Day 8: Westward Ho! to Clovelly

Weather: Cool, cloudy and clear - perfect walking weather

Distance covered today:  19.9 km (12.4  mi)

Last night's B&B: The Village Inn

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 16.3%: 165.7km

Total Ascent/Total Descent:  889 m/835 m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 8 (click!)

A curious day, to be sure. I have often commented on the good manners and general friendliness of long distance walkers, but today was an exception. I'm not sure whether it is the imminence of the May long-weekend or the fact that I am gradually encountering the more touristy bits of the South West, but my encounters with others left something to be desired.

It started last night as I cheerfully approached The Village Inn in Westward Ho!, expecting a happy reunion with the management. A fellow walker entered simultaneously and pushed forward to the reception desk. While we were waiting for someone to attend to us, I asked him politely about his day and where had he walked from. He looked irritably at me, dismissed the question with a wave of his arm and loudly demanded service. He then remonstrated with the landlady, who seemed to me to be slightly on her ear and the two did not reach a happy conclusion.

This morning I pointedly ignored him at breakfast, which apparently suited him just fine and left him time to complain about the inadequacies of the menu to the nonplussed and rather frightened young waitress, who I would have thought had no impact on the menu whatsoever. To cap it all, I discovered that the hotel is under new management, and the delightful couple I met last year have retired!

All this contrasted strongly with my experience yesterday, on the train to Exeter. A collision of coincidences had me sitting next to the Chief Correspondent for Channel 4 News. I had given up my seat so that a couple could sit next to each other and so I found myself sitting next to and speaking to someone who has been an intimate observer of all the disastrous wars of our time. I have often been fascinated about what drives a journalist to become a War Correspondent and have wondered at the motivation of people like Christiane Amanpour and Orla Guerin. In his diplomatic way, the Chief Correspondent was of course careful to nuance his views, but we had a fascinating discussion, and I learned much.

Inevitably, me being me, the discussion turned to my own exploits, and I discovered that he was, in his spare time, a long distance walker. He was in fact planning to walk the whole Pennine Way. I easily trumped that with LEJOG, and really caught his attention! By the time I had finished, he was seriously thinking of LEJOG as a retirement project for himself when that time comes!

As the Honorary Fellow in Journalism at Falmouth School of Journalism, he was on his way to Falmouth to give a keynote address; on the very day my daughter is going to her own university college to regale the current students on the subject of work/life balance. We reflected long and hard on the subject of how to set the right tone for a lecture to students from a position of authority, and decided that humility and spontaneity are the right answer.

I had to drag myself away as the train approached Exeter St David's Station and we were still talking as the train ground to a halt. Such a contrast with my experience later in the B&B.

Having finally left Westward Ho! behind, I was, as usual, a little intimidated by the prospect of a 20km walk involving a 1,000m ascent. I have been more assiduous than usual in preparing for this resumption of the SWCP, partly because I recalled how it clobbered me last year, but our puny Surrey Hills are no match for the jagged cliffs of the South West and the seemingly endless ascents and descents. This time, I was amazed at the number of people on the trail and aghast at how they all accelerated past me without any communication at all. The long-weekend or the South West? I will have to investigate further! At least I will have the opportunity to do so, because this year, I am walking for three weeks, unless my limbs and heart wear out before I get there! As it happened, I found myself catching up with all the sprinters and passing them later on the walk, and I pointedly copied their communicative inadequacies, while secretly feeling just a trifle proper, until a couple of grey-haired pros accelerated past me as if I was walking on the spot!

Perhaps because of these petty issues, I was all day in a rather reflective mood, brought on also undoubtedly because I am suddenly and delightfully, a grandfather. As usual, I am more impressed by the effect of this transition on me than, for instance, on my grandson, or indeed his mother and father, who might argue that I am missing the essence of the occasion! That said, one can only talk from one’s own perspective, and without wishing in any way to belittle the miraculous event itself, it has elicited in me a curious change in perspective.

Throughout my career, the nature of my business interests has required that I take a longer term view of the overall impacts of current decisions. From an investment perspective, that requires looking perhaps a decade ahead, but when looking at, for instance, environmental impacts, a longer time-frame is essential. Suddenly though, I am confronted with the incontrovertible fact that my grandson will be my current age in the 2080s! My vision to date sees the 2050s as the far future. I cannot conceive of his world in 2085.

Look at it in reverse.  Seventy years ago, the world was recovering from the second most horrific international conflagration in history. The British Empire was still very much in existence. Computers were an abstract idea in the mind of a great individual, who was persecuted to death for being gay. And since then things have been speeding up exponentially. Are we on the brink of the most fantastic explosion of human culture, scientific understanding and social progress, or will the awful cycle of human self-destruction just repeat itself, while we destroy the environment in the process? We are almost certain to find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, yet we still don’t understand the absolute detail of our own evolution. By the time my grandson is my age, most of these issues will have been resolved, but he will be battling to know how to cope with an extraordinarily pervasive artificial intelligence, which, by then, will be threatening human existence itself.  I have argued previously in these blogs that this doesn’t matter, but the existence of my grandson makes me question those thoughts! I need to do some more serious thinking!

Sage advice!

A parting view of Westward Ho! Still an unusual skyline for a British resort

Baggy Point,still visible in the distance

Really?  More Westward Ho! humour...

Not exactly Hokusai's Wave, but a pleasant perspective nevertheless

Grey pebble beach

Lundy Island through the mist

Clovelly in the distance at full zoom

A beautiful combe necessitating another descent to sea-level

Ancient trees in seaside woods

Suddenly, a new house in the middle of nowhere! How?

Looking back along the pebble beach

Bluebells and blue sea

Looking down on the isolated little community of Buck's Mills

Lime kilns explaining Buck's Mills existence. The limestone was imported from Wales

This is the Gore, which local legend holds was a pebble causeway started by the Devil to reach out to Lundy Island, but he gave up when his Devonian shovel handle broke

More woods and bluebells

The Hobby Drive, built by Sir James Hamlyn Williams in the early nineteenth century, using the labour of Napoleonic prisoners of war. It provided welcome relief over the final kilometres of my walk

A bench commemorating a "new" section of the Hobby Drive, built in 1901!

These are the two who sailed past me, for the third time today!

A wonderful bridge on the Hobby Drive. Such intricate work

Looking straight down to Clovelly

The impossible steep cobbled drive down to Clovelly. No vehicles allowed

My B&B for the night

Extraordinary Clovelly!