by Mike Parker
The Landslip – still marked as such on the OS map – comes right at the outset of the Undercliff part of the walk back to Lyme. It’s a good introduction to the exuberant fertility of the path, which courses through dense thickets of ash, maple, beech, ivy and what could well be triffids. Yet again, the weather had seen fit to act in the most appropriate manner for my route. In this year of paths, it had been uncanny just how perfectly apposite the conditions had been for each walk. Not a drop of rain had fallen on me in eight April days on the Ridgeway (and the Icelandic ash cloud had cleared the skies of planes for six of them). My walk across Wales had taken place in luscious warmth, with decent cloud cover to prevent me burning on the most open or knackering stretches and luminous sunshine when in the lanes, the woods or the ancient holloways. The night walk across Dartmoor had been under a cloudless sky and a full moon, albeit a slightly shy one. Even the torrential storm on the dreaded Coast to Coast had done its job of permitting me to give it up as a bad job. And in the Undercliff, rain the previous night had dampened everything down, but now a searing, steamy heat was wafting round me as I moved quietly through the jungle. It felt, smelt and sounded so exotically unEnglish. To the Victorians, this must have seemed like a taste of the Empire itself.
This was all the more unexpected when the previous couple of miles of coast path had been so tediously Little English. Seaton promenade, a concrete wall between a shingle beach and drab apartments, was deserted at 9.30 on a midsummer morning. The path then climbs up to a golf course, where the potholed car park makes all too clear the local way: the spaces nearest the club house were reserved, in pecking order of proximity, for the Secretary, the Captain, the Seniors’ Captain and the Ladies’ Captain. Behind the doors of Dunroamin or Ocean View down in town, someone was plotting the day when that car-park space will be mine, all mine.
Golfers had been on my mind a lot while I’d been walking. Mark Twain’s immortal observation that ‘golf is a good walk spoiled’ pretty much sums it up for me, and I’d hated the bits of path, particularly on the Ridgeway, that had taken me across golf courses. As I lumbered past, dripping in sweat and weighed down by a tatty rucksack, I could feel the waves of impatience pulsing off the neatly coiffed, time-is-money businessmen forced to wait until I’d gone. On one course in the Chilterns, I’d been told off for going the wrong way. ‘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 some unexpectedly hair-raising experiences. After the Undercliff, the one section of British coast path I was most keen to try was the Elie chain walk, in Scotland. Part of the splendid Fife Coast Path, the section at Elie is a kind of via ferrata, or ‘iron way’, where you have to haul yourself up and down cliffs using chains bolted into the rockface. It is great fun: enough of a challenge to demand real concentration and give some hairy moments, especially if you’re prone to vertigo, yet easy enough for most to attempt. The path is also supremely beautiful, as the chains take you into coves and gulches that you’d never reach otherwise, and have you hanging above pounding blue waves if you time it right. It’s no idle leisure path either, for the chains were initially installed sometime in the early twentieth century to allow local fishermen access to remoter corners of the coast.
Purists will sniff at the idea that Elie is a proper via ferrata, as you don’t have to clip yourself on to the chains and there’s little danger of a serious injury. There is a commercial one now in the Lake District, along an old slate miners’ path, but for proper terror, you need to go abroad. The most infamous via ferrata in Europe is in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. The Orla Perç (Eagle’s Path) was established in 1901, and climbs up sheer rock faces to over seven and half thousand feet. Dozens have died attempting it. Even that doesn’t qualify as the continent’s most terrifying path, though, a title that surely belongs to El Camino del Rey (King’s Path) in Andalucia, southern Spain. A one-metre-wide walkway built in 1905 on to the side of a sheer cliff, it was originally used to ferry workers between two hydro-electric schemes. Parts of it have completely crumbled away, leaving just a metal girder to edge along, with a drop of up to 700 feet below. Even looking at the various videos on YouTube of young desperadoes walking the camino was enough to make me swoon.
Welded as they are to totting up their Munros, Nuttalls, Marilyns and all the other sub-divisio
ns they’ve invented for Britain’s modest mountains, Wainwrighty types would contend that Britain’s most dangerous path is something like Striding Edge on Helvellyn, or one of its fellow glacial arêtes, such as Crib Goch on Snowdon or Carn Mór Dearg on Ben Nevis. These knife-edge paths have all the right ingredients, and there have been accidents galore, but I think my nomination for the country’s deadliest path is coastal. It’s still marked on the map as a right of way, but unless you really know what you’re doing, your chances of surviving it are slender.
Even on the OS, it looks like no other. Crossing the shifting sands of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, the path arcs out from Hest Bank, ploughing a course so determined that alarm bells start ringing, for, more than any other path on the map, it looks to be all theory and no practice. The smooth line courses across seven miles of sandbank, mudflat and estuary, disgorging itself on the other side of the bay at Kents Bank, to the south of Grange-over-Sands. Before the turnpikes and railways, this was the only route across to Furness from the main body of Lancashire; a coach service ran six days a week until the railway opened in 1857. One of its last trips saw ten farm workers drown on their way to a hiring fair, when the coach driver, who was reported to be drunk, lost control in the middle of the sands and was subsumed by the tide.
Standing at Hest Bank, on the edge of the bay, I watched the sea sweep in. At first, it was low tide, when there are 120 square miles of sand in the bay, gleaming gold and silver against the fantastical backdrop of the Lakeland fells. Within half an hour, the whole bay was covered by water, and as I watched it race in faster than any man could escape it, I shuddered at the thought of being caught out there, in the cold, in the mist, in the gloopy half-world between land and sea. Remembering the 23 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned there one winter’s night in 2004, so lost and confused and far from home, I felt physically sick.
The map makes it clear: ‘WARNING – Public rights of way across Morecambe Bay are dangerous. Seek local guidance.’ Signs on the bank make it equally plain: ‘Do not attempt to cross without the Official Guide.’ Since 1963, that’s meant digging out Cedric Robinson, the Queen’s Guide to the Sands, a post that dates back to the sixteenth century. It comes with an honorarium of £15 a year, the tenancy of Guides Farm, overlooking the sands at Kents Bank, and a modicum of danger: at least one of his predecessors has drowned on the job. Using nothing more sophisticated than a lifetime’s knowledge, a stick and a whistle, Cedric steers some 10,000 people a year across, mainly on charity walks (it seems to be today’s version of the Lyke Wake Walk, which is reason enough to be cautious). The designated route of the path on the map is irrelevant, as the river channels and quicksands are in a state of constant flux; every crossing is different. When the railway first arrived, numbers crossing the sands plummeted. Tramps continued to use it, however, and sometimes the Queen’s Guide of the day was known to give a tramp the rail fare to get across, so that he wouldn’t have to bother. This became something of a legend in the tramping fraternity, and others soon showed up in some number to claim their free pennies.
Should it still be marked on the OS? I’m not sure that it should, for it must invite people to think that it’s more passable than it really is. I tried walking out where it’s marked on the map, and couldn’t get further than a couple of hundred yards before coming across wobbly sands, apparently firm bits that suddenly gave way and treacherous, fast-flowing channels of water. When the first local authority definitive maps were being drawn up in the early 1950s, the path wasn’t included, but the local secretary of the Ramblers’ Association lodged an objection, which was upheld. When the route was reclassified in the early 1990s, there were suggestions that it should, for the sake of both safety and wildlife, be extinguished, but again rambling fundamentalists, glued to their dogma of once a path, always a path, managed to stop the idea after a lengthy, and expensive, public enquiry. Perhaps the most avid amongst them could exercise their right with a lovely Boxing Day walk on the path that they’ve so bravely saved. Sticking to the exact line on the map, of course. And without Cedric.
Not only are we surrounded by water, internally we drip and gush from every pore. Fly over Britain and it’s the sunlight suddenly glancing off the surface of so many rivers, canals and lakes that both impresses and moves us the most. On a global scale, our rivers – and indeed all of our natural features – are tiny, but within our own insular microcosm, they are mighty.
Being the capital’s grubby sewer, and the waterway in which we are most encouraged to admire our national reflection, the Thames is the river that bags most of our national adulation. The only consolation for those of us infected with an inverted snobbery against southern England is that, however much it is lauded and loved, the Thames will never be as long as the Severn. It will always be in second place. There are many in Ireland who have the same pride that the Shannon trumps both of Britain’s major rivers.
Both the Thames and the Severn have named paths following them, but it is the Thames Path that has been elevated to the status of National Trail. It was first considered as one of the first wave of long-distance paths in the early 1950s, but took until 1996 to be officially completed. Passing as it does some of the most sumptuous real estate in England, there were plenty of ruffled feathers to be smoothed about the idea of having the hoi polloi walking past their boathouses and helipads. Not that such problems were anything new. In the 150 miles between Cricklade and Teddington Lock, the path crosses the river 28 times; a hangover from the days when wealthy landowners refused to allow the towpath through the end of their garden, forcing bargees and their horses across the water on ferries as the path switched sides. If you want the spirit of the Thames Path, look no further than the brass plaque facing walkers at the foot of a particularly lavish garden in Dorney Reach, between Windsor and Maidenhead. ‘No Stopping – Right of Way Only’ it barks, and who would dare disagree?
The path itself has a slightly different profile to most other long-distance routes. For starters, the people walking it are generally younger than you’ll find elsewhere, especially in London, where the largest slice of the demographic is 25–34-year-olds. They also feel unable to put a foot into a boot without tweeting and blogging about it, uploading their photos of every boat, bridge and bar on to Facebook and/or bespoke websites especially created for The Project. It always is The Project. They make it sound as if they’re hoping to crack the Enigma code or solve the Middle East problem, rather than take a gentle, flattish stroll through southern England. And not even that, for many of them. Terrified of the lands beyond Zone 6, they’re only doing the stretch from Hampton Court to the Thames Barrier, but boy, do we hear about every inch of the way. And see it photographed. Videoed too, if we’re lucky. And measured. And mapped; interactively, of course. Looking at all that is more exhausting than doing the bloody walk. Takes longer too.
I take the mick, but I adore walking in London. As a student there in the late eighties, I’d often roll home on foot from a night’s excess in the West End, past the pimps and dealers of King’s Cross, the goths of Camden, through the kebab alleys of Kentish Town, and the au pair avenues of Hampstead and Highgate. These were the occasions when I most felt part of the city, one tiny cog in a gargantuan, greasy machine that never stopped roaring. The drunkenness helped, I think, blurring the harsh edges of daytime into impressionistic splashes of neon and reflections in puddles. With the collars of my leather jacket turned up against the cold, I shimmied through, feeling like Morrissey, but probably looking more like a walking Soft Cell album cover.
These days, my London walks are a little less dissolute. One of the best lately was from the Tower of London to Hyde Park Corner, via some of the many lovely eighteenth-century churches and old alleyways of the City, and the gluttonous boulevards of the West End. It was hearing my excitement about this walk that made my partner agree to accompany me on the Thames Path from the Barrier for what was planned to be a full day’s romantic promenade into central London. We landed
on the north side of the river, in order to take a look at the Thames Barrier Park, and then realised that we had to cross the water to reach the path. The nearest option was walking up to catch the Woolwich Ferry, a treat I’d long been keen to sample. I can’t say he looked too excited by the prospect, and the flyblown streets of Silvertown, its derelict railway and the belching silos of the Tate & Lyle plant didn’t much help, but the rust-bucket ferry across the river was fun, and Woolwich looked interesting. Until we docked, anyway.
I’d promised him breakfast, and pulled out all the stops by getting us a bacon bap from a caravan in a car park. It was enough to send us on our way to North Greenwich and the Millennium Dome. This is another place I’d never been to, and it both fascinated and horrified me. I felt as if we’d been shrunk, like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage, though instead of being pumped into a scientist’s arteries, we’d been dropped into an architect’s model. And one that they’d given up on half-way through, by the looks of things.
The Dome, that cathedral of political hubris, might well have been rescued and reborn as the O2 Arena, but it was still looking mighty tatty, with stains leeching down its sides and acres of redevelopment debris surrounding it. That’s all to change, though, at least according to the massive hoardings everywhere advertising this as yet another brand-new waterside quarter of London. The images were all of glossy people surfing on lap-tops and sipping lattes in funky bars, bluebells in woods, ducks splashing and sunshine dancing on water – well, isn’t that exactly what springs to mind when you think of Legoland houses built on a reclaimed toxic sludge pit? ‘Greenwich Peninsula: A place where you can’ was their slogan. Fill in your own punchline.
This demesne of plasticity and promise was a strange contrast with the gruff solidity of the river itself; the wharves, factories, chimneys and container ships, even the reed beds, swans and geese. Across the water, the towers of Canary Wharf glittered icily, looking way beyond reach or even belief. ‘This is great, isn’t it?’ I enthused to my cariad. ‘Hmmmm,’ he replied, which I took as a yes. We turned the corner of the peninsula and headed down towards Greenwich, but the Thames Path wasn’t playing. Signs announced a diversion, but it soon petered out and left us wandering hopelessly through industrial estates, along a busy dual carriageway, past cranes and concrete mixers, under CCTV cameras and hoops of razor wire. Eventually, after many wrong turns, we landed in the gentrified streets that announced our imminent arrival in Greenwich. ‘Er, I think I’ll go and see the Chelsea Physic Garden,’ he muttered as we sank a pint in the Cutty Sark Tavern on the quay. He was off before I could say, ‘But hang on in there, it’s Deptford and Rotherhithe next.’ Returning that evening, he pointedly compared the two halves of his day: my trip in the morning through noxious mud and rusty dereliction, his trip in the afternoon along perfumed walkways and shimmering walls of fern.