Sunday, 11 March 2012
Coastwalk , South West Coast Path
Combe Martin → Mortehoe
Distance: 13.1 miles
Ascent: 894 metres
Duration: 5 hours 38 minutes
The Plan calls for 2012 to be the year of the South West Coast Path, and three months in it's time we started ticking off the missing bits.
We had hoped to walk yesterday, but reality intervened so we spent the day driving instead. And with a limited (i.e. non-existent) bus service operating today, the sensible move seemed to be to take a taxi to a point from which we could walk back to the cottage we're renting for the week.
Throughout the day the view was largely the same: dense fog. At times the next fingerpost sign was lost in the mist, and it was rarely possible to see beyond the nearest headland. Consequently the tail end of the walk seemed never-ending, with Morte Point only appearing at the final moment. We continued round to the southern side of the Point, conveniently just a quarter of a mile from our sea-view cottage.
The town of Ilfracombe — approximately halfway through the walk — would have been a good place to cut the walk short had the need arisen. Just in front of the curiously-shaped Landmark Theatre, local boy (and long jumper) Jonathan Edwards' Olympic record-setting triple-jump is commemorated with a series of bronze and mosaic plaques set into the paving.
One great aspect of this section is that the coast path is never far from a road, so despite today's low visibility there was never any real risk of getting lost, and safety was always just a field boundary away.