Taking a Walk Patrick Barkham
I endured a comedy fall the other day. It wasn’t a banana skin, but a crisp packet that caused me to slip and smash onto the pavement. I jumped up, looking around to see who was laughing. Good old Londoners blithely went about their business. I was left with a torn trouser, a grazed knee and gratitude I wasn’t my son’s age (five) or my great-aunt’s (89). You can laugh off a fall in middle age. But I counted my blessings and wondered, if I reached the end of my walking life and had to choose one last walk, where would it be?
My final pilgrimage would be along the South West Coast Path, which must be one of the more significant infrastructural achievements of the 20th century. Show me a modern byway with such scenery, strenuousness and cultural influence. This path attracts walkers, money for the region and stories: in recent years, it’s been the lead character in Simon Armitage’s Walking Away and the much-praised The Salt Path by Raynor Winn.
I’ve not walked it all but I haven’t met a disappointing stretch yet, from Dorset’s Jurassic Coast to North Cornwall’s switchback coast. If I must pick just one day’s worth, I’d take the end of the Penwith peninsula.
I set out from Porthcurno on the softer south coast and walked west towards Land’s End. The Atlantic, ‘all peacockmingled colour’ as D H Lawrence wrote, fizzed below. The coves, Nanjizal in particular, shone gold. But I was struck by a more unexpected beauty: the splendour of the rocks. The cliffs, bluffs, ledges, gulleys and chasms – zawns in Cornish – are what drew the Romantics, and the first tourists, on a boneshaking, three-day coach ride westwards from London.
The granite lit up the landscape. When the sun shone, it was golden. When it rained (and it did), it looked silver. Sometimes it was pink or green or orange with lichen. The centuries have softened geometric outcrops into gatherings of human-like figures. Cornish writer John Blight called them the ‘guardians of the western coast’.
The Logan Rock Inn commemorates a celebrated ‘logging’ stone so delicately balanced that it wobbled in the wind. In the 19th century, a mischievous naval lieutenant pushed the rock three feet down the cliff. Locals were outraged and the Navy threatened to dismiss the young lieutenant. So he devised an ingenious combination of levers and scaffolding to return the rock to its rightful place. It never logged as well as before.
After an exhilarating walk around empty headlands, I reached Land’s End. Britain’s most westerly point gets a terrible press. It was not that bad, but a bit like discovering a tired shopping mall in a cathedral close. What could be England’s most important natural cathedral for reflection is this coast’s greatest aberration: scruffy, overpopulated and naff. A place of pilgrimage is the spiritual home of the selfie stick.
In earlier times, our westerly questing had a religious purpose. We believed we departed this life over the western horizon. There is a world beyond: on a clear day at Land’s End, you can see the Scilly Isles.
‘An eternal stone armada,’ thought John Fowles. ‘Mute, enticing, forever just out of reach.’
A sense of eternity, and another place, is conjured by that illimitable horizon.
For a walker, Land’s End is a fiveminute blip. A few hundred yards on, the crowds evaporated and the sun dazzled Whitesand Bay and the spectacular surf beach of Sennen. A raven croaked, and I contemplated life, blazing with thankfulness for being middle-aged and mobile enough to take on Cape Cornwall, Botallack and Zennor and all the gorgeous crinkles of Penwith ahead of me.
* I like setting out in a westerly direction along the South West Coast Path with the sea on my left but if you prefer to keep the sea on your right, please do. OS Explorer 102 Land’s End. www.southwestcoastpath.org.uk