Walking with Plato

by Gary Hayden

  And this was precisely my experience on JoGLE. It took me a while to get into it. But, by the third and final month, wildness and wilderness had worked its magic upon me. I really was invigorated, inspired, and strengthened.

  Thoreau famously observed that ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. In my humdrum, everyday life, I identified with that. But, on JoGLE, I could no longer be numbered among the mass of men. I was fully engaged. Fully alive.

  Although Wendy and I hadn’t realized it when we set off from Taunton, the Tiverton Parkway railway station isn’t actually in the town of Tiverton. It’s located seven miles east of it, close by the village of Sampford Peverell.

  Had we not stopped for a beer at a pub in Sampford Peverell, and got talking to the barman, we wouldn’t have discovered our mistake until we reached Tiverton – which would have been seven miles too late.

  From Tiverton Parkway, we caught a train to Exeter, where we spent two nights with our friend Hilary, who has an apartment close to the historic quayside on the River Exe.

  As was the case whenever we broke our journey to stay with friends, we were fed, watered, and pampered quite royally. Hilary even moved into her spare bedroom, alongside her cat Hobbes, so that we could luxuriate in her big comfy bed.

  From Sampford Peverell, we hiked fourteen miles in a westerly direction to the tiny hamlet of Hayne.

  The morning’s walk was a flat and easy stroll along the winding course of the Grand Western Canal, to the town of Tiverton. And the afternoon’s walk took us up and over lots of small hills, across farmland.

  I have a vivid memory, from that afternoon, of walking along a grassy path through gently rolling pasture, and being struck by how outrageously alive everything was.

  The grass at my feet was long and lush, and gave the impression of having triumphed gleefully over every attempt to cut it back or trample it down. The bushes and ferns at the side of the path were so thriving and dense that they seemed to be trying to fill every cubic inch of space with as much organic matter as possible. The rich pastureland, the fields of freshly ploughed earth, and the trees and bushes surrounding them were equally bursting with life.

  And so was I.

  As I walked the final few miles towards the farmhouse B&B at Hayne where we were to spend the night, I found myself unconsciously humming the tune of the Elvis Presley song ‘Wild in the Country’, and realized that it expressed exactly how I felt.

  By this stage of JoGLE, I had come to feel – and I mean this literally, not just poetically – part of the Earth.

  From Hayne, the next morning, we continued west for twelve miles: first to the village of Morchard Bishop, and then along a section of the Two Moors Way walking trail to a B&B in the village of Down St Mary.

  This was another day of pastures and ploughed fields, of hedges and trees, of cows, horses, and sheep, and of quintessentially English villages.

  Somewhere along the route, we stopped at a pub. Wendy took a photo of me, standing before an open fire with a pint of beer in my hand, and I was startled to see how much my appearance had changed. I had gone from podgy and soft to slim and toned in just twelve weeks.

  It was a whole other me; a better me; a healthier, happier, more balanced me.

  There’s a passage in Plato’s Republic where the main character, Socrates, discusses the value of physical exercise with a young man named Glaucon:

  ‘Have you noticed how a lifelong devotion to physical exercise, to the exclusion of anything else, produces a certain type of mind? Just as a neglect of it produces another type? One type tends to be tough and uncivilised, the other soft and oversensitive.’

  Glaucon replies:

  ‘Yes, I have noticed that excessive emphasis on athletics produces a pretty uncivilised type, while a purely literary and academic training leaves a man with less backbone than is decent.’

  Looking at that photo, I felt, for the first time in years, that I’d got the balance right.

  My body looked lithe, limber, and ready for action. My mind (that is, my intellect) felt the same. And I realized that this proper balance of the physical and mental was, in no small degree, accountable for my more robust, positive, and engaged emotional state.

  Plato believed that we humans have a dual nature, that we are bodies and minds. And he believed that we can only reach our potential – we can only become the best of ourselves – when our two natures are, as it were, pulling together.

  To the modern mind, Plato’s ideas often seem fanciful and idealistic. But, in this instance, he spoke from experience.

  When we think of Plato, the image that generally springs to mind is that of a be-robed, balding, soft-bearded old man – the ultimate other-worldly intellectual. But that’s quite misleading. In fact, he was known for his imposing physique, and was so skilled a wrestler that he is said to have competed at the prestigious Isthmian Games.

  Indeed, the name ‘Plato’ (from the Greek platon, meaning ‘broad’) is said to have been given to him by his wrestling coach on account of his powerful shoulders. His birth name was Aristocles.

  Plato had learned, from experience, that physical vigour promotes intellectual vigour, and that the two together promote psychological vigour.

  And now I had learned it too. My sitting-still-and-brooding-self had been, in Plato’s words, ‘soft and oversensitive’. But my constantly-in-motion self . . . well, he was a whole other guy.

  From Down St Mary, Wendy and I walked seventeen miles southwest to the town of Okehampton.

  For most of the way, we followed a section of the Devonshire Heartland Way: a forty-three-mile walking trail that runs between Okehampton and the village of Stoke Canon. This took us mostly along footpaths and bridleways through undulating farmland.

  Partway through the afternoon, we clocked up our thousandth JoGLE mile. But this was more a cause for sadness than celebration – an unwelcome reminder that our journey was nearing its end.

  We spent the night at the YHA in Okehampton, a converted railway-goods shed on the edge of Dartmoor, and then set off early to the tiny village of Stowford.

  The first half of our fourteen-mile walk to Stowford took us southwest along the Granite Way: a traffic-free cycleway that runs along the edge of Dartmoor, between Okehampton and the village of Lydford.

  The Granite Way is full of interest, offering views of Okehampton Castle, Meldon Lake, and, on its left-hand side, the Dartmoor National Park with its wild, empty moors, exposed granite hilltops, and herds of semi-feral Dartmoor ponies.

  Best of all, at one point it crosses the West Okement River by means of the Meldon Viaduct, a wrought-iron railway bridge that towers spectacularly above the river and the canopy of the surrounding trees.

  The second half of our journey from Okehampton took us west through farmland and small villages to some splendidly rural B&B accommodation at Townleigh Farm, near Stowford.

  From Townleigh Farm, we walked twenty-one miles to the remote(ish) Jamaica Inn, on Bodmin Moor.

  I say ‘remote(ish)’, because, although it’s slap-bang in the middle of the moor, there’s a tiny hamlet, Bolventor, plus a clonking-great A-road, the A30, nearby.

  The greater part of the day’s journey was a pleasant but unremarkable hike along minor roads and footpaths through rural Devon. The last few miles, though, across the empty, heather-clad granite moorland of Bodmin Moor, were something special. Like Thoreau, I find that my spirits ‘infallibly rise’ when I am surrounded by bleakness and wilderness. And the same goes for Wendy. So we both arrived at Jamaica Inn in good spirits.

  Jamaica Inn, a former coaching inn, built in 1750, provided both the setting and the title for Daphne du Maurier’s 1936 novel, set in the harsh and violent world of Cornish smugglers and wreckers in the early nineteenth century.

  Her inspiration for the novel came to her while staying at the inn, after getting lost in the mist while horse-riding on Bodmin Moor. That would be a very easy thing to do. Wendy and I crossed it on a bright au
tumn day. But even so, without the GPS on my trusty smartphone, navigating it would have been no easy matter.

  Today, Jamaica Inn is a hotel/pub/restaurant/museum that trades quite shamelessly upon its literary and lawless associations, with olde-worlde décor and abundant references to du Maurier’s novel and the world of smuggling. It is also (and I say this with a world-weary sigh) reputed to be one of the most haunted places in Britain.

  But, for all that, it’s a fun and comfortable place to stay – especially at the end of a long hike.

  From Jamaica Inn, we walked fifteen miles to the town of Bodmin.

  We spent the morning heading south along the eastern side of Colliford Lake, Cornwall’s second-largest lake. It was a splendid walk across the moor. Not quite as splendid as the previous afternoon’s walk, since our path lay along a minor road rather than along footpaths and bare moorland. But splendid nonetheless.

  I can’t remember details. I have a general recollection of a wide expanse of water on our right, and of scrubby grassland, meagre trees, and herds of Dartmoor ponies on our left. But I recall very clearly that I enjoyed it immensely.

  At one point in his classic work of philosophical fiction Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig talks about the kinds of things that one ‘should notice’ when walking up a mountain: ‘This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. From this place the snow is less visible, even though closer.’

  I wouldn’t, for a moment, dispute the value, to Pirsig and others, of this kind of observant awareness. But such conscious attention to detail isn’t at all my cup of tea.

  Once or twice, in the past, I’ve tried to walk ‘mindfully’, to focus my attention on ‘this leaf’, or ‘this rock’, or the coolness of the breeze, or the singing of the birds. But it distracts and annoys me. My attention gets focused not on the intended objects, but on my own attempts to focus.

  I find it far more rewarding to practise un-mindfulness: to climb a mountain, or to cross a moor, or to paddle in the ocean, or to lie beneath the stars without making the slightest effort to notice or focus upon anything.

  I get my kicks by absorbing rather than observing.

  This makes me, I think, what C.S. Lewis, in the second chapter of his book The Four Loves, calls a ‘nature-lover’.

  Nature-lovers, as Lewis uses the term, are not the kind of people who seek out the beauty of individual natural objects such as rocks, streams, and flowers. Neither are they the kind of people who take special delight in beautiful vistas.

  In fact, Lewis says, there’s nothing so irritating for the true nature-lover as sharing a ramble with a botanist or a landscape painter. The botanist will insist on pointing out beautiful objects, and the landscape painter will insist on pointing out beautiful views.

  Nature-lovers find all of this annoying. They’re not interested in particulars. They want to experience the whole.

  Lewis writes:

  Nature-lovers want to receive as fully as possible whatever nature, at each particular time and place, is, so to speak, saying. The obvious richness, grace and harmony of some scenes are no more precious to them than the grimness, bleakness, terror, monotony, or ‘visionary dreariness’ of others. The featurelessness itself gets from them a willing response. It is one more word uttered by nature.

  He considers the English Romantic poet William Wordsworth to be the archetypal nature-lover.

  Wordsworth decried ‘giving way to a comparison of scene with scene’, being ‘bent overmuch on superficial things’, and ‘pampering’ oneself ‘with meagre novelties of colour and proportion’. It was far better, he thought, to be sensible to ‘the moods of time or season’, and to ‘the affections and spirit’ of a place.

  This describes my attitude to nature, and to the countryside, to a ‘T’. So I have no hesitation in describing myself as a nature-lover. I hadn’t realized it before setting off on JoGLE. And it took me a long time to realize it while doing JoGLE. But, nonetheless, a nature-lover I am.

  After crossing Bodmin Moor, we walked southwest, along minor roads and the occasional footpath, to Bodmin.

  Bodmin is one of Cornwall’s major towns. But, despite spending an entire rest day there, I remember almost nothing about it.

  I remember that Wendy and I stayed in an unpretentious but adequately comfortable room at a Thai restaurant/hotel in the centre of town. And I remember that, on our first night there, we lounged on the bed, ate crisps and chocolate, and watched Strictly Come Dancing. But, apart from that, it’s all a blank.

  Our journey from Bodmin to Newquay – the final part of the penultimate section of JoGLE – took us twenty miles west, along minor roads, through gently undulating farmland.

  Summing it up, like that, it all sounds a little dull. Or, at any rate, of little consequence. And if you asked me about it, and understood how little of it I can actually recall, you’d think that it really was of little consequence.

  But that’s not how it was. And that’s not how it is.

  I have two photographs in front of me now, which I took that day using my smartphone.

  The first shows a leaf-strewn forest path, which is enclosed overhead by the canopy of the trees, giving it the appearance of a tunnel. The second shows a broad pasture extending to a line of trees at the horizon, with white cotton-wool clouds in a pale-blue sky overhead.

  Without those photographs, I might struggle to remember those scenes. But, at the time, they were magical. And, even now, something of their magic remains.

  In the spring of 1802, my fellow nature-lover William Wordsworth came across a long belt of daffodils while walking with his sister Dorothy in the Lake District.

  This event inspired him, a couple of years later, to pen his most famous poem, commonly known as ‘Daffodils’, which begins:

  I wandered lonely as a cloud

  That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

  When all at once I saw a crowd,

  A host of golden daffodils;

  Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

  Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

  The poem, though, isn’t just about that one experience, that fleeting moment in time. It’s also about memory, and how memory can make such fleeting moments last.

  The poem ends:

  I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

  What wealth the show to me had brought:

  For oft, when on my couch I lie

  In vacant or in pensive mood,

  They flash upon that inward eye

  Which is the bliss of solitude;

  And then my heart with pleasure fills,

  And dances with the daffodils.

  And it’s the same for me with that forest path and that broad pasture. I may struggle to remember precisely when and where I saw them. I may confuse them with similar paths and similar pastures. But nonetheless their beauty remains. As does the beauty of a thousand other half-remembered scenes.

  At the time, I ‘little thought what wealth to me the show had brought’. But now, when I look back – even after all this time – ‘my heart with pleasure fills’.

  We arrived at our destination, a neat little B&B in Newquay, early in the evening.

  Newquay is a major tourist destination, principally on account of its long sandy beaches, especially Fistral Beach, which is a Mecca for surfers. And, like many popular seaside towns, it’s bursting with clubs, pubs, bars, cafés, and amusement arcades.

  Normally, I quite like busy seaside resorts. And, although I’m not one for clubs and bars, I’m as likely as the next man to stuff myself with hot donuts and to pour money into a slot-machine.

  But, after spending so much time in the countryside, I found it all a bit tawdry and depressing. Well, not depressing, exactly. But I can’t say that I liked it much.

  That night, Wendy and I sat in a very cheap and very cheerful fish-and-chip shop, and looked forward, with as much sadness as anticipation, to the final section of our End to End adventure.


  The end of a melody is not its goal: but nonetheless, had the melody not reached its end it would not have reached its goal either. A parable.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche

  Chapter Eight

  Bittersweet

  Newquay – Perranporth – Portreath – St Ives – Pendeen – Land’s End

  For Wendy and me, the contrast between how JoGLE began and how it ended could hardly have been greater.

  It started with a 120-mile trudge from John o’Groats to Inverness: a road-walk of such epic dullness that no right-minded person would ever undertake it except as a means to an end. It ended with a seventy-mile hike from Newquay to Land’s End: a coastal hike of such constant yet varied beauty that no right-minded person would ever want it to end.

  For this final part of our journey, we followed a short – alas, all too short – section of the South West Coast Path.

  The SWCP, in its entirety, stretches 630 miles from Minehead, in Somerset, to Poole Harbour, in Dorset, encompassing the whole of the Cornwall and Devon coasts. Its origins date back to the nineteenth century when coastguards patrolled the cliff-tops of the southwest coast, scanning the bays and inlets for evidence of smuggling. Today, it’s the longest and most popular long-distance footpath in Britain.

  The remarkable thing about the SWCP is that for almost its entire length it passes seamlessly from one scenic splendour to the next, and the next, and the next.

  At any given moment, you may be navigating along the edge of a cliff, looking down upon the breakers crashing into the rocks below, or traversing a stretch of sandy beach, gazing out across an expanse of turquoise sea. Later, you may pass a remote lighthouse perched on the farthest edge of a grassy headland. And shortly after that, you may be clambering down the steep side of a rocky inlet.