We passed the Autumn Equinox two days ago. The marker of the year’s turning, I can already feel the chill in the morning, the darkness creeping into the edges of the day, and the slowing of growth of almost every living thing around me.
But before I sink into the coming season of gift and decay, and before the memory of it slips too far from my grasp, I want to take you back to the South West Coast path to finish my walk. After my first day’s walking in steady rain, you might remember, the evening glowed with surprise sunlight. It promised well for my second day, the longer of the two, when I would walk from the fort at Whitsand to Looe. I ate a full English cooked breakfast in the curved brick chamber of the fort that now houses the restaurant - an unsettling retreat into the shadows when the day promised such light - but soon I was striking out west along the old military road. Patchy sky with lumpy clouds but fragments of blue between. The path followed the road for a while, then dipped off to the left into secret narrow green paths, then back through a gate onto the road, then back down again towards the sea. Within fifteen minutes or so, the sun broke through. The light lifted and my spirits followed suit. In a notch in the cliff leading to Sharrow Beach, I watched rooks play in the brisk wind, catching the turbulent air kicked up by the swell of the waves beneath. Ivy flowers glistened in the new sunlight and the air felt fresh, full of potential.
I get used to the wildflowers in our hedges back in our village but, here on the coast, only a few miles away as the crow flies, the hedgerows offered a different palette. There were some familiars: wild honeysuckle, bramble, bindweed, ragwort, wild thyme, yarrow. But some were new to me, like the yellow Aaron’s Rod mullein and glossy common mugwort. I shared the path with swirled yellow snails and slugs making their cumbersome way across the path. The path was barely a foot wide in places, disappearing into the brambles on the seaward side, and leaning into slate rock on my right, folded and fractured like old gnarly tree-trunks. Steel-grey clouds passed behind me and the sky continued to clear ahead of me. I could see my destination, Looe, at the far end of the bay around ten miles away, its companion St George’s Island clearly indicating the entrance to the harbour tucked out of my sight. For the accomplished SWCP through hiker who marches up to twenty miles a day, this stretch would be nothing. But I have never been able to cover that kind of mileage in one day, my limit sitting firmly at around 14 or 15 miles if I had nothing to do for the following three days save nurse my feet. I seem to be cursed with blisters, whatever I do, however I lace my boots. I guess I’m just not used to being on my feet for such extended periods of time. For preference, ten miles of walking in a day is about right.
There is a functioning military base at Tregantle Fort part way along Whitsand Bay and they publish their firing dates on the government website and announce the dangers by flying red flags on the coast path. It was a firing day (all day apparently) although I couldn’t see any flags. The high metal gates full of military warning and official regulations were enough to put me off. The alternative path skirts inland along a sweeping road, offering pleasant views across rolling green and brown fields towards the River Lynher that flows into the Tamar. Yellow military signs punctuated the path like grim haikus:
Danger
Do not touch
any military
debris it may
explode and
kill you.
Back on the flat expanse of the coast path, the last swallows darted in the thermals above me. Ripe hawthorn berries sang out from the hedgerows and brambles tumbled their bubbles of blackberries to the damp ground. I stepped over the stone wall separating the coastal realm from the fields and squinted my eyes towards the shining mirror of sea to the east, close strips of waves surging towards the cliffs below. The sky cleared and by the time I descended the winding shady path into Portwrinkle and bought a coffee to drink overlooking the beach, it was hot in the sunshine. Shrieks of four women rang up from the beach below as they tested the waters, strong waves sucking at their ankles. I looked away, knowing from experience it could only end in accident. Which it did, and they slowly walked back up the beach comforting one of their party who had been swept from her feet and scarped her thighs against the shingle.
Past the smugglers’ cottages on the seafront and up the steep rise of The Beacon. Such peaks bring deep fatigue, but oh, the views! I watched as the sky darkened and the sea shone suddenly with bright turquoise. A squall was approaching. I watched for a few moments as the grey water smudge of rain crept closer and, calculating its path, I made a quiet wager with myself that it would pass within a few hundred metres of the coast. Which it did, although a few rogue drops prompted me to put the coat on anyway. I took it off about three minutes later as the smudge passed, replaced with silver sheets that traced east across the sea. The sun returned.
You might imagine that walking the path brings a sense of freedom. In one sense that’s true, it does, but time is not really your own on the path. Time presents a more embodied experience - a physical rhythm of miles walked, miles left to walk, hours left before the hot spot beneath your left heel erupts into a painful blister, time left before that next squall crosses the path and soaks you - but it is also governed by human time too. Hunger, thirst, the opening times of cafes, the infrequent train departure times from Looe, my destination. I pressed on.
Down into Downderry, down sweet gentle old paths that skipped towards the cottages. Fallen apples lay in my path. Quiet moments of nothing but the sea and rustle of wind in the leaves. Belgian waffles and fruit for lunch. A strenuous walk into a headwind on the vast beach that joins the village to Seaton. Up the path out of Seaton, past an open sore on the land, where new luxury houses were being built. None with a view of the sea, but each paying the ultimate price for proximity to the lifestyle. Walking the path reminds me we can never own this land. We do better to wear it lightly, pass through it, take a sup from its overflowing cup of delight, and then go home.
There’s confusion up on Struddick, the path winding inland where it should hug the coast. I ascend a steep slope and then retrace my steps, only to find that I was on the right path all along and it had been diverted, due to unstable cliffs most likely. No-one had told the coast path guidebook, or Google Maps, or even the South West Coast Path official website who sang the praises of the circular walk along a route now defunct. I cursed them and followed the re-routed path, pleasant enough. Past the Monkey Sanctuary, where years since friends and I took a diversion on our long drive home from camping in Sennen to the Lake District to meet a friend of one of us. Past the campsite where my husband and I stayed for a few nights whilst we were waiting for our flat to be ready to move into.
Closer now to Looe. I text G to say I’m nearing the end, but two hours later I’m still walking through the long suburbs and holiday villages that lie along the eastern coastal approaches to the harbour town. Too late for the 16:25 train, I dawdled into town, sat on the harbour wall, watched the yogis on the beach, the painter with his easel, the man with long dreadlocks running light on his feet, the two teenage girls screaming in the cold water. Seagulls eyed me and signs warned against feeding them. As I walked back into town to the train station, several hundred gulls screamed above me in a vast swirl. I sat on the small platform waiting for the train connection to Liskeard, and onto Plymouth, where I’d sat seven years earlier at the end of my longer walk from Falmouth. Two days felt perfect. The train pulled in and trundled us back up the Looe Valley, past little egrets, Canada geese, black-tailed gulls, grey herons, each stretch of sand in the low tide draped with birds of all sizes and varieties. The river narrowed to a stream, its banks choked with Himalayan balsam.
The sea, of course, is the defining and non-negotiable feature of the 630-mile South West Coast Path that hugs the south-west coastline of England, but the path is so much more than that. It is a space of fractional vignettes of life other than one’s own, a space of small creatures and fallen apples, a space of peril and exposure, a space of reverie in the blueness of the ocean and the white heat of the sun, a space of isolation and stark solitude, craved for but also a little feared. It is a space of holidays, of modern life refracted through its coastal architecture, a space of decay and poverty, but also of unseemly riches. It is a space in which I confront my body in all its shades of resilience and weakness. But most of all, the path is a space in which, for a short breath of time, I become part of the endless story of this land.
In his beautiful collection of essays, Next to Nature (2022), Ronald Blythe writes of paths: ‘Wherever we stroll, the way belongs to us. At this moment it is our way. It converses with us every step.’ For two days, this path - between Plymouth and Looe - belonged to me.
You made me want to go and walk another long distance path. I agree there is a strange mix of perceived freedom and also the constraint of the path, the physical journey and the human infrastructure we need to complete such a journey. I also agree that somehow time becomes much more of a rhythm, your stride, the tide... Interesting as I had never thought of it that way, but you are exactly right. Thank you! x
I like your thoughts on the path and time here - the expectation of freedom vs the reality of following the way - constraining as much as freeing, dictating your passage through the landscape and confronting you with the limitations of your body and its own demands and needs. Really enjoyed this Lynne, as I do all your posts. Nice to experience the cliff tops and the glimpses of the sea as we settle into autumn.