Day 2: Porlock to Lynmouth

Weather: Blazing skies with heavenly, cool north-easter

Distance covered today: 22.3km (13.9mi)

Last night's B&B: Seaview

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 3.2%: 38.2km

Total Ascent/Descent today:  846m/872m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 2 (click!)

If yesterday was a canter, I took today at a steady trot! I was aware that the demands of the day would be almost double those of yesterday and I did feel tired last evening. I was not disappointed! The distance wasn't the issue; it was the rise and fall of the cliff path. I am slow in many things, but it has taken many years of map-reading and long-distance walking for me to realise that it is not easily possible to estimate total ascents and descents on paths that run along cliffs. In retrospect, the reason is obvious! As the contour lines on the map crawl closer to each other and coalesce into a brown smudge, a public path drawn parallel to them appears to follow a specific contour. It may not! By shifting tenths of millimetres on the map in either direction, the path may ascend or descend tens of metres!

It was just so today! In fact,with the exception of a blissful, sylvan idyll along the cliff through Culbone Wood, I was pretty much tramping up or down the entire time! It is also fascinating (to me!) that even plotting the route on a OS digital map doesn't solve the problem. My OS predicted total ascent today was 1,113m, yet as you may have seen above, in practice, I only ascended 846m. The reason, in retrospect is clear; when you plot a digital route on a map, you draw straight lines between waypoints, but by their nature, they are at the extremes of the curves on the map and hence may very much be higher or lower than the actual path. It seems so obvious now!

I appreciate that I may be the only participant in this blog who is even the slightest bit interested in the foregoing and so to every other reader I render my humble apologies and suggest only that when the thighs are screaming and the heart is pounding, the brain tends to want to find an explanation!

That said, today's walk was indeed interesting beyond the cliffs, or perhaps because of them. After leaving the impossibly quaint villages of Porlock and Porlock Weir, I was thrown into an environment redolent of the distant past. I passed through tunnels built by Lord King, the husband of the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Ada Countess Lovelace. He built Ashley Combe to please his wife, influenced by the fairy castles of Italy. On the other hand, the tunnels were built so the residents didn't have their views interrupted by the comings and goings of tradesmen on the estate. The fabulous residence is no more; the tunnels still exist! A moral, perhaps?

As I travelled further, I came on Culbone Church, England's smallest complete parish church, meriting an entry in the Guiness Book of Records. More importantly, it was counted in the Domesday Book. Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Wales travelled along this path from about the late 6th century onwards, leading to a revival of Christianity in England. I may have been going in the opposite direction, spiritually and directionally, but I was moving in august company!

Culbone church is surrounded by a tiny community accessible only by the roughest 4WD track, and beyond lay the true coastal wilderness on the edge of Exmoor, with no civilisation in sight for miles. I got to thinking about the juxtaposition of historical events in a given geography and how even in one's own life, geographical changes can effect perception.

Memory is a strange thing. I have no doubt that neuroscientists and psychologists will have much to say on the subject, but as I traverse these alien lands, finding so many things in common with previous experience, and so much completely new to me, I have been thinking about it all in a much wider perspective, or should I say, longer.

As I have sometimes explained, my relationship with this land is complicated. I first arrived here when I was three years old, and my earliest memory is of the sick bay on the MV Edinburgh Castle, where I was quarantined with Chicken Pox! We lived in England (and Ireland) for four years and I left for South Africa with a broad Yorkshire accent. I have since returned to live here on four separate occasions, all of them, except the last, truncated for a range of practical reasons.

So my memories of England, like the history of these cliffs, are specific and time-related. I have found in innumerable conversations with many people that my recollections of the past in these parts are at variance with theirs, and I may have stumbled on an interesting interpretation!

It seems to me that they are looking at a video and I am looking at a series of stills! I was talking to Rosie last night in the pub, telling her that I remembered individual speeches by Arthur Scargill in the 1985 miners’ strikes and the response by Ian McGregor, head of the Coal Board. Few of my contemporaries even remember his name, let alone his role! I remember the excitement around Steve Davis winning the world snooker championship in 1983 and 1984 as if it was yesterday, yet no-one I know could even guess those dates.

Of course, what I am saying is obvious! If you have a short immersion in a bit of the history of a particular geography, it sticks! If you are constantly moving in time in the same place, everything blurs. So when I talk of the past to people in any of the countries in which I have lived, I am using a completely different perspective. My still photograph is detailed and specific; theirs is a mosaic moving in time. Neither of us have any objective view of reality.

And so it is with my walks. I take still images along the way, which I delight in appending to these blogs. My own perspective, though, is a kaleidoscope of moving images. A happy blur!

Neither is the truth.

Leaving my love in Porlock

A good day for a regatta off Porlock Weir

The lock in the quaint village of Porlock Weir

Possibly the most impressive toll booth I have seen anywhere, charging vehicles to access the Worthy Toll Road

Lord and Lady Lovelace's tunnels

Every time there is a landslip, it involves a major diversion uphill, followed by a similar painful descent! There were lots of landslips!

Approaching the isolated Culbone community,

I encountered this lovely, old fellow playing his guitar to himself in a secluded, sheltered, sunlit spot

Culbone church

Its fascinating font

The church from the graveyard

The lovely path through Culbone Woods

There were innumerable combes along the path. I had expected them to be in full spate, after the recent heavy rains, but the water had already cascaded down the cliffs and they were just beautiful murmers

Gorgeous deciduous forest,

followed by much more sombre conifers; darker, quieter, greyer, somehow sinister!

The extraordinary entrance to another privileged estate, Glenthorne House 

Foreland Point comes into view in a gap through the trees

A curious, unexplained edifice along the path

Rhodies; presumably escapees from Glenthorne

That's a 250m vertical drop to the shore. Scary at times...

Then, a spaceship in the sky! Actually, probably a ferry through the mist, with no horizon and no view of Wales

Suddenly, the terrain changes dramatically! A comfortable path, but yet another climb!

21st Century grave-robbers!

Looking back on Sillery Sands

Through the Whitebells to Lynmouth

Quaint little Lynmouth

The intriguing, water-driven railway escalator from Lynmouth to Lynton

Filling its water tank to propel it downhill, while raising the other empty car upwards. Ingenious Victorian engineering!