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...
