The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [105]
reminding you that you could be back where you began, all those days and all that pain ago, within three-quarters of an hour.
It takes a special kind of mind – a rather calmer one than mine, I suspect – to appreciate that sort of exquisite torture. Perhaps I’m just too much of a dilettante, or cursed with the attention span of a goldfish, but at the end of a two-week walk (the average time taken to do the entire Pembrokeshire path), I’d like to feel that I’d actually gone somewhere, that I had progressed through different landscapes and taken with me a cumulative sense of wonder at how they all fit together. Mile upon mile of seabird sameyness, up and down, down again and then up a bit more, would snap my sanity, I feel sure. But it is for these very same reasons that many people adore paths such as this. Its sheer repetitiveness and constant proximity to the endless horizon of the Atlantic acts as a fortnight-long Zen meditation. It is, to some, a kind of ultimate challenge, to be locked in the now, to walk only for the journey and not for the destination. And if you’ve ever been to Amroth, you’ll know how doubly true that is.
All the stranger to my mind, therefore, that anyone would want to tackle the South West Coast Path (SWCP), Britain’s longest single waymarked trail at 630 miles (1,014 km). The official start is at Minehead in Somerset, then it threads all the way down the northern coast of Devon and Cornwall, then all the way back along their southern coasts and that of Dorset too, finishing at Poole Harbour. The South West is by far Britain’s favourite holiday playground, thanks to its comparatively mellow climate and plethora of good beaches – things that are, in other words, best enjoyed at a very leisurely pace. I’ve walked various sections of both the Pembrokeshire path and the SWCP, and quite wonderful they were too, but the idea of doing either in its entirety fills me with horror.
The section of the SWCP that I’ve most wanted to see for years was the one perhaps least connected to the sea itself. The seven-and-a-half-mile slither between Seaton, Devon and Lyme Regis, Dorset picks its way through unstable cliffs and land-slips, past ruined houses long since demolished by the caprice of Mother Nature. Due to its inherently precarious character, it is beyond cultivation, and a semi-tropical wilderness has grown up there, one so dense and primeval that only the occasional glimpse of the sea, far below, is gained from amongst the deep greenery. This is the Undercliff, and it has held a special place in my heart since studying John Fowles’s classic novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for A-level English, a quarter of a century ago.
One of our teachers – a gaunt, rather ascetic New Zealander, now sadly dead – knew all too well that the best way to drag a group of lumpen Worcestershire teenagers towards an enthusiasm for Fowles’s book was to hit the button marked SEX. This he did with dry aplomb, making us read out loud all the bits where Charles Smithson, the soon-to-be-unbuttoned Victorian hero would delve deep into the Undercliff for assignations with the wild eponymous heroine, Sarah Woodruff (or Meryl Streep in a red fright wig, as she is rather better known). The fertile, damp, earthy Undercliff was everything that the prim cobbles of nearby Lyme Regis were not. It was abandoned and licentious, a steamy green Hades. It was, I think, the first time that I made the connection between