves in an elongated C around the front of the family as if protecting them from some imaginary incoming tide or tsunami. And not a mini screen in sight.
Near Pendarves Point there is an old wall that must have once been a drystone wall, the stones arranged in a herringbone pattern but built into earth so that great bulbous lumps of grass or moss have grown all over it. It is a living wall. To me it now appears more like a rampart around an ancient field closure. There is something comic about its ‘blobbiness’ but I suppose it still does the same job but without the need for repair. It gets me thinking about how human intervention in a landscape can combine with nature to produce positive outcomes.
Earth and drystone wall, near Pendarves Point
A few weeks ago I went to hear the nature writer John Lewis-Stempel give a talk in Taunton about his new book ‘England: A Natural History’. He gave examples of how management of the land in England has resulted in some of the most interesting biodiversity in the world. He gave the example of deer parks which were introduced by the Normans and reached their ‘heyday’ in 1350 when it was estimated there were between two to three thousand in England, equivalent to 2% of England’s land surface.
The greatest achievements of deer parks is to preserve our ancient oak trees. Apparently we have more ancient oaks than any other country in Europe and Lewis-Stempel points out that ‘35% of all oaks in England with a girth greater than 19 feet are associated with medieval deer parks’. He also emphasises their importance to biodiversity saying ‘Such old oaks are universes in themselves, abodes to more than 1,000 species of fauna and flora’ and as such uses this to warn against the popular recent trend of rewilding. These oaks wouldn’t survive as long or grow to the same extent when they grow in woods or forests. It is thanks to the management of the land that they have been able to prosper.
Pendarves Point with Newquay in the background
Above Pendarves Point I reach one of those rare moments where the walking has become so light that I can hardly feel the ground. Away to the west sunbeams angle down onto Towan Head and Newquay lighting it up like it’s on the stage of the sea as if to say ‘Now you’ve gone, don’t forget me.’ And the wind seems to breathe with me. In me. I start humming that Nick Cave song, ‘Jubilee Street’. What does he sing as the guitars get heavier and heavier at the end?
‘I’m transforming, I’m vibrating, I’m glowing I’m flying, look at me now I’m flying, look at me now’
A walled clump of pine trees stands sentinel above Wotton-under-Edge. They make an undulating rushing sound like the wind itself their needles quivering in the cold air. All around their base on the east side away from the sun snow has gathered itself into drifts. The first Arctic weather has arrived for the winter and now we remember what the cold is really like.
The copse of pines look out from Wotton Hill across a flat plain towards the Bristol Channel. The Severn Bridge is visible, its white H shaped uprights silhouettes against the pale blue of the horizon. To the west mountains are cloaked in snow. The Black Mountains? I guess so. Just for today transformed into the white mountains. As I set off a man was having a sandwich in a fiat panda listening to BBC Wales in Welsh, a reminder of how close we are to the border.
Nov 27th
It’s another freezing day. No snow but a biting wind as I set off exactly a week later from when I set off last time. Since then TTT and farewell to Glemham. I climb a steep path and then road up Blackquarries Hill. A hollowed out pumpkin cut in half and so bright and real compared to the leaf litter that has been one it’s bed. at the top the sun comes up and I say hello to a man who walks his dog and says nothing in return. His loss. Or his hearing loss?
Looking north imagining the way I have come I’m greeted by the strange sight of a plane seemingly motionless in the sky like a mobile above a child’s bed or a hover fly. I look at it – entranced – for almost a minute listening to its roar. When I shift my gaze I notice great banks of cloud pushing from the north creating the optical illusion of the plane not moving. It is the background that is in flux rather than the one object of my focus. It reminds me of being 4 or 5 years old in the thatched cottage I grew up in lying on the grass and looking at the roof of the cottage seeingly falling over under the moving clouds that pass overhead.
Long Barrow. View across to dark band of pine forest. And out of a row of fir spikes the slightly taller spike of Tyndale monument. How long ago? Two weeks?b
Water logged fields storm Bert. Trees down. Flooding
The papers have been reporting that there has been only two hours of sun in the last two weeks across the UK. I have just accepted it as the changing of the seasons but today there is sunshine, but also a cold wind like a harbinger for the long winter ahead. I think back to how I had to order a fresh load of wood in the last week of April days before the traditional celebration of the start of summer. We all couldn’t believe how cold it was.
Why do some trees shed their leaves quicker than others? At Maytree House the ash at the entrance is totally bare while the young oak behind it is still completely full and filters the sun through its green and orange coat.
I went to hear John Lewis-Stempel give a talk recently in Taunton about his new book ‘England, A Natural History’. He said a funny thing, that the only thing that smells good when it is dying is leaf litter. And he’s right. It has a lovely fermenting sweetness like apples.
The old grass tennis court on the way to Windmill Cottage has abeen mowed but the net has gone. Perhaps it has finally taken retirement from its many years of hosting summer games. It’s where my grandfather used to play in the 1950s. My mum can remember him going off to play in white trousers and she could hear them playing through the trees on summer evenings after she’d gone to bed. I remember the white Slazenger balls still in their cardboard boxes when I used to explore the larder at Rose Cottage as a boy.
The top field is now ploughed and flattened. There are many stones resting in the earth. I remember Jane saying how these two fields aren’t the best for growing. Ronnie Blythe in ‘Akenfield’ wrote how before the war villagers in Suffolk would be paid to go and collect the stones off the fields. The trees that line the field are releasing leaves in a constant stream. They float down around me softly in the same manner as snow flakes and rest on the grass border that Henry – kindly – likes to leave on the edge of all his fields. It creates patches of camouflaged grass. Later in bed I read Ronnie’s ‘Next to Nature’, published for his hundredth birthday only months before he died. He writes this about leaves in November:
‘How golden bright it is outside where the lime leaves fall in their millions – well countlessly anyway..The air will be delicious, a kind of dying freshness whuich is full of movement and colour.’
An anxious looking woman appears with a very excited dog with a tennis ball in its mouth. It is a bouncing, brown mass of whiskery happiness. In stark contrast she is fretting. ‘No. No. Don’t do that. Come here. No. Come on. No. Sorry. Sorry,’ as she reaches down to grab its collar. I tell her not to worry.
I meet lots of people like this. Not in total control of their dogs and often seemingly anxious about people’s response to them. Many people I now see will stop as soon as they see me and put their dog on a lead til they are past me. I don’t know if it says something about the dogs, the owners or how people without dogs may respond to them. A lot of people would blame it – like many other things – on the ‘pandemic’.
Often there are Lynx helicopters here from Yeovilton airbase that buzz and whir overhead here doing their exercises but thankfully today it is quiet. As I look across the moors in the Isle Valley towards Isle Brewers and the Blackdown Hills beyond there is only the recycling lorry slowly trundling up Holman’s Way with only the top foot of it visible above the hedgerows declaring its message:
There is a sheen on the road leading down Tregurrian Hill from my car towards Watergate Bay. It’s nearing 4 O’Clock but instinctively I can feel the day is nearing its end. It’s the mental adjustment we all make in the days after the clocks have gone back each year (it was last weekend). We are settling into winter awareness. Setting out on a coastal walk at this time of day I have that sense of doing something slightly subversive, going against the grain, doing something which others are not. I get tingles just thinking about it.
I round a corner and the land falls away to the gun metal grey of the sea. I suddenly realise that for the whole three hour drive I’ve been anticipating this moment. Like arriving at the sea when we were children. Can you see it yet? There. There it is.
There was steady drizzle most of the way on the A30 but now a patch of blue sky has appeared above the sea while a group of beginner surfers in yellow rash vests stand in the surf in front of the Watergate Bay Hotel. As I climb the path from the road through the cabins that are part of the hotel there is the welcoming roar of the Atlantic, a sound that I have got to know well especially along this cliff-edged section of North Cornwall.
I think back, as always, to when I was last here. What I did. What has happened since. May 11th was the last proper stint I did from St Agnes Head to Crantock, that crazy bank holiday with the summer weather, the wonderful church with the man in the stocks and the epic aurora that everyone was talking about that I miraculously managed to miss!
However, I did come back on October 1st to do a small section from Crantock to Newquay. I stayed at a hotel overlooking Fistral Beach and arrived in Newquay via the golf course at Towan Head.
Overlooking the three town beaches that face north west from the town, I passed a whitewashed huer’s hut that stares out to sea. Its basic stone structure against the blue of the sky immediately reminded me of the white stone chapels that are dotted all over the Greek Islands. A plaque at its base revealed it is 14th century and was probably a hermitage before it was a huer’s hut, the person being ‘entrusted with the lighting of the beacon fire for the guidance of shipping.’
As for its later use the plaque tells how the building was ‘used as a lookout by a huer at the time of year when shoals of pilchards were expected in the bay. A call on his horn raised the hue and cry alerting the townsfolk to the arrival of the fish. By means of hand signals the huer enabled the fishermen to position their boats and encircle the shoals with their nets.’
There was something lovely about the simplicity of the building but also how it seemed visually – as well as historically – connected to the land and sea scapes around it. I walked around it several times looking at the sunlight creating shadows on the spartan interior, imagining the sounds of the huer’s horn and the vast dark shadows that would regularly appear in the blue waters of Cornwall and provided many Cornish folk with their livelihoods for most of the 18th and 19th century.
Huer’s hut, Newquay
The centre of Newquay felt like what it was: out of season. A blue and yellow road train came steaming up the high street with four carriages, all of them empty apart from one man sitting in the last one staring blankly out of the window with a microphone in his hand. Starlings on the shop roofs were making an incredibly loud whistling, the sound bending up at the end of the phrase like a wolf whistle but with a greater range. It seemed to be amplified by the narrowness of the high street. A man with a sheepskin jacket and beanie read his paper outside Cafe Nero. A bit further up the street another man sat cross legged asking passers by for money.
It seemed far removed from the hardcore tourism and partying that Newquay is known for throughout the summer months.
I’m shaken out of my memories by a sharp movement out of the corner of my eye. And I’m back on the clifftop above the Watergate Bay Hotel. A wren is flitting about in thorns on top of the cliff looking at me. They seem so busy, wrens, forever restless, like there is forever something they need to be getting on with. And it’s a reminder for me to busy myself on the path before the dying of the light.
Curtains of spray drift slowly up a cleft in one of the the cliffs like enormous ghosts. There are silvery patches on the sea where light has found a way through the cloud cover onto the sea’s surface.
The palest blush of pink has appeared a long way out there – who knows where – above the line of the horizon. Apart from the little wren I haven’t seen a living thing. There is only the wind and the roaring constant of the sea below me.
Griffin’s point is a mile north of the Watergate Bay Hotel between Stem Cove and Beacon Cove. I pass over a small wooden footbridge with a stream passing below it heading east to west, right to left. It winds its way through long grasses and then suddenly empties over the rocks into the sea.
The light is quickly fading. It’s not even 5 yet. It’s taken me by surprise and I decide to head back via Trevarrian passing a caravan site and a football pitch shrouded in mist.
Tonight I’ve booked a stay on a farm in Newlyn East. It’s glamping, something I’ve never done before unless I count my own trips using an old bell tent. It sounds fun. I arrive bumping down a long, pot holed track in darkness and pouring rain. The track finally ends in a farmyard with a big farmhouse beyond and off to the right down a path is a clearing amongst some trees with two painted, wooden huts – the owners call them pods – and a chicken coop next door.
My pod, known as Fistral after the famous surfing beach which I walked past a few weeks ago, is cosy and warm with just enough room for a double bed, a desk and a fridge. It is decorated with the sort of things I suppose people expect from glamping sites: striped bunting hanging from the roof that wafts spookily as a result of the heater, white enamel mugs hanging on a rail and many cushions in floral patterns. On a wet night in October it’s a perfect cheap option in an area which is normally expensive at the best of times.
Back in the farmyard there is a low building of whitewashed stone with an old stable door.Inside it has been made into a breakfast room where I – and any other guests if there are any – can help ourselves to tea, toast and cereal.
I have that lovely sense of coming into a little building after a long time in the dark, the feeling of having to get used to the light and the warmth, everything a bit blurry.
Feeling curious about my night in my shed I tramp through wet grass and dripping tree trunks ready for bed and my thoughts looking ahead to the path tomorrow.
Back at the cottage after a fantastic two days in Snowdonia as a belated 50th birthday present.
Perhaps in a cliche of other middle aged men around the world focusing on their health I have become a ‘hoffer’, a follower of Wim Hof and his breathing method and crazy cold water treatments.
I’ve always been into swimming but last week there I was suddenly launching myself into glacial Welsh lakes and sitting there surrounded by forests and mountains looking like I was watching the news.
It might sound bonkers but, God, does it feel good.
Thus on my return to Somerset yesterday on one of those dark, dank evenings that remind us what English wintertime is capable of I left C watching Paddington 2 and set off in shorts and flip flops to go to my summer swimming spot at Muchelney.
Parking at the bridge something seemed amiss.
Under the bridge there were the wooden posts that lead to the river pontoon that had been funded by EU money back in the day. Aside from the posts a muddy gash beside the river and then nothing but the grey water of the river.
A man with a beanie, a walking stick and a football team app on his phone told me they get taken out for the winter.
‘They come out at the end of october and then they put them back in May.’
‘Last year when the water rose it started to buckle the metal poles that hold the pontoon in place. The one at Langport is also out for the winter.’
It makes sense. Besides what fool would want to be using the river in winter anyway?
I’m now committed though so onwards to the slipway at Black Bridge in Langport.
There I found a few cars in the car park, a man fishing with an old fashioned reel and a white van at the top of the slipway. A young girl was sitting in the passenger seat.
The man at the back was tall with restless eye and demeanour. He was called Dave. He had bought a tiny rowing boat ‘after a few pints in the pub for £100’. He shows me in the back of his van. He also had bought an outboard for £45. His daughter probably aged about 8 has appeared beside us and is looking a bit pouty.
‘We almost sunk’, she tells me. And he says nothing. Was that half an eye roll behind his back as he explains his enthusiasm for his boat? I wonder if she learned that from her mum.
‘Are you going for a swim?’
‘Yep’.
So they watch me and we chat about young people who are causing a problem at the east end of Langport and he tells me his wife was at school I used to work in although I can’t remember her name and the daughter looks on amusedly now and asks the obvious question.
‘Is it cold?’
On the way back I start thinking about the myriad possibilities of cold water dipping in Somerset, a place which has always been smothered with water. A place where as Roger Deakin put it everywhere seems to have a watery name such as Frog Lane and Water Street. And I feel like Deakin as he starts getting into the idea of his watery mission (in ‘Waterlog’) to swim across the British Isles by poring over maps and looking at the abundance of water.
Well I could say the same for me as I start picking out potential spots close to me now the pontoons have been taken out. Oath Weir. The Sowy at Oath. Under the bridge at Langport. Pibsbury Weir. The Hambridge Mill stream (where my mum used to swim as a little girl). the River Isle at Hambridge. I have the same childlike excitement I used to have when I asked my grandfather for detailed maps of the Somerset moors when I was a child to plan my fishing jaunts.
Although now it is me who is the fish wanting to be immersed in the cold, ancient waters of The Levels.
Beautiful chilly day. 11 of us to have English heritage tour around the stone circle. Sun is still strong and scores of swallows swoop above stubbly fields while jets start their descent to Briz.
Great black drums glint in the autumn sun at Norton Malreeward and heat haze above the grass makes the houses behind it shudder slightly like I’m looking at them through a riffling stream. Beyond the pale brown of fields and the lush green slopes of the Mendips.
Join three peaks way. Mast off to the south west over Wells where I used to work. Reminder of burn out. Breathe out in relief.
Cross a bridge and as I get closer to the circle pass the first people. A man in a singlet and cap sits in the middle of meadow with his hands in a backpack next to him. Another man with a grey ponytail walks slowly looking into the water of the river.
‘Big BPM crew’ sticker stick on one of the footpath signs.
All those in the group I would say fit into the same demographic. Couples. Over 60. Most have been to Avebury and Stone Henge, the rock stars of ancient sites and both conveniently situated an hour from here.
I ask one man if he is an ancient site regular. ‘I’ve been to a few’ and after a pause ‘but I’m not a Druid’ perhaps because of his long flowing white hair and earring.
We are pilgrims of sorts – people drawn to places by an interest in the past and looking for a connection with the past.
Our guide tells us ‘People were gathering together in communities doing whatever they were doing.’
And what were they doing? Travelling and gathering at a special place. Pilgrimage.
The guide talks about there being a lot of people coming here on the solstices. ‘There was a coven from Spain and people with sound bowls and bells and crystals’
One man points out ‘this circle here lines up with the one there for the lunar standstill. The lunar one only comes about once every 23 years’ the moon wavers from side and side and reaches the furthest northwards’
Our guide says that some of the stones sparkle when the sunlight catches it. Is it quartz.
In the middle of the main circle someone has created a circle of yellow and red flower petals. There are pale pink crystals in the grass inside the circle.
A perfect Autumn day. The first of the year. Rain water on the blue lias wall outside the cottage. The last of the pink roses droop over it reaching almost into the way of anyone who might walk past. The flower heads nod deliberately and have drops of moisture that catch the light. Everything is still green and we’re thankful for how full of life the near world seems.
White cyclamens crowd outside Wiltown cottage.
Old Father Time stands solidly above the red post box on the barn as he has for as long as o can remember. His face is a bit vague and his scythe and hour glass are peeling and most unfortunate of all he has lichen growing in his groyne area. Marked by the passage of time. He needs a bit of sprucing up.
On Furlong Lane the only sound is the whispering of leaves. The first are falling onto the tarmac. The horse chestnut is already brown. This is where Dad asked mum to marry him. Was it Autumn? I think so. It would have been 1968.
Under the pines with their low hushing sound as the wind blows through its branches. It could be the sound of the sea from a cliff top.
The striped fields between here and Burrow Hill are mostly brown now. Ploughed. With one band of bright green in the middle distance. In May those stripes are bright yellow when the rake seed are in flower and sometimes a pale blue when it is linseed that is being farmed.
Jane’s daughter pulls into her drive up from Devon. I wonder how she, Jane, is doing. 94 and still completely mentally together.
Always the sound of water rushing next to Holden’s Way as it descends the hill. And still reminders of the summer: a bee buzzes past noisily, a cabbage white flutters its way frantically over the hedge. A minute ago a hornet veering to and fro amongst the branches of the pines.
My mind keeps turning to a pitch or a lesson I need to do or a stress from last week but I bring it back to this place, this moment, this light, this sound.
A panel of St Abraham’s Offering, St Carantoc Church, Crantock
I’m still cursing myself for missing last night’s freak aurora as I look down onto Crantock Beach.
In my experience of walking the coast path in Cornwall it seems to be typical to have protracted periods of time alone with the path, the sea, the sky and then rare occasions when I’m suddenly thrown into the melee of Cornwall in peak holiday time mode. It’s true that it’s not the summer holidays but the sudden burst of summer sun has transformed the weekend into what appears to be an August bank holiday.
Love it.
The path winds its way along the western edge of Crantock beach, dips between high hedges and then spills out into a packed car park. Two girls with red National Trust T shirts and walkie talkies talk to each other from different ends of the car park looking perplexed. As I head up the lane into the village I count 20 cars queueing.
After a cold pint of Korev at The Old Albion Inn I wander past a great big man strimming between the graves and into the coolness of The Church of St Carantoc.
Named after a Celtic saint who apparently had a small oratory on the site of the church, St Carantoc has a fantastic rood screen with fine carving. A quote from the church history says of the church ‘The principal beauty is its very rich High Church fittings, dated mainly from 1897-1907. They include a splendid screen with coving, loft and rood, which incorporates a few medieval parts..The pews have good carved ends in the late medieval manner. The largely renewed roofs have fine colouring above the rood and the sanctuary.’
Rood screen, St Carantoc
These are treasures indeed but the best carving of all – for me – lies hidden around the back of the church.
Here under a purpose built shelter sits the original village stocks and behind it a panel which tells a story that could probably only come from Cornwall.
It tells the story of the last man to be placed in the stocks, William Tinney, ‘a smuggler’s son and vagabond’ from West Pentire who was placed in them within the church tower in 1817 for a brutal crime where he apparently ‘robbed with violence a widow woman of Cubert Parish’. That is not all though. The story develops into something worthy of a James Bond-esque blockbuster. The panel continues ‘By negligence or design he was insufficiently secured and shortly afterwards appeared on the top of the tower. He had cut the rope from the tenor bell and by this he lowered himself to the nave roof. Climbing to the eastern gable of the choir and sliding down it he dropped to the churchyard grass and in the sympathetic view of certain village worthies bolted, got off to sea and was never brought to justice or seen in the neighbourhood again.’
A carving of Tinney sitting in the sticks presides over the panel of his story. He has a beautifully carved branch of oak behind him. His arms are folded belligerently, his face staring at the viewer under a cap with a feather while his luxuriant hair curls over his collar and his bare feet poke comically out of the stocks. It’s a cracking yarn and has all the romance of a great prison break story and contains the best ingredient of any story – mystery. For hours afterwards I can’t helping thinking whatever did happen to William Tinney of West Pentire?
Crantock stocks and the story of William Tinney, St Carantoc church, Crantock
Back at Crantock beach a temporary brightly coloured community has settled on the beach. White flesh covered for cold month after cold month is suddenly revealed. Blue, red and yellow windbreaks mark the beach at various points all the way beside Pen Pol creek. The scene looks like it’s been deliberately put together by an artist, not just a scene of random tourists. Dogs bark. Children squeal. Ed Sheeran belts out ‘I’m in love with the shape of you’ and I wonder if anywhere in the world has the Brits’ ability to have a good time when the sun decides to shine.
Crantock Beach
As advised by Paul at the cafe – he who said ‘You must have been sparko!’ when I told him about me sleeping through the northern lights last night – I take a dip in Pen Bol Creek which separates Crantock from Newquay. It is green with a sandy bottom and a few rocks. At low tide there are pools which are 6 feet and it’s perfect for wallowing in. I am a hippo relaxing. On one side thick trees cover the hillside their leaves sparkling, whooshing and swaying in the wind. On the other a variety of grand houses – some Victorian, others modern – look across the creek.
I lose myself in a heady mix of warm wind, sparkling waves, the rushing of leaves. It is like a waking dream.
Pen Bol Creek
It’s time to move on, to return to my car which seems like it could be hundreds of miles away and last seen….how long ago?
On the bus two holidaymakers chat to a local man with a lined face, matted hair and beard.
The visitors are sounding incredulous.
‘At Watergate campsite it was £470 for 5 nights for a bit of grass and shower block’, they are saying.
The Cornishman replies: ‘It’s because of Air BnB. A lot of people here are jumping on that bandwagon’.
I leave the bus at Perranporth and walk back to the relative wilds of St Agnes Head where my car waits alone on the cliff top. Before I get to it I hear a cuckoo nearby and calling its two note song over and over. It’s so clear it sounds electronic. I look at the two islands of Man and his Man and further south in the distance there is a beautiful white dome half lit in the sun like a half moon. It is the radar tower I passed at Nancekuke Common at the start of the year. I pause, taking in the scene, trying to hold onto it knowing it’ll slip away soon and then unlock the car door.
It’s 8.30am when I arrive at the Holywell Beach Cafe. A tall couple from Holland are seated on the bench outside smiling, chattering and looking about – the telltale signs of those excited to explore a new place. A young woman with dark hair dressed in white is calmly getting things ready behind the counter while her son, probably 4, sits at a table eating a bowl of cereal and talking to her in that direct, inquisitive way of students with a certain way of thinking that I’ve known in schools.
Although they’re not properly open yet she says she can make me some breakfast. I enjoy the simple pleasure of a cushioned chair and a cold glass of water as I watch the comings and goings of the cafe waking up. The coffee machine being prepared, another girl with tattoos arrives to start a shift and a lorry delivering fruit and veg has pulled up outside.
The delivery driver comes in and starts speaking to the girl in white.
‘Did you see the lights?’
‘They were amazing – I saw them with my mum and dad’.
I can’t work out what they’re on about – sounds like a UFO sighting.
It’s only when I go up to pay that she shows me. Scrolling left on her phone I can tell it’s the sky but transformed into otherworldly colours. Many of them show the sky a psychedelic purple like an alt rock album cover from the 1960s. There is the distinctive wavy effect like swirling liquid or vapour that I recognise of photos I’ve seen of the Northern Lights.
But these are hundreds of miles south than where they normally appear. The following week while talking about it in Somerset – like everyone seems to be – they say ‘It’s probably global warming’ but it’s not that at all. There are just greater storms occurring on the sun than usual sending huge eruptions that then interfere with particles in the atmosphere to create these incredible displays of colour.
And I missed it.
What better place to have witnessed a once in a lifetime view of the aurora than camping out on a cliff top in a bivvy bag with a view for miles and miles and a clear, unpolluted view of the sky. And for once in my life I was asleep by 10.30 and woke up at first light. Oh dear.
As I pack up to leave the cafe, Paul, the owner, comes out wearing an apron. He asks me what I’m doing and when I tell him doing the path he nods with approval and says he keeps meaning to do it.
When we get onto ‘the lights’ as everyone is calling them he cracks a rye smile and says in a Cornish accent:
‘Bloody ‘ell, you must have been sparko!’
Above Porth Joke ewes and their lambs munch grass determinedly a few feet from the cliff top and a rope placed to guard against people getting too close to the edge has become like a reclining seat/cum massage chair where they like to rub their backs. I watch one of the older lambs rubbing its rump back and forth making the rope bounce up and down. As a result the rope has what look like woolly hand holds all the way along it like you might get in a rope to help you climb down a cliff.
Cliff top rope near Porth Joke
Porth Joke is one of those picture perfect coves that you might only come across when walking. Sapphire sea. Yelllow flags. Little hidden coves around its edges where you can sunbathe or just sit and reflect. And nothing else. Just a camp site hidden away up the valley.
Bluebells, buttercups and campions make a beautiful range of blues, yellows and pinks amongst the grass.
I meet another wave of path walkers on this stretch, most of them women. A couple of Aussies from Perth ask me about crossing the Pen Bol Creek from Crantock to Newquay which can only be done at a crossing that appears at low tide. I apologise and say I don’t know. A Spanish girl in full Lycra walking kit. And another woman in her twenties with the laminated map and backpack that indicate she’s doing the whole path – all 630 miles – probably in one go. I’m always full of admiration for these people who want to take up the challenge. It’s a great achievement and not one I could complete without a great deal of training.
I wake to the feeling of cool air on my face, feeling the dawn before I see it. It always takes me back to camping trips as a boy – that initial strangeness of waking up OUTDOORS, as exciting as the feeling of waking up in a new country.
I sit up in my sleeping bag and let the sea air slowly bring me round. My breathing is slow, my mind blank. I want to prolong my dream state, reaching back to dredge up the strange images that were thrown onto the screen of my nighttime mind, dreams somehow always more vivid when sleeping out. Now I can’t remember what was going on, just that I was travelling somewhere.
I am in a small, narrow bowl in the land, granite and tussocky grass rising up behind me. After an hour of looking in the fading light last night it was the most sheltered spot I could find. In front of me there is as good a view as any beachside villa. Leading in a line at roughly 1 o’clock west from me where I sit the path threads its way to the end of Ligger Point. Ahead the sea is a dark blue until it meets a zone of haze where it merges with the pale blue of the sky. To my left Perran Beach stretches about 3 miles south towards Perranporth where a few lights still blink in the half light.
Sleeping spot, Ligger Point
I have woken up to lines. Below me dark creases in the sea emerge a few hundred metres out and then break into creamy white lines. Similar lines form, break and thin out all the way back to Perranporth. There are also lines above – a huge X has been painted on the blue canvas of the sky, the vapour trails of planes flying from the west silently marking their passage with their wakes. Where have they come from? The Americas? It must be as there is nothing else west of here.
My bivvy bag is wet and covered with little yellow snails drawn by the moisture at night. Once I’ve done my best of brushing off the snails I am quick to get packed (I’m dressed already).
A long distance runner with a baseball cap and arms covered with tattoos appears from nowhere. He has a double take when he sees me, no doubt looking a bit early morningish.
‘Morning’ he says between breaths then adds ‘You all right?’
‘Yes, thank you’.
I smile at the camaraderie shared fleetingly on the path.
My mind is cast back to yesterday. Perranporth was in full summertime swing like it was mid August. The weather was unseasonably warm – well into the twenties – and people had gone berserk. The beach was heaving. Wind breaks. Romping dogs. Ice creams. Barbecues. Music. People would run into the sea (me included) only to remember it’s early May and realise the water temperature is still in the teens. Minutes later they’d be running back again shining and glowing and grinning.
The sounds of Perranporth slowly faded away as I padded barefoot up Perran Beach, surfers and the dropping sun my only company. Step after step in the damp sand. Thousands of my footprints fading back into the low mist that was starting to settle over the beach. The sun got lower and started to lose its shape like molten metal and finally dropped below the line of the sea. And then I was alone. It took me another hour to make my way up the steep slopes of Ligger Point, a stiffness starting to creep into the backs of my legs before I found the small scoop in the land.
Sunset, Perran Beach
As I walk along the narrow hulk of Ligger Point I hear the lilting, high-pitched song of a sky lark. There is something immediately uplifting about it. At dusk last night when the light was almost all gone a solitary skylark sang on and on over one of the headlands looking over Perran Beach. I could still hear him 10 minutes after I’d passed singing his intricate melody. When I was feeling a bit panicked about finding a place to sleep it lifted my mood and felt like some company in this otherwise remote spot.
I think of another of Ronnie Blythe’s pieces about the Essex/Suffolk countryside that he wrote about so perfectly for so long: ‘Returning, the larks cover me with their song. Decade after decade, since Edmund or whoever it was, these dizzy birds in the blue air making a singing canopy for the early toilers’. Well today I’m one of those ‘early toilers’ and I think of Ronnie looking down on me from a pastoral other place saying with a smile ‘Yes, that’s right.’
I return to my breathing and think of the many times I alternate between the sounds of my breathing, the ‘breathing’ of the sea as the waves meet the land and the sound of the wind. On the path those sounds are a constant. Before I reached Perranporth yesterday I stood for ages staring at Shag Rock where I could see and hear water sloshing lazily over the rock and see the soft rise and fall of water. Then every few seconds a great blast of spray would be ejected from a hole in the base of the cliff somewhere just out of sight, so similar in sight and sound to the spouting of a whale, that sudden release of air they make when exhaling from their blowhole. I had a strange moment where I envisaged myself walking on the back of the land as if it was some vast and ancient beast.
Water ‘spouting’ near Shag Rock
After Ligger Point I come across the sad, abandoned Nissen huts of Penhale Camp. They are a bleak grey against the morning sky. Windows are boarded up and those that aren’t are often broken. It’s spread over a large area between Ligger Point and Holywell, the size of a big sized village.
Penhale Camp
I notice a developer must have bought up this land and have staked their claim by putting up a sleek sign advertising their name, Cabu. It stands out in stark contrast to the abandoned and broken buildings that surround it.
Later I find an article from Cornwall Live written in 2022 that reveals there has been a battle going on between the developers who want to build a holiday camp and ‘the friends of Penhale’ over 400 people “concerned with the ecology of the site”. There’s some interesting stuff in the article. Apparently the Nissen huts were built in 1943 by the United States Army Corps of Engineers ‘as part of the buildup to Operation Overlord, the D-Day landings’. 23 people were killed here when it was bombed by the Luftwaffe.
The article continues ‘When peering through the broken windows one can see bedside tables and cabinets left abandoned and half broken, while some of the buildings also sports signs warning not to disturb the various species of bats which roost inside.’
Apparently the site is home to all sorts of rare flowers and animals such as bats, barn owls and my new friend, the chough.
Not all of it is abandoned. Behind the fence there are more up to date buildings surrounded by razor wire and CCTV cameras. According to the article ‘these are rumoured to be active listening posts for enemy submarines’.
It all adds to the rather surreal and spooky atmosphere of certain parts of Cornwall.
This isn’t uncommon. My dad always said he found something unsettling about the Cornish landscape. And the writer Tim Hannigan, author of the excellent ‘The Granite Kingdom’ about Cornwall, its identity and its representation throughout history told me that DH Lawrence was intrigued by the landscape near Zennor but Katherine Mansfield was disturbed by it and swore never to return.
As I turn away from the abandoned wartime camp, as if just waiting in the wings for his cue, another chough comes boldly striding along the cliff top next to the path. I can’t believe it. Having been looking for them for years I manage to see 2 less than 24 hours apart. He makes a brief croak while he looks this way and that.The bright red of his beak and legs are striking next to the shiny black of his head and body. It’s the most wonderfully bold matching colour combo and I wish I had a better camera to try and do him justice.
Within minutes of arriving at St Agnes Head I almost step on a chough. I had just got out of my car to look at the sea and there he was strutting around right in front of me looking like he owned the place. As Cornwall’s national bird he probably has good reason to behave like this land is rightfully his and probably has a bigger claim to being Cornish than most people around here. He looks resplendent with his red legs and wonderful red hooked bill. He gives me what I read as a withering look and then proceeds to pick about for food in the heather. I think back to my friend with the sailing cap at Godrevy Head in October shouting ‘Look out for the choughs!’ And think at last I’ve found one.
Suddenly – following months and months of endless rain – a period of freakishly warm weather has descended on the UK. The sudden change threw me. 2 days ago I was lighting a fire in my fleece. And then yesterday I was having to dig around for unfamiliar stuff like sun tan lotion and shorts.
Beside the remote St Agnes Head car park a half naked middle aged man is sunbathing with huge earphones on. He slaps out a beat on his belly while a seagull stands between us staring at me, the odd feather ruffled by the westerly coming off the Atlantic. Two bald men sit in deckchairs eating their lunch. There is nobody else and over us hangs a blue sky, bold and awe inspiring after the days and days of grey. In the distance I can hear a cuckoo: wa-woo-wa-woo wa-woo. At last it feels like summer might be here.
I look back towards Chapel Porth where I started the last section of the path in March. The view is the sort of scene that comes to mind whenever I think of Cornwall. Green hills drop towards the sea and merge into the black of granite cliffs. These then meet the pale gold of the sand and beyond that the shimmering blue green of the sea with dark lines that magically appear like veins beneath the its skin. Amongst the moving lines are the black specks of surfers sitting, waiting and then every now and again taking off, a glistening black shape gliding along a crumbling white line. Even though it is a scene that I have seen many times before it makes me hold my breath and immediately makes me curse at not bringing my wetsuit.
This morning in the few seconds it takes to come round from sleep I was tingling with the thought of another trip along the path: the anticipation of what I’d see, who I’d meet and where I’d sleep. And the knowledge that I would be surrounded by the wildness, history and rough beauty of this land at the end of the land. It is the same feeling that I used to have on the first day of a summer holidays. Even then I would be dreaming of going west, to Cornwall or Somerset.
I set off with the seagull now standing on top of my car seeing me off. As always the sea is my only companion now on my left as I head east. I pass the coastguard’s hut and a man in a white shirt gives me a big wave with both arms. It makes me smile. The coast/path leading up to St Agnes Head goes due north and then around the point turns east. A mile out to sea Bawden Rocks, also known as Man and his Man are like a parent rock with its child, the one on the left the size of a four bedroom house and then its replica, the same shape but a fifth of the size. White foam froths at their feet and beyond that nothing there is nothing but deep blue ocean.
Bawden Rocks
I don’t know why but here there are several walkers on the path. I know it won’t be like that for long. 90 per cent of the path I have done without seeing a soul. I pass a couple who don’t respond to my hello, then a middle aged Dutch couple who cut off their enthusiastic chat (in Dutch) to say hi. A minute later a well built man in blue with the unmistakable twang of the Antipodes says nonchalantly ‘Gday mate’. I smile for the second time in 10 minutes.
It’s only a couple of miles to Trevaunance Cove and St Agnes beach, another of those classic Cornish beaches that are secreted amongst the cliffs and suddenly appear into view when arriving from around a bend high above.
A steep hard standing takes me down to the beach past a few dinghies pulled up onto the concrete and past a small ice cream shop and then a pub right on the beach. The beach itself is another lovely swathe of sand with rocks that border its edges. On the western side is a great pile of grey blocks and rocks that once was a harbour. The effort that the locals here put into trying to have a safe place for their boats was extraordinary.
Between 1632 and 1916 no less than 5 harbours were built here but each was destroyed by winter storms. The first was never completed before it was demolished. The second took months to build in 1684 but then apparently came apart in a matter of hours. The third, built in 1699 was made by the same people who built the Eddystone Lighthouse. It lasted 20 years before it too was completely destroyed.
In 1793 an act of parliament was passed for ‘erecting and making a pier and harbour in the cove of Trevaunance in the parish of St Agnes’. According to the trusty information board on the way to the beach ‘The outer walls were made from large, dressed granite blocks drilled from top to bottom and laid so they were overlapped allowing iron bars to be driven the holes locking the blocks together. An inner wall was built and the cavity between filled with rubble and mortar made from stone and lime.’ This harbour lasted for over a hundred years and apparently was well used. The info board continues ‘Many goods were landed there including lime, slate, wine and most importantly, coal from Wales for the local mines. A major export was copper to Wales for smelting.’
A granite block washed away in 1915 and within a year once again the power of the sea had taken apart St Agnes harbour.
Now all the harbour is good for is to hold my towel and backpack as I rush into the cold water and feel the fire of adrenaline coarsing around my body. As I lay in the sea mesmerised by the sparks of light striking off the surface I think of the challenges of trying to live off the sea while living beside the sea. A great beauty, a great mystery and also a great threat. For many people living a coastal existence I suppose the sea is the giver but also the taker of life.
Trees that lovely light bright green. The weather finally sunny and warm. It’s been such a long and wet winter. The bumps and dips of Castile Neroche are awash with bluebells bowing their heads in the shade. Bees hum drunkenly. A yellow brimstone flaps jerkily up and up. The sight freezes me with its exoticism.
Views in a blue haze north towards Taunton. The summer is upon us and this could be the start of a Blackdowns walk of my own making east to west ending in Cullompton. Let’s see..
The seasons are embroiled in an ongoing battle with no end in sight. Weeks have now gone by where spring has slowly tried to free itself from the cold grip of winter so that it can start its annual journey. Yet it can’t quite make it. Primroses and dandelions get buffeted by icy blasts of wind. Horse chestnuts wear their full dress of enormous leaves and pink and white flowered panicles but others look like they’ve hardly started and their bare branches lean into and away from each other clattering like rowdy teenagers waiting outside a shop.
As soon as the blackbird starts his cheery tune or the blossom declares ‘I am ready – look at me’ as it sparkles in the sun, yet another cold gust or downpour will chase the blackbird from his tree or fling the little flowers from their branches in a stream of white. Every day Winter seems to proclaim ‘I am still in charge here’ and our hearts sink and we grumble and then rebuild our hopes for the following day.
Yet today – despite the cold – the sun shines and all of nature is trying its best to be bright.
I am in Hardington Mandeville, a few miles south west of Yeovil and heading due north on The Monarch’s Way before it turns east to follow the footsteps of Charles II when he had to return to his safe house with the Wyndhams at Trent just north of Yeovil after failing to escape from Charmouth. As a result the path does a huge loop and I find myself in similar territory to 3 years ago and closer to home.
Ahead of me slopes spread west towards Crewkerne. Blades of grass quiver. The brightness of the green makes me stop and breathe. Beyond the predominant blue above green, bright yellows catch the eye: a line over there below the horizon, a small square there behind some trees. Oilseed rape. The yellow appears as small painted patches on an otherwise green canvas.
I start and then deliberately stop. My temples are throbbing slightly and eyes a bit sore from an early start. Hearing myself breathe and tuning in to sounds while trying to tune out of thoughts. A lawnmower. A plane. The chattering of sparrows. The low hum of the breeze around my head.
I thought I was onto something when I discovered walking slowly / slow walking as a way of not just appreciating the world in as absorbed a way as possible but also as a way of slowing myself down to make me a happier, healthier person. I only discovered recently that it is a ‘thing’: a way to meditate that involves slowly walking. They say for many people the movement can make it easier than meditating sitting or lying down.
So without knowing it I discovered a way to do what I love best but improve my mental and physical health at the same time. It’s a happy thought. I just have to be careful not to lose myself completely and veer off the path and fall off a cliff, go down the wrong road or into someone’s garden! Getting lost is always happening to me and it’s all part of the journey.
Sheep with angelic faces greet me just outside the hamlet of Lyatts. This breed seem bulkier than many of their brethren with woolly legs like a plump gentleman with plus fours and wool that surrounds their beautifully pale faces and broad platipus-like tails. After a brief glance they bolt and go back to their chewing further up the hill. I remember John, the farm labourer in his seventies I worked with once on a flower seed farm in Suffolk. Sometimes he would stop and rest on his hoe while he looked at the cows. ‘Might be quite nice just sitting their all day a-chewing.’
After a scotch egg and apple for lunch I lie down in the long grass overlooking Lyatts. It seems to hold me and its blades gleam and shiver all around me. Someone in the valley hammers a piece of wood. A car is turning. A small plane lazily passes over. The wind passes back and forth over my face while small clouds pass south at snail’s pace. At one stage I am aware of nothing. What am I? Am I conscious? Is there me? Where is time? And then I drift back and nothing has changed but the clouds.
In fact after Lyatts I do take a wrong turn. I see an arrow and a path going straight up a hill which I charge up to the top of before checking the map. Oh well – every mistake can provide some benefit, I think, as I admire the view before going back down.
I walk another mile. Past a huge new building – all horizontal lines and metres and metres of glass behind a high wall. It could be a Bond villain’s lair apart from the name ‘Waterfalls’ which somehow doesn’t seem right. In a barn young calves are mooing for food. Their heavy breathing seems so deep in tone for for their size and their pale pink tongues appearing out of the side of their mouths curl upwards snakelike to lick my outstretched finger.
I cross a road and an avenue of oaks guides the way through the grounds of Coker Court. I smile at myself sitting on one of the great bulges on the side of a trunk and try to imagine time through oak time: the slow growing of the years and the many different seasons they have weathered. If they could think surely they would be very meditative beasts!
At last I reach my place of today’s mini pilgrimage, St Michael’s and All Angels church, East Coker. It is at the top of a hill next to Coker Court. The church looks down upon the village and its graveyard is surrounded by dry stone walls. East Coker is where Michael Eliot had lived and worked as a cordwainer (a shoemaker) before he emigrated to America in 1670. T.S. Eliot was born in St Louis in 1888, a descendant of Michael Eliot of East Coker. St Michael’s and All Angels is now famous for having Eliot the poet’s ashes interred here.
Eliot wrote the poem ‘East Coker’ during World War 2 as a way of getting back into writing poetry after he thought he’d lost his ability. According to my old friend Wikipedia ‘The poem discusses time and disorder within nature that is the result of humanity following only science and not the divine.’ It must have been inspired or influenced by the chaotic state of the world in 1940.
A specially written guide about Eliot in the church says that he visited the church at least twice before the war and that it is likely that his decision to have his ashes put here ‘was about the closing of a circle, returning to the place in England where his family roots lay.’ It also says how ‘the village in the poem ‘has been seen as a metaphor of an idyll of a lost way of life’.
In one corner at the back of the church is a memorial to the poet with a cross, some flowers and a photo of him. Below a window in the west wall is a plaque which says:
‘Of your charity pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet 26th September 1888 – 4th January 1965 & Esme Valerie Eliot his loving and beloved wife 1926 – 2012.’
At the top and bottom of the plaque are those much quoted lines from East Coker that I also saw earlier on a sign welcoming me to the village:
‘In my beginning is my end’
‘In my end is my beginning’
It is the same sentiment that Mary quoted to me at the Pilsdon community in Dorset when I passed it on the Monarch’s Way in July of last year. The community had been modelled on Nicholas Ferrer’s Anglican community at Little Gidding in the 17th century. She had talked about the benefits of a ‘contemplative lifestyle’ and ‘living with the seasons’. Like Eliot she seemed to believe in a circle of life where our lives are a small part of something much bigger.
Eliot had written another poem ‘Little Gidding’ in 1942. It along with East Coker makes up the ‘Four Quartets’. Like East Coker it is concerned with past, present and future and the need for renewal and salvation.
T.S. Eliot memorial, St Michael’s and All Angels Church, East Coker
Not for the first time I think about the great gift of churches and the wonderful secrets they keep. It shouldn’t matter if you’re religious or not. These places are important for being a place for reflection or contemplation away from the stresses and distractions of everyday life. Yet they are also a place to remember our dead, to celebrate past lives and our stories and art. They are like mini museums and there are still 16,000 of them in use in England and Wales.
Unfortunately many of them are at risk of being abandoned as Christianity becomes less relevant but let’s hope we are able to protect and continue to love them as other people have done for hundreds of years.
About fifty metres from the cliff edge the wind hits me. It is so cold it makes my face ache. It is coming from the north. Where has it travelled from? Greenland? It sure feels like it. Its force is such that it makes me suddenly stop and then slowly carry on with my walk like a film being stopped and then slowly starting up again. There is something comic about it. Daffodils are in flower but their yellow cheeriness seem incongruous in the face of this juggernaut coming off the Atlantic: their heads are blown flat onto the grass, their stems held down by the wind – they and I all bent double in the face of such brute force.
It reminds me of Seamus Heaney’s poem about the storm that hits the island ‘We just sit tight while the wind dives and strafes invisibly’.
This also feels like an aerial assault and maybe, like the narrator and most people today, I should also be sitting tight out of this weather but my aim now is to embrace the path in all its guises, in every mood, however capricious it might be.
Sitting tight is what a lot of people are doing in The Blue Bar facing the beach in Porthtowan. It has bay windows with window seats. All four of them are full with people – many with dogs – who are all looking out at the beach, the sea, the sky, the weather. There is a great comfort from being close to the weather but not in it. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website that creates new vocabulary or as it puts it “Creates beautiful new words that we need but do not yet have.” A recent addition has been the word chrysalism and TDoOS gives its definition as ‘the amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to waves of rain pattering against the roof like an argument upstairs, whose muffled words are unintelligible but whose crackling release of built-up tension you understand perfectly’. For sure I have felt this pleasure too – as we all must have to some extent – but I have a far more powerful response when I’m actually IN it.
I pick up where I left off on January 13th on the cliffs less than half a mile south west of Porthtowan. How much can change in six weeks. Since then I have driven to Ukraine and met many wonderful, brave people facing up to their third year of war; I received the news of the death of a beloved aunt who liked to read these pages and I also made a discovery of something which has required visits to the local hospital. When there I was greeted by a whole team of new people – kind and efficient – who in turn introduced me to a whole range of new vocabulary about what is going on inside me. This is a new kind of adventure, one where I’m still familiarising myself with the contours and features of my own inner world. It has also galvanised me to come back here where now the air seems fresher, the colours fuller and the light that little bit more brighter.
On the way into Porthtowan mine shafts are rather daintily covered with peaked caps like large Chinese hats. Beyond the ocean is separated into moving patches of grey, green grey and then luminous swathes of jade where the sun has let its touch rest on the surface of the water. It’s mindbending in the variety of forms it presents.
Mine shaft and Porthtowan beach
And the weather is also incredible today in its variety. I have only got to the cliffs approaching Wheal Charlotte Moor the other side of Porthtowan but what a sight. It is an almost unparalleled performance, like a display by the Gods who seem to say ‘Look you little people. This is what I/we are capable of!’
Fronts of dark cloud and falling rain cross the ocean like serried ranks of soldiers approaching the cliffs. It’s both terrifying and thrilling at the same time. Moments later the whole sky is that much lighter. Far away now to the west there are silver lines of light on the water under the rocks of St Ives bay. Above them the odd roof of a house in St Ives catches the light, a patch of shining silver momentarily lit up like the pane of a satellite in space catching the light of the sun.
Rain clouds arriving at Wheal Charlotte
Above me the sun is a wobbly white oval in the sky that appears briefly and then is enveloped by the grey smoke of moving cloud. Great layers of surf keep gliding in like enormous white sheets folder over each other while the roar of the sea is unending.
When I bring my gaze back to the cliff top I notice the grass is intensely bright, a hallucinogen green. In places it has been sculpted by the wind into small dips and ridges like the land has had its hair ruffled.
Wind ruffled grass Wheal Charlotte
When I turn to look up a prefect multi coloured arc has formed to the north east – vibrant, vivid in its colour – and its presence is amplified by the dark backdrop of the sky.
Rainbow, Wheal Charlotte
The walk today is brief. I set off late and for a long time I am just on one patch of cliff engrossed in the stagecraft of everything that is happening around me while the odd couple walk past with a dog and glance a sideways look at me as if to say ‘What IS that guy doing?’
On the way back small hailstones tok tok on the hood of my jacket and bounce off the ground around me. They look like pearls nestled amongst the blades of grass. Away to the west the great white dome at Nancekuke Common airbase glints in the watery sun. It wasn’t long ago I was there but it seems like another era.
Sonetimes the path is like a memory guide tracking my life. I can literally look back and see the places I trod before: passing Portreath on that grey January day thinking of the Mousehole lights and lost crew of the Penlee lifeboat, sleeping on the perfect sand of Carbis Bay while the toylike train rattled round the cliffs, passing the old stamping ground of Alfred Wallis in St Ives and seeing the scenes he painted. These places I can still SEE and they prompt these memories in me. How far back can I go? Passing Lands End tired and sore. Watching the soft shades of sunset over Mousehole, Portscatho, St Anthony’s Head an more. Watching lights glimmer on The Lizard at night. Seeing ships and stars and the sun rising and sinking and always the sea, the sea, the sea. And on and on. It’s a kind of therapy this visual delving into the past.
And today? Well maybe it’ll stay with me, maybe not. We’ll see at some point when I’m many thousand steps and hours ahead of this here and now.
I had another dream about Ukraine last night. I was going to meet a couple in West Ukraine to deliver aid – comically being carried in a caravan on the back of a van – and was getting their details and all the relevant information to cross the border. This was all just at it happened (apart from the caravan).
Every night I dream of border crossings, guards and driving along miles and miles of straight roads through pine forests. This happened and must have made an impression on my imagination for me to keep reproducing the images in my sleep.
C and I are staying in a small B n B just back from the promenade in Penzance. The roads are quiet and slick with rain.
In Newlyn there is a buzzy atmosphere. The shops are open. In the bakery a queue of people wait for fresh pastys, in The Swordfish pub early drinkers are already propping up the bar and a couple look at a painting of a seascape in a window of a second hand shop.
In the fish shop nearest the harbour a woman expertly cuts off the head and tail of a megrim sole the size of a large serving dish before cutting off the fins with scissors.
‘There aren’t so many these days’, she says about the fishermen without looking up.
A man in his sixties with a creased face and a small ring in his ear stands with his back to the wall and looks at her as she works.
When I ask her why she replies without hesitation: ‘because they’re men aren’t they – they don’t like doing a proper day’s work’, and then looks knowingly at her friend with the earring. He just smiles and raises his eyebrows.
Walking into the harbour it seems quiet. The wharves where the fish are unloaded and packed for transportation are swept clean, the only sense of recent activity being a distinct fishy odour. The low sheds that line the eastern edge of the harbour have the old clock faces that show the ‘TIMES OF HIGH WATER’ that I remember from years ago.
It’ll be ten years ago this summer that I did my ‘Competent Crew’ training with a rag tag bunch of other men on a 35 foot yacht in Falmouth. Our surf dude skipper took us round The Lizard in a force 7 gale. I remember the boat pitching and heaving and everyone being sick over the side while one huge great bloke lay still on his front with his head over the side of the boat unable to move. We eventually made it and had to moor up next to two other boats as there were no moorings left on the harbour wall. The next day was totally still and sunlit and I remember the soft light playing on the water in the harbour and the smell of ciragette smoke and those clock faces.
There are very few people about but a strange welcoming party has gathered to meet us on the harbour wall. About fifty small birds with grey wings and backs, pure white undercarriages and orange legs drift quickly en masse from side to side chirruping keenly. With their beady eyes and quick fluid movement there is something comic about them. They are turnstones and used to feeding off scraps from the great hauls of fish that arrive here.
Turnstones, Newlyn Harbour
Along one of the piers a couple of big trawlers are getting ready to go to sea. A bulky man with tattoos is checking hundreds of metres of green fishing line. Another man in his twenties with the immediately recognisable yellow waders of his trade was bringing a hose into the fish locker.
‘Yep, we’re fishing today. We’ll go about 30 miles offshore.’
Further on I meet Mike Knowle standing at the back of his pickup chatting to the skipper of one of his two fishing boats. Where is the boat heading?
‘Wherever the fish are’, the skipper tells me. Mike adds quietly ‘probably just south of the Isles of Scilly is where they mostly go at the moment’
They are both positive about fishing. ‘It’s a good living’ the skipper says and Mike echoes this.
‘There’s plenty of fish out there but the young guys these days fon’t want to do it.’
How hard is it I wonder.
The skipper answers. ‘If you’re a builder you’re not going to go and work for f*#king 3 hours a day. Same with this. We go for a week. While we tow two men work a shift of 3 hours while the others rest then swap over with another two. When we come back we have 36 hours while the boat has repairs then we go again’.
I don’t say anything.
Mike says ‘It’s not as dangerous as it used to be. It’s all mechanised now. I was 15 when I first used to go. Now I’m 54 and I prefer staying on dry land.’
He gives me a wry smile as we say our goodbyes.
Fishing boat, Newlyn Harbour
Up on the north coast I restart from the man made hillocks that spell tin mining activity where I left off yesterday. Another leg. I’m exact about starting where I started before like joing the dots on a massive sketch of the outline of the south west of England. Sometimes I have to park as near as I can and walk back the other way along the path (as I have today). I normally stop and think back to where I was and celebrate the continuation of the walk. If there’s a SWCP wooden sign I pat it encouragingly before I set off. Back again. Rituals that started off as silly habits have now become set in stone.
Just as I start, two shining black shapes screech past and disappear over the edge of the cliffs. Are they choughs? Ever hopeful but alas no. Jackdaws. As soon as they have gone out of sight 2 bits of froth the size of tennis balls spin upwards passing in the opposite direction from the sea hundreds of feet below. It’s like the birds had been transformed somehow and sent back up the cliff in some bizarre moment of reincarnation – no doubt some ancient Cornish magic at work.
Much more of the sea is lit up today. Half of it is emerald green flecked with white spray while the vast shadows of clouds drift across it like continents.
At Chapel Porth the car park is half full. The sun is out. The wind is cold. But families and couples are at play.
Alongside the car park the stream races along almost level with its banks, a sign of the heavy rain that has continued unabated for several weeks. Every person I have spoken to recently have been talking about it.
Stream arriving at Chapel Porth
Everywhere on this stretch there are reminders of Cornwall’s mining past. Signs warning of shaft openings litter the heather covered cliff tops. The old narrow stone buildings with their tall chimneys nestling up to their sides can be seen all along the coast in various states of disrepair.
However, at Towanroath the engine house from the outside has still maintained its original structure like those car stickers in Cornwall which depict a silhouette of an old engine house – a symbol for Cornwall and Cornishness – and almost as ubiquitous as the white cross on black background of the Kernow flag. According to The Cornwall Guide The Wheal Coates mine that existed beneath where I’m standing was worked between 1802 and 1889. The Towanroath engine house is now a Grade II listed building and owned by the National Trust.
‘Built in 1872 the Towanroath engine house was responsible for keeping the water out of the shaft 600 feet below.’ There were two other engine houses here too that were ‘responsible for hoisting and crushing the tin ore.’ (Cornwall Guide).
Towanroath engine house
I have a moment of imagining working 600 feet below ground and shudder. I can’t imagine two places so physically close but so utterly different. It makes me wonder that I must be slightly claustrophobic. Give me loads of space and a great view any day. Coastal walking? Yes. Caving? Er No. Not for me.
Up on the top the wind is blasting. The ground is colourless. Even the heather is grey. It’s getting to that time of year where the world seems to be poised, ready now for the spring to arrive, for new beginnings, new life to be made explicit in the near world. Some day soon it’ll suddenly happen. And we’ll breathe a collective sigh of relief.
At St Agnes Head many people are parked. A mother and daughter walk side by side the wind blowing their hair into one dark mass. A small woman with two dogs focuses on the path ahead. A couple huddled into one another lean into the wind and beam at me when I pass. It is another small section done. Another collection of moments. And once again I look at the cliffs to the north east, pause and then peel off to track back to the car at Chapel Porth.
I wake up slowly, softly in my bed at The Ship that looks over Mousehole Harbour. The first thing I’m aware of – apart from the quiet of the room and the cries of seagulls outside the window – is the great sense of relief, that I’ve made it through the night again without resorting to some sort of sleep aid.
For years my relationship with bed and sleep has become unharmonious to the point that I have spent countless nights acutely aware of the dark hours passing by, imagining the world turning slowly, heavily until at last I would wrench myself out of bed and start the day, my mind normally shrouded in a fog of intense fatigue.
In the last few months and having made some quite drastic changes to my lifestyle my nights have started to change. I have persuaded myself that going to bed is something not to dread but to look forward to and waking up like this and realising it’s 7.30am and not 1.30am and that I’ve slept through the night is the most simple, wonderful feeling.
It’s a Saturday morning and the mattress of the sky is still covered with the same grey blanket that was there yesterday. It seems to make the world seem stiller.
Around Mousehole Harbour there is a distinctly early January feel to the village: a shop and the bakery both have workmen doing renovations, a person with a dog says good morning and otherwise the unlighted windows of houses stare vacantly out to sea.
Yet there is a jaunty air to the harbour. The famous Mousehole harbour lights are still in place. Strings of bright blue and orange lanterns adorn the road that rings the harbour. A cartoonish, pink Octopus uncurls its tentacles on the side of the sea wall. And on the beach an enormous dragon made out of wood and painted boards lies on the beach while eight men in high vis jackets stand around it waiting to carry it up the sea steps until next year. In the background the long line of The Lizard is a thin blue band between the sea and the sky.
I am the only person having breakfast in The Ship. The woman serving me breakfast has the typical unabashed friendliness that I’ve often associated with the Cornish. She is from St Austell but moved to Mousehole to be with her partner.
‘The best decision I ever made’, she tells me.
The Mousehole illuminations are famous. Local artist Joan Gilchrest was the first to put a string of lights beside the harbour in 1963 and the Mousehole Harbour Lights display has become bigger and bigger so that thousands of people now visit them every year. These days there are wonderful designs such as boats and animals that light up the village and must be magical when seen from the sea.
Sea wall, Mousehole and The Lizard beyond
In a storm on December 19th 1981 the local lifeboat, the Solomon Browne based at nearby Penlee Lifeboat Station set out in an to attempt to rescue the passengers and crew of The Union Star whose engines had failed 8 miles east of Wolf Rock. The conditions that night were incredibly fierce with hurricane force winds of up to 100mph and 60 feet waves. The 8 crew of the lifeboat – all of them from Mousehole – and all those on board The Union Star lost their lives.
Ever since then the Mousehole Lights are turned off on December 19th every year to remember those who were carried off that night.
I ask my host about this and she tells me most of the families of the crew are still here. The landlord of The Ship at the time was one of those who went down with the lifeboat.
‘Weather permitting, the families will go out on that date and lay a wreath on the spot where it happened’, she tells me.
I think the oft repeated thought of the mixed relationship villages that depend on the sea have with the beast they live beside, only too aware of its changeable, unpredictable nature.
When I arrive at Portreath nothing has changed. The grey and the cold and the biting northerly wind is a facsimile of yesterday and I set out with a smile at the continuity of this great walk and the never knowing when I’ll finish it. I don’t care. It’s about being in the here and now rather than treating it as a prize or achievement.
At Portreath housing is clustered around the harbour. A man with chest waders digs, I guess, for clams in the sand with a pitchfork.
A steep hill carries the road and path out of Portreath and when the path leaves the road black bushes of thorns accompany me with faded cans of Stella resting beneath them and a black bin liner that has been shredded by sea winds so that it looks like a hideous black cobweb amongst the branches.
Like many times over the last seven and a half years I track my progress on the coast path by the headlands that stick out into the sea behind me. Godrevy Point is still visible but St Ives Head is fading into the ubiquitous grey like the memories of all those other places that I once anticipated reaching and then left behind.
Gull Rock, Godrevy Point and a barely visible St Ives Head from the north east
A stonechat watches me quizzically on top of the old broken fence that follows the path, immaculate with his tan breast and distinctive white collar and black head.
Inland from the coast after Portreath is dominated by the old airfield on Nancekuke Common now abandoned but with its white futuristic dome once used for radar. It falls out of sight as I descend into the cove known as Sally’s Bottom where the path drops steeply down the cliffs and rises up via steps on the other side. It’s so steep it looks like a crooked rope ladder hanging down the hillside.
I am listening to myself breathing aware of the impact it has on me if I slow it down. I’m not thinking anything. Just watching and listening. Before I know it I am at the top of the next hill pausing for breath and wondering at what I was thinking in the few minutes it took me to go down one side and up the other. I don’t know and not for the first time I thank the vastness of the landscape and the calm it induces in me.
And soon I’ve moved on to realising I won’t make Porthtowan today and heading inland and back to the car. It doesn’t matter. The path will always be here and if I’m an old man when I finally complete it so be it. Until the next time.
The Slow Walker 