Column: Stuart Maconie
Why unplanned walks are ace too.
PLANNING, WHERE WALKS are concerned, is a very particular pleasure of mine. I like nothing more than to sit with an opened map or Wainwright guide in my lap or spread on the table, planning the next day’s walk. I love the way its expected pleasures will unfold in my mind as I envisage the slope from the contours or the path winding through a forest.
Sometimes, though, the spur of the moment is the right time for a walk. A week’s beach holiday in Cornwall with family and, after a long morning of sandcastling and surfing, it was decided a drive was what was needed to get our youngest member Noah (two and a half) into the land of Nod for an afternoon nap.
“Jump in,” said his dad. “I’ll drive a few miles south and you can walk back along the South West Coast Path. You like a walk, don’t you?”
Now normally I would need at least half an hour with the maps, selecting various bits of kit depending on weather, gathering up phone and cash and changing my shoes at least four times. But time was tight and the little ’un was fractious. So the next thing I knew, I was jumping into the passenger seat, still in damp swimming trunks, Hawaiian shirt and deck shoes, encumbered only by fifty pence in my pocket.
The town of Rock, playground of rich, rangy youths in pale pink polo shirts and where the price of a pint of prawns will make your eyes water, is an easy place to walk briskly away from, and so I did. Once dropped off at the car park, I was across the soft and yielding sand of the beach, harder on the thighs and calves than any road (which is why they used to train Red Rum at Ainsdale). With the shapely little hump of Brea Hill ahead, I wound through the dunes and, as the path climbed, I looked back as the path climbed to the tiny rocky island we had passed on a boat trip the day before.
Cormorants and razorbills and the very occasional puffin had wheeled above us, and a grey seal basked on the wet, black slabs.
In two or three weeks, the whole of this stretch of coast will be filled with windbreaks and surfboards and kids crying for dropped ice creams. But today I had it almost to myself as I left St Enodoc’s Church behind in its sheltered hollow, and rose and fell to Daymer Bay, the receding tide a sheet of silver in the afternoon sun. At low tide, tiny coves and beaches become accessible to the adventurous, and every few yards I rounded into another delightful one, some with a courting couple and a disposable barbecue, or a solitary fisherman, or completely deserted. Around the next headland there was Polzeath and New Polzeath, the fine white houses of Atlantic Terrace turning their faces to the sun and sea. Beyond them came Pentire Head, and beyond that fine promontory, the amazing sight of the Rumps, like two mini-Matterhorns thrust into the ocean. There was an iron age fort here, and as I felt the damp sea mist begin to roll in from a vast horizon of water, I wondered how they spent their days on this wild headland. I can never get my bronze, stone and iron ages in the right order but I’m pretty sure there were no boogie boards or flip flops or cargo shorts around here then. Just back, and I decided to write these musings right away, while I can still taste the salt on my lips and feel the sting of the sun on my skin. I know that part of the pleasure of the last few hours was in simply doing it instantly and without a second thought. And I know that tonight I will sleep like a log on the foreshore with the crashing of surf in my dreams.