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By Root 429 0

‘The path is up by the thirteenth,’ a snooty lady hissed at me, shooing me out of the way as if I were a cat crapping in her begonias. Golfers and walkers, I concluded, must be almost mutually exclusive circles on a Venn diagram, for there is something almost inherently antipathetic in each towards the other – aesthetically, if nothing else. I’d rather stand and gaze at a landfill tip or a bus station than a golf course. They make my eyes ache, with their fussy uniformity and fake countryside pretensions.

After climbing over the golf course itself, and annoying a few middle managers, you skirt some cornfields and pass a sign warning you of the harshness of the walk from here to Lyme. It’s the coast path, but there is no access to the coast, and no way off inland either. You are locked into a six-mile green corridor. The temperature continued to climb as I pounded the copper groove of the path, up and down rough flights of muddy steps, around gargantuan ash trunks, over their roots and through creepers and clearings. Just occasionally, the milky-blue sea would appear far below, its soft splash a welcome, if frustratingly unattainable, antidote to the intense mugginess. The sweat poured off me, and mindful of the overheated headaches that tend to crucify me in such circumstances, I stopped pretty much every mile in order to cool and dry off. By the time I finally reached Lyme, I’d drunk two litres of water, and my head was still throbbing. It was well worth it, though. Twenty-five years after having my teenage hormones recklessly stirred by John Fowles’s take on the Undercliff, their rather creakier fortysomething heirs had twitched in eager accord.

Thank God I’d walked in the direction I did, though. After the furtive, oozing jungle of the Undercliff, popping out of it into the seaside starch of Seaton would have been a horrible shock. Dropping down into Lyme is a definite change of tempo, but it’s a destination still odd enough to maintain the illusion that you’ve left normality far behind. I sauntered to the end of the Cobb, along its hunched serpentine back, before ambling down the bright little prom that links it with the town centre. This, I was chuffed to find, was named Ozone Terrace, a fine memento of chin-up Victoriana. If Seaton fancy rebranding their prom, I’d like to suggest Bromide Boulevard.

For all my lack of enthusiasm at the idea of doing a whole coast-path walk, there is something wonderfully anti-prissy about them. Just look at the cover of any OS Explorer map to see the officially prescribed ways in which we’re supposed to interact with our countryside – on a bike, on a designated bike trail, in a helmet; on horseback, through the heather in a hi-vis tabard and a helmet; perhaps climbing a rockface, in shoulder pads, knee pads and a helmet; in a small sailing boat on a Home Counties reservoir, in a lifejacket and . . . you get the picture. In fact, you’ve got the picture, probably dozens of them, the grinning faces of corporatised leisure all fully concordant with section 14, paragraph 6 of the relevant health and safety legislation.

By contrast, take a coast-path walk, and hear the existential howl of your flimsy mortality every couple of minutes. Some of them are spectacularly terrifying, the unfenced path snaking its way along vertiginous, unstable cliffs and down muddy scree slopes, with just jagged rocks and the restless crash of the ocean to break a fall. In these cotton-wool times, it hardly seems possible that they’re still legal, let alone to be yet further encouraged as the plans for a nationwide coast path tiptoe forwards. I recently heard a talk by a warden from the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park about their coast path. It was basically a litany of deaths, injuries and problems landing the helicopter ambulance. Apparently, injuries peak in the autumn, when seal pups are born and walkers go that little bit further to have a good look through their binoculars or to take the perfect pho . . . to . . . bump.

Dicing with danger is good for us, and paths, for all their quiet charm, can offer