Tintagel To Port Isaac

From this wilder, North Cornish section of the path, you could see many more rock stacks and tiny islands ...

This is the castle at Tintagel, supposedly the birthplace of the legendary King Arthur ...

I deviated from the official route so that I could visit Tintagel's isolated parish church, which stands on windswept high ground to the south of the village ...

And so I continued, each day with its own little difficulties and its own little joys, its own little problems and its little own epiphanies ...

Here I'm leaving Trebarwith Strand on the way to Port Isaac ...

A Haven For The Night

Cornwall is England's furthermost south-western county. It's remote, it has its own customs and traditions (and its own language, which, sadly, is rarely spoken nowadays), and it's beautiful - though, when the mists are down, beautiful in a sombre, haunting, mysterious kind of way. It's Celtic to the core, and has much in common with Brittany, that other proudly Celtic and independently-minded region, which lies just across the Channel in north west France.

The cliffscapes became even more rugged and ravishing, and the views inland, over small, misty fields, more open. In this photo you can see my walking poles resting against a wooden Coast Path marker. Note the acorn, symbol of the trail, and the yellow arrow (seeing these yellow arrows always made me recall the yellow arrows of the Spanish Camino...)

I spent a night in Crackington Haven, a place well known to geologists for its tortuously folded rock strata. The Coombe Barton Inn, where I stayed, was rather haphardardly-run, but the home-cooked food was excellent. I ordered soup, followed by a delicious fish pie. And, instead of the usual shower, I found a big bath in which to luxuriate...

Ronald Duncan's Hut: Margins And Borders

This is the stone-built work hut of the writer and man of letters, Ronald Duncan (1914-1982). It's been beautifully restored by some members of his family, and stands directly by the South West Coast Path on the border of Devon and Cornwall. The door was open, so I went inside. Under the window was Duncan's desk and chair, and a box of his books, with a hand-written sign saying 'Help Yourself!' I took a couple of paperbacks and stuffed them into my rucksack. On one wall hung an information board, which contained some interesting facts about this most prolific yet little known of writers...

Duncan read English at Cambridge with FR Leavis, and was much taken with Gandhi, whom he met in India in 1936. (He remained a life-long pacifist.) Back in England, he moved to Devon, where he established a community farm in the small village of Welcombe - a project he describes in his book Journal Of A Husbandman (1944). He wrote plays, poems, fiction, fables, film scripts, opera librettos, autobiographical essays, journalistic pieces, literary criticism, and topographical books about the landscape of his beloved Devon and Cornwall. He was one of those figures destined to stay on the margins of belles-lettres, forever in the shadow of his more famous literary and artistic friends, who included Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Benjamin Britten, Jean Cocteau, and the sculptors Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

This is the view of Marsland Mouth from Duncan's writing desk. I'm not sure I'd be able to write anything at all with a view as amazing as that. I'd be perpetually distracted. Where I'm standing is in Devon, but I'm looking down on Cornwall...

And here's the border sign ('Kernow' means 'Cornwall' in Cornish). There was no passport control, no officious guards, no body searches. I just slipped right through, over the long, green grass, past the gliding fulmars and cronking ravens, into a new county, almost a new country...

From Hartland Quay To Marsland Mouth

I left an eerily quiet Hartland Quay Hotel and continued south. It's just as well I started early, for the day was a long and tough one. But the steep and numerous climbs had many compensations: not least, the view from the tops. Stunning vista followed stunning vista. Can you see the island of Lundy again on the horizon?

I was now more than a week into my trek, and that day, the eighth day, was one of the most scenically dramatic so far. The terrain had become wilder, the cliffs higher, the rock architecture more jagged and ribbed. Looking inland, there was still much purple heather and yellow gorse to be seen, which provided a pleasing, colourful contrast with the landscape's prevailing greens and blues...

Here I'm descending through the heather and gorse to Welcombe Mouth. You can see a tiny waterfall just below the car park...

And this is the waterfall close-up. Note the interesting rock structure with its horizontal strata and lines of erosion...

I pressed on. The weather was good and I was feeling quite energetic. The next dip led down to Marsland Mouth, where, quite unexpectedly, I came across a renovated writer's hut, a writer I'd vaguely heard of but was soon to learn more about...

Wind And A Curry

After Westward Ho! and Babbacombe Mouth, cliff top woods extended for many miles, beyond Peppercombe, below Buck's Cross...

... as far as Clovelly, where a boat race was going on, and the jetty was packed with folk...

More woodland, then the scenery became more open, wilder, starker, more elemental. You can see that the sun was out again - though the wind was fierce - and the path descended right down to sea level, where I took this photo. The island on the horizon is Lundy...

Rounding Hartland Point...

Wouldn't you just love to live in a static caravan in the middle of a field miles from anywhere? Well, I know I would...

Here I'm approaching Hartland Quay, where I spent the night in the excellent, quaintly eccentric Hartland Quay Hotel. It was curry night, and the curry was home-made and quite superb. The wind was very strong now. In some places I could hardly stand upright. But the brash sunlight defined everything with a brittle, almost painful clarity...

In Which Our Hero Struggles Valiantly With Bruised Toes And Blisters, But Finally Makes It Across The Marsh To An Unprepossessing Seaside Resort

On the fifth day of my trek along the South West Coast Path, I walked 25 miles from Croyde to Bideford. This was too much. Even though the stretch was unusually flat and relatively easy for a change, I was still carrying full camping gear. Also my toes were being crushed in untested boots. I swapped the boots for lightweight walking sandals, which provided some relief at first - but at the end of the day I had a blister on each foot. Now I know this sounds as if the day was hell, but it wasn't, for I was passing through a landscape of uncommon beauty...

Braunton Burrows is the largest area of sand dunes you'll find in Britain, and it's so ecologically important that, not only is it a National Nature Reserve, but it was also the UK's first UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. I'd been there before on family holidays when young. Places like this had given me some of my first exciting glimpses into the natural world. And now here I was again, 45 years later, entering the reserve - and loving it even more! (In a way, this walk is like joining the dots, connecting up all the isolated coastal places I'd visited as a kid, or with my own children, in one continuous, linear journey.)

An amazing 400 plant species have been recorded here, including some quite specialised varieties such as pyramidal orchid, southern marsh orchid and bog pimpernel. I myself was delighted to see common centaury, evening primrose, purple loostrife and viper's bugloss. On the bugloss, burnet moths (distinctive with their red spots) were feeding, and gatekeeper butterflies fluttered limply on the brambles. There were leaf beetles on the willows, and crusty lichens and fragrant herbs - particularly wild thyme - underfoot. There are rare amphibians here too, not to mention the rather less rare rabbits - which crop the grass so heavily that most of the flowers appear in strangely stunted forms. I took a short-cut behind the dunes across the flat, eerily haunting Braunton Marsh, an area of tussocky, uncultivated grassland, intersected by drainage ditches and grazed by cattle...

Beyond the marsh, I followed the muddy sandbanks of the river Caen to Velator, on the outskirts of Braunton village...

... then joined the Tarka Trail (a popular walking and cycling route along a former railway trackbed) by the river Taw. I eavesdropped on this noisy gathering of Canada geese, though what they were squabbling about I could not decide...

... then crossed the river, and made my way along its southern shore, where sheep safely grazed, and redshanks and oystercatchers piped and whistled...

I spent the night in a splendidly old-fashioned little guest house in Bideford, and, the next day, sent home all my camping gear and my rogue boots. I would buy some more comfortable footwear at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile I limped slowly onward to Westward Ho! - a faded, down-at-heel, surfing resort of such grey gloom and despondency, I vowed I would never return...

Lie Down And Listen To The Rain

Leaving Combe Martin in the rain ...

Looking back on Water Mouth in the rain ...

The sun shone briefly over Ilfracombe ...

And in Torrs Park a brisk wind was blowing ...

This is Croyde Bay beyond Woolacombe, where I camped on a 'Holiday Park' campsite for the night. It was pretty dire. I could find nothing to eat. There was no hot water in the Portakabin showers. Though the rain held off momentarily ...

Here's a poem about rain, taken from one of my treasured poetry collections, The Green Book Of Poetry, edited by Ivo Mosley. This poetry anthology, published in 1993, is little known, and I love it. It's a book I used to sell when working as a freelance publishers' sales agent in the 1990s. Mosley visited Japan back in the 1970s. He then read Japanese at Oxford (there are lots of Far Eastern poems in the book) and subsequently became a stoneware ceramicist in Devon. Its a constantly surprising collection - don't look in here for all your usual anthologized pieces - and each poem is linked by Mosley's own perceptive, humanistic, eco-aware commentary. Although this poem from the anthology describes the rains of spring, it was easy for me to identify with the same feeling during the rains of Devonshire's late summer...

Third Day Of The Third Month, Rain: Written To Dispel My Depression

I go out the door; it's raining, but I can't go back now,
so I borrow someone's bamboo hat to wear for a while.
Spring has tinted ten thousand leaves, and I didn't even know;
the clouds have taken a thousand mountains and swept them away.

I look for flowers in the village
but they hide from me on purpose;
and even when I find them, they only sadden me.
It would be better to lie down
and listen to the rain
in the spring mountains -
a quick downpour, then a few scattered drops.

As spring dies, the scenes grow more beautiful:
the poet will remember them for the rest of his life.
Level fields overflowing with green -
wheat in every village;
soft waters reflecting red -
flowers on every bank.

YUNG WAN-LI, Chinese, 1127-1206, translated by J CHAVES

A Sombre Place And A Stiff Climb

After that first night's wildcamp, I spent my second night in a Lynmouth B&B. I showered, then had a couple of beers and a fish supper at the Ship Inn. Lynmouth's a sombre little place in the rain. For yes, on waking the next morning, the weather had turned, and sporadic showers - sometimes heavy - were forecasted for the whole day. Thus the pattern was set for my complete trip: one or two days fine, one or two days rain, as successive fronts of high and low pressure hit England from the Atlantic throughout the month of August. Here's a view of Lynmouth's tiny harbour ...

Lynmouth - which huddles at the foot of cliffs at the confluence of two river gorges - was wrecked by a devastating flood in August 1952, killing 34 people. I felt, especially in the morning rain, that a morbid atmosphere still lingered on, so I put Lynmouth gladly behind me and tackled the back-breaking, zig-zag path up to Lynton. It was unexpectedly steep, and I kept stopping to catch my breath. Had I really become this unfit since my walk across Spain? At the top, I followed the Victorian-planned North Walk towards the Valley of Rocks, and on the way encountered some very docile feral goats ...

Here's part of the spectacular Valley of Rocks ...

And here's the coast path cutting through heather and hugging the cliff to Combe Martin, where I spent my third night, in the welcoming and reasonably priced Royal Marine Inn ...

Green

On that special, second day of my coastal walk, believe me, all was magic and mystery. I felt like Sir Gawain on his quest for the Green Knight. The sun shone, and the sky was a cloudless, ineluctable blue. I passed this thatched, double-arched tollgate ...

... on the way to Culbone church, one of those churches the tourist guides call 'the smallest church in England' ...

Inside two German walkers I'd met earlier were engaged in some gorgeous a cappella polyphony (you can see their walking poles on the left of the church porch; mine are on the right next to my backpack) ...

That morning I'd startled two red deer which had run noisily down a brackeny combe. Then they'd frozen in perfect unison, both looking back at me, thinking themselves camouflaged ... And I'd disturbed two green woodpeckers, eating ants in a green field, which had then ricocheted away over slopes slanting to a blue horizon ... And I'd seen a falcon from above, with black-tipped scimitar wings, perched on a stumpy tree, then gliding off up-valley in motionless flight ...

The stunning moorland purple and yellow carpet of heather and gorse had been pure Wizard Of Oz. And, in the woodlands, the variety of trees was stupendous: oak, holly, birch, rowan, maple, sycamore, pines, many rarer species I could not identify. Butterflies did their limp, fluttery thing, and greenbottles (flies you don't normally notice) sparkled on cow pats. Tame, dumpy robins skulked an arm's length away. However, the bright red berries of the wild arum flower showed the season was on the turn.

Yet it was still summer, and I walked through green tunnels of legendary shadows and celestial light ...

The Person From Porlock

On the second day of my walk along England's South West Coast Path I passed through Porlock and down to Porlock Weir (see photo). The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge used to live not very far away - in the village of Nether Stowey between Minehead and Bridgwater to be exact - and he and his friends William Wordsworth, Wordsworth's sister Dorothy, and the poet and essayist Thomas de Quincey, used to take frequent long walks in the surrounding hills of Exmoor and the Quantocks. What lively, literary conversations they must have had! Or do you think they must have just grumbled about the weather and the state of their feet, like most walkers? (Though actually we know both from Wordsworth and from William Hazlitt that Coleridge was a brilliant conversationalist.)

Of course, the name of 'Porlock' resounds in the literary imagination because of Coleridge's famous story about being interrupted by a 'Person from Porlock' while feverishly writing his visionary poem Kubla Khan. Whether Coleridge was struggling to finish it, or whether his juices were in full creative flow, we will never know. Whether the 'Person from Porlock' really existed, or whether this was a fiction invented by Coleridge to excuse the fragmentary nature of his poem, we will also never know. But what is certain is that only fifty four lines were ever completed - out of a projected two to three hundred. And what is also highly probable is that the poem was composed in an opium-induced trance. For Coleridge was addicted to laudanum (an easily obtained, readily prescribed pain-killing drug at the time) - as were many of his friends and contemporaries, including Thomas de Quincey (whose book Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater I strongly recommend; it makes wonderful reading.) Indeed, some scholars believe that the actual 'Person from Porlock' was Coleridge's physician, Dr P Aaron Potter - who had called unexpectedly on that day in 1797 to supply Coleridge with his fix, thus diverting him from one of his wildest visions. Anyhow, the term 'Person from Porlock' has been alluded to by many poets and novelists ever since to mean any unwelcome visitor or unwanted intruder.

On a wider note, all this got me thinking about 'unfinished' art in general. Creative works may be 'unfinished' for many reasons: the death of the artist, the deliberate wish of the artist, the interruption of the artist. Consider the great 'unfinished' masterpieces: Jane Austen's Sanditon, The Mystery Of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, Coleridge's Kubla Khan. Does the fact that they're 'unfinished' really matter all that much? Personally I feel it matters not one jot. Indeed, for me, some works of art are all the better for being 'unfinished'. Perhaps this is why I like so much some of the suggestive, seemingly unpolished drawings and sketches by artists like Constable, Van Gogh and many others. Perhaps this is why I like so much the fragmentary nature of a poem such as Kubla Khan, with its half-fulfilled desires and half-complete visions. Sometimes the 'unfinished' work of art reflects more truly the life we really live. We can fill in any gaps and omissions and endings in our own imaginations.

Back at Porlock Weir, this family's having a good time crabbing and messing about by the boats ...

But this couple's striding off rather purposefully towards ... what ..? I leave this unfinished, as I don't know the answer myself ...

(If anyone is interested in the relationship between opium and English Romanticism, try reading Alethea Hayter's terrific book Opium And The Romantic Imagination, a book I read and enjoyed many years ago.)

Piece Of Mind/Whole Mind/Peace Of Mind

I'm finding it impossible to write anything even mildly creative at the moment - let alone get my thoughts together about the South West Coast Path - because the virus I came back with (which I thought gone) has left my ears in a sorry state. To put it bluntly, I'm half deaf in one, and completely deaf in the other. I believe I may have an infection in the completely deaf ear, as it hurts. So I suppose I'll have to visit the doctor on Monday if things don't improve. I thought a purgative onion, garlic and chilli soup had blasted the virus away - but, oh no! There's often a sting in life's tail (or tale), isn't there?

The Tibetan Book Of Living And Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche is giving me some consolation, so I thought I'd post a few quotes from this wise classic ...

Confined in the dark, narrow cage of our own making which we take for the whole universe, very few of us can even begin to imagine another dimension of reality. Patrul Rinpoche tells the story of an old frog who had lived all his life in a dank well. One day a frog from the sea paid him a visit.
'Where do you come from?' asked the frog in the well.
'From the great ocean,' he replied.
'How big is your ocean?'
'It's gigantic.'
'You mean about a quarter of the size of my well here?'
'Bigger.'
'Bigger? You mean half as big?'
'No, even bigger.'
'Is it ... as big as this well?'
'There's no comparison.'
'That's impossible! I've got to see this for myself.'
They set off together. When the frog from the well saw the ocean, it was such a shock that his head just exploded into pieces.

Dudjom Rinpoche described the buddha nature of mind thus:

No words can describe it
No example can point to it
Samsara does not make it worse
Nirvana does not make it better
It has never been born
It has never ceased
It has never been nonexistent
It has no limits at all
It does not fall into any kind of catagory.

And the poet Nyoshul Khenpo wrote:

Rest in great natural peace
This exhausted mind
Beaten helpless by karma and neurotic thought,
Like the relentless fury of the pounding waves
In the infinite ocean of samsara.

Purgative And Blackberry Pie

To loosely paraphrase, nay to subvert, Shakespeare: 'If food be the music of love, let's eat.' Or something like that. Dedicated readers of this blog will know that the subject of food and drink looms large in Solitarywalkerville, and I can't go too long without my fix of foodie posts.

First of all, a big thank you to blogreaders Bella and Karin for their suggestion of onion, garlic and chilli soup as a cold-busting remedy. I tried it and, by God, it worked! As usual I was too lazy to surf for a recipe, so I casually sauteed red onions in butter and olive oil, added an unprecedented quantity of freshly chopped garlic (this called for emergency measures), then finally an eye-watering amount of chilli powder (should that have been a teaspoon not a tablespoon-ful?), which I figured would blast the virus like a visit from some culinary Spanish Inquisition. I poured in chicken stock and whizzed up this lethal concoction. It looked bad, though innocuous enough: a sort of thin, brown, watery gruel. It tasted bad, too. And the aftertaste lifted the roof of my mouth clean off, leaving it somewhere west of Penzance on the Cornish coastal path. Screaming neural messages - was it pain, was it pleasure? I wasn't quite sure - ricocheted in shock waves from mouth to gut via oesophagus and stomach. These splenetic telegraphs seemed to shout: yes, this hurts, but it's good for you! And it was good. So, so good. This wondrous purgative shook the remnants of the virus from my system like Cynthia Payne thoroughly working out one of her more masochistically-inclined clients. I haven't had a sniffle since.

Next, and slightly more seriously, I wanted to tell you we've been out blackberrying. (For any younger readers - blackberry in this context is a wild fruit not a smartphone thingy. 'Wild fruit', I said - you know, growing in the hedgerows? With seeds? Oh, never mind ..!)

Foraging is heaven at this time of year and for the next month or so. (Remember Richard Mabey's book from the early 1970s, Food For Free?) On my Caminos I've picked walnuts freshly fallen from the tree, grapes missed by the harvester, nectarines and peaches from the orchards of the Camargue. I've shared raw, olive-oil-brushed wild mushroom delicacies with fungi gatherers in the woods of south west France. Oh, it's so satisfying and rewarding to go out into the countryside and pick your own food from nature's larder. We've already collected pounds of blackberries, and turned them into blackberry and apple crumble, blackberry and apple pie, blackberry fools (see pic). And I've just made some blackberry jus in a twinkling of an eye - from fresh blackberries, vanilla sugar and a little water - which will perfectly complement some delicious Lincolnshire ice cream. Or perhaps a venison steak.

Thanks for indulging me in my foodie post. Normal travel-and-poetry service will resume before long!

South West Coast Path

The South West Coast Path is Britain's longest waymarked trail, stretching for a staggering 634 miles (1014 km) around England's south-western peninsula. It begins in Minehead, but soon leaves Somerset for the coastline of North Devon. It then encircles the whole of coastal Cornwall, and takes a circuitous line round the South Devon coast, before coming to an end at Poole Harbour in Dorset.

In August I walked two-thirds of this trail from Minehead to Plymouth: a total of 410 miles (660 km). It took me the whole month to walk it. You can't do it quickly. It's a squirming, squiggly, writhing, wriggly kind of route, tracing every point and headland, often going back on itself as it seeks a way round inlets and estuaries (though you can often use ferries to cross these estuaries). Sometimes you feel you're walking two miles only to progress one mile. And it's a surprisingly strenuous route, possibly one of the most strenuous I've ever done in the UK (and that includes the Pennine Way). There's hardly ever an 'easy' day of flat walking. Most days you're on a perpetual roller-coaster of short but steep ups and downs. But, for all the hard work, it's a remarkable route, a beautiful route, and, though there were some busy coves and beaches bustling with surfers and holidaymakers (it was the month of August), much of the route was splendidly isolated, with only the occasional other walker for company.

I started out with full backpacking kit, but soon sent home all my camping gear - tent, stove, sleeping bag, sleeping mat. Even though the stuff was 'lightweight', I found it much too heavy to carry. The unaccustomed weight on my back and shoulders was spoiling the whole enjoyment of the walk. So I resigned myself to spending more money than planned - but could now look forward to hot showers, comfortable beds and big breakfasts in the B&Bs and country inns along the trail!

The photo above shows my first and only wildcamp. It was an idyllic spot just two hours west of Minehead. The moorland here - colourful with yellow gorse and purple heather - rolls steeply down to the Bristol Channel. I pitched my tent in the lee of a stone wall overlooking ferns and rocks, short bilberry bushes and the still, blue water of the channel. In half an hour all was done - tent up, air mat inflated, sleeping bag unpacked. I put some water to boil on my dinky little Coleman gas stove and sat cross-legged, gazing out into an infinity of blue. It was so peaceful. There were no passers-by. I felt like the only person in Somerset. Buzzards mewed and red deer barked. I relaxed, freed my mind and let the tranquillity drift over and through me. I watched the sun set. An owl distantly hooted. This walk was going to be good ...

Here are two views from my wildcamp ...