Goodbye Cornwall: South West Coast Path – Day 30

Portwrinkle to Plymouth

34,000 steps

Sunny again.

Maybe I should be surprised, but in fact I’ve done the research, and I know that there is less rain on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall at this time of year than in July.

(Mind you, I’ve had holidays in Cornwall in July, and it’s not hard to be dryer than those.)

George Clooney and Overplanning: South West Coast Path – Day 29

Polperro to Portwrinkle

28,000 steps

Polperro

If you had to design a classic quaint Cornish fishing village – maybe for a Hollywood movie, featuring a world-weary George Clooney rediscovering his soul, surrounded by grizzled old salts mending nets, and falling for a perky divorced barmaid – Polperro would be it.

It has narrow streets, with buildings crammed together at odd angles, and looking like they were assembled from leftover bits of earlier towns. It has a proper working harbour, admirably uncommercialised compared with other Cornish ‘fishing villages’.

But I don’t linger. I never do. The Path awaits. It feels like I might need to come back some other time, to take a proper look at all the places I marched through.

The book promises an easy start, but it doesn’t feel like it at first. A brisk climb out of Polperro and I’m up on the cliffs. I soon reach a fork in the Path. A handwritten sign reads, “Coast Path reopened”, and points to the right. I go that way.

Ten minutes later, I pass a couple with a dog. The man says, “Are you confident you can get through this way now?”

I was until you asked me that. I view the Path ahead with new suspicion, wondering who might want to send unsuspecting walkers down a dead-end, so close to April Fools.

I don’t need to worry. I pass two sections of fencing, now half-cleared. I don’t tumble over an eroded cliff-edge. I never work out why the Path was diverted in the first place.

The morning is sunny again, but with more of a haze, and a stronger breeze than before. But I’m still happily in shorts and tee shirt. The clocks went forward in the night – into British Summer Time – robbing me of an hour’s rest.

I soon reach Looe, with its quirky banjo pier.

A coast path sign points across the river, but there’s no ferry, so I continue on into town to the bridge. I stop for coffee.

Looe

East Looe is probably a couple of notches above West Looe on the Cuteometer. But it’s close, and I make only a superficial investigation.

I continue, climbing out of Looe for an easy walk across a flat headland to Mellendreath, a small beachy cove, which is palpably readying itself for the coming summer season – people sit outside the ugly beach cafe, and walk round in flip-flops. The easier terrain allows my blister to check in with me, to let me know it’s comfortable under the new plaster, and it will be keeping me company during the miles ahead.

Out of Mellendreath, the Path cuts inland through woods, and then onto a road past the Monkey Sanctuary (disappointingly closed for winter – don’t they know it’s now British Summer Time?). I pass a cottage and hear loud music coming from inside. It’s ‘Knights in White Satin’, and for a moment it’s easy to believe I’ve slipped back into the 1970s.

The Path emerges out onto grassy headland.

The further coasts, ahead and behind, have disappeared into the haze, sea and sky merging into a wall of silvery-white.

It’s a long stretch in the morning. Once again, I’ve overplanned it – leaving myself to race along, trying to go a little too fast.

I’ve now done nearly thirty days of the coast path. I really should have learned:  the route can be arduous; it’s more challenging than the gentle downland around London; the path rises and falls frequently; and it’s best taken slowly and enjoyed.

I reach Seaton for lunch, having done two-thirds of the day’s walk in the morning. The consolation is that I am meeting two special old friends.

We have lunch in the busy beach cafe, and then Pete joins me for the afternoon stroll into Portwrinkle, a splendid clifftop walk, with relatively few climbs, but lots of coastal beauty.

Walking with someone else makes this stretch a completely different experience. Especially being accompanied by a dog: she quickly finds a sheep skeleton that I probably would have missed.

It’s also a revelation walking with someone who’s more of a countryman. It turns out the white blossom I couldn’t identify is growing on Blackthorn. Who knew.

It’s a lovely interlude. We say goodbye at Portwrinkle, and I have a weary dinner alone. Feeling like I’ve probably had enough Coast Path.

Again.

For a while.

 

Wild Garlic and Lots of Steps: South West Coast Path – Day 28

Charlestown to Polperro

34,000 steps

If you are looking down while you are walking it is better to walk uphill – the ground is nearer.

– Gertrude Stein

Under a cloudless sky, with air tasting fresh and smelling of the sea, with me already wearing shorts, I set off on what the guide book promises will be an easy start to the (long) day.

Charlestown Harbour

Out of Charlestown, the first mile or so takes me past holiday homes and hotels, along a tame headland, to Carlyon Bay.

I pass a coastwatch tower, inside which I notice a watcher faithfully watching the sea, despite it being like a sun-dappled sheet of frosted glass, and as dangerous in appearance as a rice pudding.

There is however a solitary sailboat off the coast, so I guess someone should keep an eye on it.

The Path here is too domesticated and tame for my taste. Well short of past wild glories. I spend too long skirting a golf course.

Then the china clay works at Par loom into view and the Path veers inland, taking another precipitous plunge below former standards.

There’s a long walk between the railway line and the clay works, hemmed in by mesh fences on both sides. This is followed by a tedious road walk through Par.

It’s not coastal. It’s not even a path. The walking is – I admit – far from strenuous, which I’m not against in principle. But there’s surely a balance to be struck. I tramp through a ghost town of a caravan park, and down the east side of Par Sands to pick up the Path again. This is more like it.

There’s even a swan in the sea. Not something you see every day.

After half an hour’s gentle stroll, I make a steep descent into Polkerris, which has an impressive curved harbour wall, and a pub on the beach. A good place to while away an afternoon. Or a week.

Distracted, I lose my way, and what I think is a short steep track up to the Path turns out to be a long steep road up to another road. I follow this road parallel to the coast, and pick up some footpath signs, turning inland through a smelly farmyard and across a defective footbridge.

Suddenly, I’m on a different Path – the Saints’ Way, which goes inland to Fowey. What I hate above all is having to retrace my steps, so I go with it, hiking a couple of miles of uneventful field paths to reach the outskirts of Fowey, where a banal stretch of road walking takes me down a sequence of hills, past an eccentric bus shelter, and into the riverside town.

Fowey Bus Shelter

I’d liked to linger, but the Polruan Ferry is in, and I walk straight on board.

The ferry ride is too brief, serving up delicious views of the estuary.

Fowey from the ferry

In Polruan, I have lunch in the harbourside Lugger Inn, before heading off again. The guide book has promised me that the cliff path from Polruan to Polperro is “quite difficult”, with “lots of ascents and descents”, and obviously I can’t wait to get at it.

After  a long climb up what must be Cornwall’s steepest high street, I leave Polruan and quickly settle into the afternoon’s rhythm.

Sure enough, the Path climbs and descends a succession of coastal headlands, hugging the cliff edge. None of the ascents is as dramatic as the peaks scaled earlier, in north Cornwall, for example. But there’s a lot of them, and they don’t let up all afternoon.

After an hour, I stop for a drink and a foot-check. A blister has checked in on one toe. I apply a plaster and move on.

Call me a philistine, but there’s a saturation point with all this natural beauty. Halfway through this trip on the Path, and I’m becoming immune to it.

Another heartbreakingly beautiful scene of coastal cliffs above a sapphire sea? Okay.

Yet another hidden cove with empty, sun-kissed sand, washed by crystalline waves?

Shrug.

I get to musing once again about my ignorance of nature. What are those purple flowers with five petals? What do you call that white blossom growing all over the prickly hedgerows?

And then there are the birds. What’s that bird that chirps like a CD sticking in the player? Or the one with the slippery, fluid song – like a guitar solo on an early Steely Dan album?

I know I’ve thought about this before, my lack of knowledge of the natural world. And – in the six months since I was last on the Path – I suppose I could have done some research. But I’ve been busy, all right?

I guess I’ll never know. Does that matter?

It’s a long six miles to Polperro. Two hours out of Polruan, I persuade myself it must be only an hour to Polperro. I make the rookie error of starting to anticipate what I’ll do when I get there: boots off; cup of tea; maybe a beer; shower and clean clothes.

Then I see a sign suggesting I’m barely half way. I struggle on.

I should have known what the afternoon would be like from the description in the guide book. Here’s a sample:

“Climb steeply…Climb almost 120 steps…then walk down 60 steps on a slope of gorse. Cross a footbridge over a stream, then climb 170 steps on another slope of gorse. Walk over the top…a descent uses 160 steps, then the path continues along the rugged coast…”

At last, at long bloody last, the Path has mercy, and plunges into bushes, on a stretch lined with pungent wild garlic.

And, as I round yet another headland, Polperro springs out from wherever it’s been hiding and is finally there at my feet.