Can a picture really tell a thousand words?

IT’S said a picture tells a thousand words. But is an image, however striking, able to express as much as the power of prose?

Take this holiday snap I grabbed during a solitary walk with my dog on the Lizard. It’s a nice enough photo but I’m not sure it really does justice to the beauty of the location or the power of the moment.

You see, it doesn’t matter how much time I spend on the South West Coast Path, I am still overwhelmed every time I hit the trail and am reacquainted with its majestic beauty.

Every clifftop, every headland, every cove I encounter overwhelms me with its jaw-dropping presence on the edge of the Atlantic. It’s the kind of emotion which you can only really describe in words – and how I wish I could do that with the same eloquence as poet Wordsworth or novelist Thomas Hardy.

There are countless tales behind my holiday photo, not least that it was almost impossible to snap, as my dog was even more excited than I was to explore the path between

Mullion and Lizard and pulling like a leashed tiger on her lead.

But something more amazing was the solitude. While Cornwall was reportedly packed with holidaymakers, I saw no other human for the duration of my two-hour plod along the coast.

Granted I picked up the path away from the honeypot villages and quite late on a rather cloudy day. But considering Cornwall was reportedly packed with holidaymakers, where was everyone? My photo shows the vastness of the sea and sky but it doesn’t do justice to the splendid isolation I enjoyed walking to the tip of the UK on that Bank Holiday afternoon.

Of course, it is extremely unusual not to meet other coast path walkers and it’s normal to get chatting to them about their inspiration for being there. It’s interesting that while the TV is currently flooded with documentaries about the Cornish coastline, more people admit to being inspired to walk by a novel they have read.

Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path doesn’t have any pictures at all but her beautiful descriptions of the healing power of the South West Coast Path are enough to inspire even the most reluctant of walkers to get out and get a deep breath of that purifying sea air.

Maybe it’s her refreshing honesty, and the magic of her storyline, but TV presenters Michael Portillo, Rick Stein and even Julia Bradbury do far less to draw you to the coast than the nimble novelist.

Luckily I can keep my photograph and treasure memories of the moment behind it. A day in the summer when I felt as free as a bird and eternally thankful to live on this beautiful earth.

Sadly, however, it also puts me in mind of another late summer holiday enjoying nature when the peace of the whole world was shattered by an atrocity.

It was September 2001 and I’d been exploring the west coast of France when news broke of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

I remember having to peer through the window of a French television shop to view the early footage before seeing the stark front pages of the international press the next morning.

To this day, 20 years on, it is difficult for any empathetic human to look at those now familiar images of the burning towers without being horrified at the memory of what happened to the people inside.

Those pictures probably do speak far more than any words written at the time, or ever since, to sum up the tragic loss of life on that terrible day.

A day in the summer when I felt free as a bird and eternally thankful to live on this earth

> The South West Coast Path between Mullion and Lizard