The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I totally approve of the Coast Path. I love the sea and love to walk next to it’
In fact, Griff Rhys Jones likes seaside walks so much that his garden is part of one – and he is chalking up 186 miles in Pembrokeshire
Natural England has been working to extend its Coast Path around England. I know this because, a while back now, a man came to my door in Suffolk. He had a proposition. He wanted to direct that path straight through my garden.
I live on an estuary. He knew that already. Previously, the Coast Path gave up when it got to any major inlet. It stuck to the sea border. The roundBritain walker was left to wander up creeks at will. But now the authorities want to include estuaries and river mouths. And quite rightly. It’s all coastline, just long, inland, windy, estuarine coastline.
So, anyway, Mr Natural England had arrived at my back door with his maps and compasses. He had come to urge me to hand over a stretch of grass beyond where my alpacas graze. This was so that particular stretch could join another beaten track that came down off the sea wall. I was confused. “But the coast goes that way,” I bleated, pointing vaguely.
“We are avoiding the actual water’s edge along there,” he replied, “so as not to disturb the brent geese nesting sites.”
“Yes, but…” This was a monster “but”. Leaving aside the geese, I couldn’t help noticing that the proposed new route through my garden also didn’t “disturb” my neighbours, either, who happen to own the fields by the water’s edge. They had been making vague, fractious clucking sounds of their own. And they weren’t nesting. They didn’t want the path to cross their bit of foreshore and had called up some rare birds to help them out.
My grassy stretch of garden is about 200 yards long. It is already “a permissive footpath”. I had granted walkers, neighbours and the simply curious the right to walk it some time ago, in order to get to the banks of the river. But, as the Natural England man explained, the Government now wanted me to “give” it to them.
In crude terms, with a width of a couple of yards this amounted to a present of about 400 sq yards. Forever. And gratis. The actual land has to be given for nothing – nothing, that is, except a responsibility to ensure that branches from my trees don’t fall on walkers, and that they have clear access, and that I clear up their rubbish.
I pondered this. I pointed to the muddy foreshore and the adjoining fields. Could the man not overcome the scruples of my neighbours’ legal advisers and stick the path on their land, given that their great houses were invisibly located, way off, and there would be no intrusion into their life at all? And that, after all, was where everybody actually wanted to go.
He sighed, he scratched his head and then advised me to talk to a property lawyer about the detail of the handover.
“And will you pay their exorbitant charges?”
“Er... no. The Government will not pay anything towards the costs.”
I was clearly failing to understand. This was to be my “gift” to the nation, you see.
You may be surprised to learn that I was happy to help. Unlike those who wanted to ensure that nobody strolled along the sea’s edge within sight of their powerful, ex-navy binoculars, I totally approve of the Coast Path and its ambitions. Reader, you can walk a few feet from my back door and through my garden, access the estuary and get to the sea any time you like, if you want to. (Just don’t ride a bike and mow down my grandchildren.) I love the sea and I love to walk next to it. The coastal footpath that is not actually on the coast but through my garden will eventually be open to the public.
So, come on. Walk my way. Don’t get too obsessive about these routes, though. When those lovely landlords have finally given us earnest shortwearers access, there will be nearly 2,800 miles of muddy foreshore to negotiate, in England alone. That is a lot to start fretting about – a lot to need to make sure you do every last bit of.
I know the feeling. Wales has 870 miles of its own path, and 186 miles of that is in Pembrokeshire. I have started knocking it off. I am itchy-scratchy to get the entire county sea border under my belt, but I have only managed about 50 miles so far. Or nearly managed. There is this really irritating half mile that I left out and I still need to do. No car parks and no access to it. It’s a trial. I should never have skipped it in the name of a shortcut.
Mrs Jones and I began purposefully with a great slug of the route around Strumble Head, near Fishguard. It was about 12 miles long – though, again, you can’t be accurate about these things. The path wanders. You get distracted by the beaches. You simply have to venture out to marvel at the bushes and lichencovered rocks. You can’t fail to take the detour to pop up to the dolmen, a short way inland. So there will have to be the odd extra hundreds of yards, or maybe half a mile, to take into account.
But that first bit proved proper hard for us. So hard that we collapsed. We only managed another four miles on our next stage, and that was two days later. We had to rest an entire 24 hours in between. Pathetic. This is partly because, along bits of Pembrokeshire, and especially from Goodwick to Strumble Head, the coastal path is not a level playing field. You have to factor in the rise and fall. The cliffs are 150ft high, I suppose. I reckoned that by the time we had reached our day’s end, with all the ups and downs, we might as well have climbed Ben Nevis. And descended it, too.
You start by heading upwards from a fish and chip shop near the station and past a glorious, faded Edwardian hotel just outside Goodwick. You finally get to the top of the cliff, pass two bramble bushes and then immediately start going down to sea level again; and this is just because some Ice Age brook cut through the rock into St George’s Channel millions of years ago.
So you go down, down, down to a blissful, sheltered cove studded with smoothed granite and slate pebbles, get your feet wet crossing the brook, and then, my goodness, up, up and up again to the next 100ft summit of cliff. And you haven’t even reached the first indentation on the Ordnance Survey map. The Coast Path is a constant slowmotion roller coaster.
It swiftly became clear that the more arduous the climb upwards, the more likely there would be an almost immediate bone-shattering descent.
This is where I hand out the best advice I can give to any who take on the Pembrokeshire coastal walk: don’t be too cool to take those irritating, telescopic ski-pole sticks that novices sneer at when walking in Fishguard High Street. Take a pair. They cut the judder. They enable the slither. A well-placed pole will help you master the eroded steps careening down ahead. Later in the walk, they will become a miraculous saviour of knees and hips.
Is it worth it? Hell, yes. This is a spectacular piece of unspoilt gorgeousness. The cliffs are whitened shades of granite and slate, formed at the bottom of an ancient sea, set on end by tumultuous tremors. Every turn reveals another juddering hole in the escarpment. Don’t go too close (“cliffs can kill”), but beyond the fringe of tufted grass studded with pink thrift is a beetling drop to some mysterious, completely inaccessible cove. Way below, the sea froths white, the birds wheel, and if you are lucky, you might spot the dark, sleek lozenge of a seal keeping watch just off the rocks.
Not that our later walks in the unspoilt areas further on, around Porthgain, Abermawr, Penberry and Abercastle, were without incident. You may feel remote and somehow beyond the course of human history in wild west Wales, but you are wrong. This coast is a palimpsest, stretching back to the earliest of civilisations. All have left their mark.
Goodwick, our starting point, is where the pilgrims heading for the shrine of St David’s (two visits there counted as one to Rome) came ashore. Until you reach Garn Fechan, you are tracing their route. But people lived here long before St David started dunking himself in icy streams and founding the Church of Wales in the 6th century. You can visit a 5,000-year-old burial chamber near Llanwnda, pass by Celtic crosses carved in the church walls from the Viking age and climb the hill to a gaping, massively roofed burial chamber erected some 4,000 years ago.
A bit further south lies Carreg Sampson, which is the more spectacular because it can be your own private Stonehenge. The mud around this monstrous construction is beaten down by sheep, not fake Druids or tourists. There are no explanatory signs or protective fences to mar the impact. When we walked the short offshoot of path to see it, we were the only visitors there. But fast-forward 2,000 years. The summits of the hills to your left hide Iron Age forts, dating from an era of legends and wars, when communities took to fortified settlements.
You can see the fallen walls on Garn Fawr. Or seek out more recent abandoned slate and brickworks at Porthgain and a former copper mine at the
Blue Lagoon. These faded dots and scratches on the landscape provide continuity in the sparsely populated surroundings. They stretch back 12,000 years to the last Ice Age. It all culminates in the biggest surprise of all – St David’s Cathedral. Hidden in a valley beneath a tiny cluster of houses, it is a vast miracle of sacred construction, built in purple stone, spanning an entire era in the making.
Your trip will need planning. A coast path is a one-way ticket. When you finally get to Abercastle, you really do not want to have to turn around and walk back to Abermawr, where you started. Otherwise, as we completists note, you will have ended up walking round Britain twice (as well as up and down Ben Nevis). So you will need to fret a little over your transport.
The best way to get your sections done is to use both the shuttle bus and your car. The shuttle bus shuttles, all right, but its entire trip takes hours. You don’t want to miss it. There are not two more coming along soon. You don’t want to arrive at the end of your walk to see the rear of the jolly, penguinadorned people-carrier flitting away up the valley. Given your long trek, that bus may be the last one of the day. Far better to take your own vehicle early in the morning and park where you intend to finish. Time yourself and jump on the first shuttle of the day to where you want to start your walk.
That car will wait patiently for you, in that £5-a-day car park. You will seldom be so pleased to see it. Those shabby front seats will never have felt so comfortable. The sudden mobility, from a seated position, having finally offloaded the pint of water that you never got round to drinking, and having stuck your telescopic sticks in the boot, will never seem so good. Walking is not everything, after all: coast or no coast.
Take a pair of those irritating, telescopic ski-pole sticks that novices sneer at