Walking Away Read online

  SIMON ARMITAGE

  Walking Away

  Further Travels with a Troubadour

  on the South West Coast Path

  Map of the South West Coast Path

  Contents

  Title Page

  Map of the South West Coast Path

  Introduction

  Gearing Up

  Home to Minehead

  Minehead to … Minehead

  Minehead to Porlock Weir

  Porlock Weir to Lynton

  Lynton to Combe Martin

  Combe Martin to Woolacombe

  Woolacombe to Braunton

  Braunton to Instow

  Instow to Westward Ho!

  Westward Ho! to Clovelly

  Clovelly to Hartland Quay

  Hartland Quay to Morwenstow

  Morwenstow to Widemouth Bay

  Widemouth Bay to Boscastle

  Boscastle to Port Isaac

  Port Isaac to Padstow

  Padstow to Constantine Bay

  Constantine Bay to Newquay

  Newquay to St Agnes

  St Agnes to Gwithian

  Gwithian to Zennor

  Zennor to Land’s End

  Penzance to St Mary’s

  Tresco to Bryher, Bryher to Samson

  Reckoning Up

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Introduction

  In 2010 I walked the Pennine Way, and wrote a book called Walking Home. The conventional compass bearing for that particular journey is one of south to north, to keep the British weather out of the eyes and get a push from behind by the prevailing wind, and consequently all the guidebooks and most of the signposts point the hiker in that direction. But I walked south, from Kirk Yetholm on the top side of the Scottish border towards Edale in Derbyshire, a distance of 265 miles, a journey which would take me the best part of three weeks. The idea was to walk home, back towards the village of Marsden where I was born and grew up and which continues to be the focus for much of my writing, especially my poems. Being situated close to the southern end of the trail I used the gravitational pull of that place as a way of moving continually, if slowly, forward. The potential embarrassment of failing to arrive in my own postcode served as a further incentive to keep going, especially through the cloudier, boggier and more forlorn sections of the walk, of which there were many. As well as a challenge to my physical resolve and mental stamina, I conceived the walk as a test of my poetic reputation, giving readings every night in village halls, pubs, churches and private houses in return for board and lodging. Up until the early nineties I’d been a probation officer in Greater Manchester – how far had I come in that time? I took no money with me, and passed a sock around at the end of each evening, asking people to put in whatever they thought I was worth (which wasn’t always currency, and it was with a certain amount of both curiosity and trepidation that I slid my hand into its lower reaches, never being too sure what my fingertips would discover). In fact in some ways I felt as if I was testing the reputation of poetry itself, wondering if an audience would turn out to hear spoken verse on a wet Wednesday in Wensleydale, and if there was a place in the contemporary world for a latter-day troubadour living on his wits and hawking his stanzas and stories from one remote community to the next. After the final audit, I declared a small financial surplus and an enormous emotional profit, though the demands of that journey on the body and the brain made me vow never to commit to such an undertaking again, because for all the beauty of the trail and the exhilaration of the experience, the Pennine Way is a brutal, punishing slog from start to finish.

  Three years later, restlessness and imagination got the better of me. I convinced myself that my legs still had one last long-distance walk left in them, and started to think that Walking Home had only been half the project. If I really wanted to put myself on trial as a poet, rather than strolling around my home patch shouldn’t I be striding out across the country in the opposite direction, getting further away with every step and spending time in places and with people as unfamiliar to me as I might be to them? After a few weeks of studying maps, totting up mileages and lining up cardinal points, I decided that a walk from Minehead in Somerset to Land’s End in Cornwall offered a neat symmetrical opposite to the previous adventure. Specifically, the north coast of the South West Coast Path, a journey that by a quirk of maths is exactly the same distance as the Pennine Way. A walk this time not of boggy uplands, remote interiors, planted forests, unpopulated hillsides and uninhabitable moors, but a coastal journey, at sea level, in sunnier climes, through holiday destinations and tourist traps, towards accents and dialects different to mine and even into a separate language. Then rather than come to an abrupt halt at that far and famous corner of Britain, I’d overshoot, and go skimming across the sea to the Isles of Scilly. St Mary’s, Tresco, Bryher, Samson … diminishing dots of land in the trailing ellipsis of the European archipelago, and the last opportunity for a public event in the UK before the vast, reader-less expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. Mystical Samson, whose population in the 2001 census is given by Wikipedia as ‘(1)’. I’d walk every day again, and read every night again, not stopping until I got to the end or the end got to me, but this time rather than walking home I’d be walking away.

  Gearing Up

  I have bought a hat. And I have made a stick. And both these objects say a great deal about the journey I think I’m about to embark upon. The hat was something of an impulse purchase, given that I don’t really have a head for hats, and in recent years have been happy to suffer whatever complaints come with an uncovered crown rather than risk embarrassment or insult. I learnt the hard way: West Yorkshire wasn’t ready for the peaked sailing cap I went for in the early eighties; neither did it appreciate my ‘pork-pie’ brown trilby during the ska revival era, and the ceremonial black bearskin I bought from a jumble sale one winter made me the worn rather than the wearer, as well as an easy target for snowballs. My wife looks good in a hat, any hat, and my daughter would look good even under a plant pot or lampshade. It’s a certain face that suits a hat, or a certain smile, and I don’t have either. My new hat, though, is no ordinary hat, as the dedicated display stand in Huddersfield Outdoor World and the price tag seemed to imply. For one thing, it’s the only hat I’ve ever known that comes with an instruction manual, a four-page guide in small print with diagrams and specialist hat vocabulary explaining not just the practical aspects of hat ownership such as which way round it goes and how to put it on the head, but also the finer points of its design and functionality, as well as some conceptual issues relating to its philosophical significance in this world. Included within the terms of the guarantee is a lifetime insurance policy confirming that lost or damaged hats will be replaced by the supplier at the drop of a hat, as well as a strip of tear-off, pre-printed slips – the hat equivalent of the business card – to hand to admirers and enquirers, of which there will be hundreds. Almost unwittingly I seem to have bought into some kind of cult or owners’ club, members of which include mounted police, guides and trackers, musterers and herders, field scientists, jungle explorers, extreme gardeners and military personnel from across all terrains and territories. As far as my own needs go, the hat’s 50-plus UV protection factor promises to shield me against heatstroke, its three-hundred-and-sixty-degree brim will offer shade to my face and neck, and any perspiration will be absorbed by its built-in sweatband. It’s washable, breathable and carbon neutral. It’s made from a natural fibre which if not used by the hat manufacturer would have only ended up in an illegal cigarette and should help to ingratiate me with some of Devon and Cornwall’s more alternative communities. It comes in an environmentally sensitive autumnal br
owny-green colour, ideal for blending in against a background of gorse slopes, seaweed-covered rocks and sandy coves. It boasts an inside pocket for money or plastic. Should the wind blow, the integrated bootlace can be looped under the chin and around the rear hemisphere of the head to prevent the hat blowing away over the edge of a precipice or across a beach, and there’s no need to worry about it coming into contact with the sea because not only is it waterproof, it floats. And it’s collapsible enough to make me the happy wanderer or easy-going rambler, but with just enough stiffness and body to distinguish me from the rank amateur and bumbling novice. All in all it seems like the essential head-wear for someone about to spend a month out of doors walking directly into the sun along the narrowing corridor of Britain’s south-west peninsula at the tail end of summer. It will be my roof, my camouflage, my wallet and my begging bowl. But more than all that, when I stand in front of the vanity mirror in the shop with the hat on my head, rather than looking like a seventies Australian cricketer or a weekend ranger at a British safari park, I think I look sort of … normal. Sold.

  The stick was also an impulse, though when I say I ‘made it’ most of the credit must go to nature itself and the organic processes by which a tiny seed is slowly transformed into solid timber. There’s a dank and shady corner at the bottom of my garden, made danker and shadier by the handful of holly trees which grow there and the number of offspring they conceive every year. The shoots grow quickly and plentifully in the understorey around the trunks of the parent trees, and earlier this summer I was making the annual cull with a pair of rusty bolt-cutters and felled one particularly straight and surprisingly light sapling, whose circumference sat comfortably within my fingers and palm. I trimmed away a few twigs and sprigs, and the wood itself, once I’d shaved the slimy dark-green bark from the top five or six inches, was antler-coloured and bone-like in texture and shape, as if I’d stripped it of skin and flesh. I even considered whittling ornamental patterns or Celtic designs along its length but decided that might cast me in the role of an over-indigenous man of the hills or New Age rustic walking the spiritual highway of life with his shamanic wand. I left it outside through the big heat of June and July, through Murray’s Wimbledon and England’s Ashes, imagining I was ‘seasoning’ it or subjecting it to a traditional and essential maturation process. The exposed ‘handle’ split a little, and the olive-toned cortex didn’t weather or age as I thought it might, but by early August I considered that enough time had passed for it to have made the transition from lopped branch to walking stick, and it was coming with me.

  The holly is a much mythologised and occasionally maligned tree, but both its reputation and its practical applications suit me very well. Holly is a hard, dense wood. It was once used for making the hammers in harpsichords and in the fashioning of billiard cues, and even though I’m not making a tour of concert halls and snooker clubs I like the idea of the stick as a totem of something rhythmical and melodic, accurate and true. As someone with an unreliable backbone, its rigidity and uprightness also appeal, as does its reputation as a tree which diverts thunderbolts away from houses and humans. Planted on paths and tracks, the tough evergreen acts as a way marker or beacon to the weary and lost, and in past times its branches and arms have proved useful as horse whips and batons. So the stick will be my signpost and my compass needle, and my cattle prod and my nettle slayer, my vaulting pole and my hatstand, and my extra leg and my spine. The holly is also symbolic of winter, and a charm against black magic and the dark arts. The berries, attractive as they appear, are bitter on the tongue and potentially poisonous. In those terms, I’m taking it with me as a piece of the Pennine north, out of season and out of place as I head into that long, low and increasingly treeless coastal region, a representation of who I am and where I’m from. Something of myself.

  My dad, never one for getting hung up on the psychosocial significance of material objects but with a keen eye for a comparison, is able to offer an alternative interpretation as I climb out of his car at Wakefield Westgate with the hat on my head and my kit bag in my hand. In previous years that manoeuvre would have produced a waft of pipe smoke which would have followed me onto the platform and halfway to Birmingham. But since he quit there’s no sign of the loose tobacco strands or spent matches that once clung to the seats and littered the footwell, no whiff of St Bruno Ready-Rubbed, and the ashtray is now full of small coins for the pay-and-display machine. A dedicated and expert smoker from early adolescence, his previous attempts to stop all ended in acrimony and deceit, and in one case farce, when on top of nicotine patches and nicotine gum and electronic cigarettes he was still secretly puffing on his pipe and had taken up cigars. This time, though, it looks like he’s stopped for good, cold turkey following a worrying chest infection and the steep road between his favourite watering hole in the village and his house becoming ‘a bit of a pull’. So today the only thing that trails me as I make my way towards the station entrance is the sound of a well-worn Duke Ellington cassette tape rattling through the car stereo. Sixty-five years of pipe smoke might have impaired his lung capacity – he could no more walk the South West Coast Path with me than he could run a marathon – but his ability to deliver a one-liner is undiminished. Through the open window he shouts, ‘You’ve forgotten your staff, Moses.’ I retrieve the stick from the boot of the silver Polo, then watch as he performs an illegal U-turn in the busy forecourt and heads for home, waving goodbye with the back of his hand.

  Home to Minehead

  Tuesday 27 August

  Bishops Lydeard is everything we have come to expect from a station on a ‘heritage’ railway line: overenthusiastic staff in period uniform carrying handkerchief-size flags and buckets of water; milk churns converted to litter bins; wooden signage painted the colour of homely comestibles packaging (Ovaltine, Colman’s Mustard, Lyle’s Golden Syrup, etc.); destination markers in the shape of pointing fingers; rusting billboards advertising obsolete brands of cigarettes; and a cafe where a large urn hisses and gurgles at the end of the counter and where home-made iced buns are displayed on a cake stand and served on paper doilies. Everything bought in the gift shop, even a 10p postcard, is handed over in a brown paper bag with an old-fashioned till receipt. The small bespectacled face in the booking-office window seems surprised when I ask for a single, even though the return is only a couple of quid extra. I tell him where I’m going, and he replies, ‘Well, people have been known to come back from there.’ When the train arrives, hooting hysterically and blurting out great plumes of pillowy white steam, I have a whole carriage to myself. It trundles along a single-track line cloistered by overhanging buddleia displaying semi-erect, vulgar purple flowers, then through dark and narrow cuttings, then out into open, rolling farmland with the Quantocks as a backdrop, slowing and halting at Stogumber, Williton and somewhere called Blue Anchor, where bearded porters stride purposefully alongside, blowing whistles and slamming doors. It wouldn’t come as a surprise to pull into Adlestrop, or to see Bernard Cribbins on the platform checking his pocket watch. For a line run by enthusiasts and volunteers it’s cleaner, less crowded and probably more punctual than most of the rail franchises currently operating across the national network. However, it’s not a service you’d want to use if you were in a rush, and I wonder if it’s a source of pride or embarrassment for locals that rail access to one of Somerset’s principal towns is via a train offering packages such as ‘Snowdrops and Steam’ or the ‘Santa Special’. Type ‘Minehead’ into the National Rail Enquiries website and the dreaded phrase ‘By Bus’ appears in the timetable. I pull my bags down from the luggage rack and head for the station exit. And there’s no need to ask for directions – it’s just a case of following everyone else out of the gates and along the prom, families mainly, some of them arguing with each other after a long journey, wheeling enormous suitcases towards the pinnacled white pavilion on the horizon.

  *

  The outward appearances are not encouraging. After guest check-in I’m d
irected towards a place called Strawberry Square in an area labelled Plantation Quay, which seems to be a series of apartments somewhere between Swiss chalet and mock-Tudor in design. The grassy strips separating each structure are scuffed and patchy. Varnish is peeling from the window frames of the buildings. The outside walls of each block are stencilled with large, unequivocal Soviet-style letters. Lots of men are wearing Premier League football shirts with their own surnames printed on the back. In a female voice, an uninterrupted stream of abuse and profanities issues from the open door of a ground-floor flat. Outside each block there’s a rusty, Bronx-style fire escape, except it isn’t an emergency exit but the exterior metal staircase leading to my second-storey accommodation.

  Once across the threshold, though, it’s a different vibe altogether, a spotless two-bedroom apartment (one double, one twin), all lemon-smelling and new-looking, with neutral colours on the walls and shiny appliances in the kitchen area. There’s a flat-screen telly in the corner of the living room, shampoo in the shower, coffee in the cupboard and a framed photograph of a pebble over the headboard. On the bed there are two soft white flannels and a bath towel expertly folded into the shape of a kneeling elephant. It might not be home but I know I feel comfortable here because ten minutes later I’ve taken off my watch, put it down on the chest of drawers, and I’m walking around in my bare feet.

  *

  This isn’t my first time at Butlins. In the seventies we bought a family day-pass and spent seven or eight hours on the rides and in the swimming pool. I don’t remember the location, possibly Pwllheli, though I can say with certainty that it wasn’t the one in the Bahamas or the one in Mosney, Ireland, which underwent a relatively smooth architectural conversion from holiday destination to government-run centre for refugees and asylum seekers. But I do remember peering through the open door of one of the chalets as we walked past, which was more of a cabin or a manger, with a couple of beds in the room and not much else. And I remember the straggly barbed-wire fence that marked the perimeter, which my dad said wasn’t to stop people getting in but to deter escapees. This was at a time when the sites were known as holiday ‘camps’, a word which brings with it all kinds of unfortunate imagery associated with incarceration or worse. Rebranding and refurbishment has sought to do away with all such connotations. Butlins is now a resort, and checkpoints and border crossings are also a thing of the past. Guests are free to come and go through the open gate, as are visitors and townspeople and anyone else with cash to spend. I wander around for a couple of hours through precincts and arcades, between chain-owned shops and outlets, from the Play Fort to Bob the Builder’s Yard, then on to the Activity Gardens and Splash Waterworld, then into a ‘residential’ zone of ‘streets’ and ‘lanes’, among two-storey maisonettes, back-to-back terraces, detached bungalows, into Avocet Boulevard, Angelfish Park, Buccaneer’s Way, Egret Villas, and transit from one neighbourhood to another without knowing if I’ve strolled into the posh end of town or onto the wrong side of the tracks. At one stage I find myself in the staff quarters, ranks of distinctly dilapidated barracks beyond the last supermarket, spookily quiet except for a tinny portable radio playing Capital FM next to an off-duty employee with a can of lager in one hand and a roll-up in the other, sunbathing on the pavement.