The Salt Path Read online

  Even if they are eventually afforded some protection, it can’t be guaranteed to save them, not until we can rely on governing bodies to show consistency. The Welsh government now thinks that marine life in the Cardigan Bay and Pen Llyn Special Areas of Conservation have been special for long enough and have put forward a bill to reopen the areas to trawlers dredging the sea floor for scallops. Having left the previously heavily dredged area for a few years, marine life has been slow to return, allowing the Welsh Assembly to conclude that a sandy underwater desert is the natural state of our coastal waters. But along with the scallops, the metal claws have ripped out all the sea life: mussels, anemones, sea fans, sponges, seaweeds, all manner of fish, a marine world that cannot recover in a handful of years, but will take decades, centuries even. The exact marine life that dolphin mothers feed on when their calves are young and slow moving.

  The cliffs that backed the beach were shale and unstable, so we pitched the tent well away from them, on the other side of a stream of fresh water and far above the tideline of seaweed and shells. Weeks of ebbing and flowing with the tide had given us a feeling for the point where the tide would turn. Darkness fell; the light from Pendeen Lighthouse swung rhythmically over the headland never reaching the beach; the oystercatchers came and with them a biting cold, eating up through the sand, chilling us to the bone. I wore all my clothes and some of Moth’s, who wasn’t cold at all, and eventually shivered into that state of deep sleep which doesn’t last for many hours in a tent.

  That’s when the sea came, rushing in with urgency and force, rising above the tideline and not stopping. We’d chosen that tent for its ability to stay upright even without tent pegs, but staying erect when being hoisted in the air with airbeds and sleeping bags still inside was beyond any expectation. More amazing than the staying power of the Vango tent was Moth. Running up the beach in his underpants, holding the tent above his head. Even wading knee-deep through the salt water as it ran up the fresh-water stream, he kept moving. He’d changed, there was no question, he’d changed and according to the doctors that wasn’t possible. CBD is a one-way ticket.

  He knew it too.

  ‘I’m stronger. I feel as if I can put one foot in front of the other and trust where it’ll land. I’m not dropping things as often. But it’s my shoulder too – it’s not as painful. It was really bad when I stopped taking the Pregabalin, but somewhere before Newquay I realized I wasn’t feeling it as much. It’s been years since it felt this good, and my head’s so much clearer; I can think straight. I don’t know if it’s temporary, if it’s even possible, if it will all come back the moment I stop walking. I don’t know.’

  ‘Before Newquay? Probably Kurt’s herbal remedies.’

  ‘I think it’s extreme physio. Maybe I’ll have to keep walking all my life.’

  ‘Don’t joke – we might have to anyway. But I don’t care. If it keeps you well, I’ll walk forever.’

  ‘What are we going to do, after Land’s End?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  The need for food drew us into Pendeen. A tiny shop had a pile of home-baked loaves the size of footballs; we had to have one and devoured the whole thing in one sitting. Gagging for a cup of tea we blagged a pot of hot water from the café and tried to charge the phone, but it hadn’t survived the rain and refused to leave a white screen.

  ‘So, where are you heading?’ The owner of the café was clearly curious about the smelly scroungers in the corner.

  ‘It was Land’s End, but we’re not sure now; we may carry on.’

  ‘Don’t you have to be back?’

  ‘No, homeless now.’

  ‘Wow, selling up to go on the road? Brave at our age – there aren’t many that would do it.’

  That’s not what Moth had said, but we went along with it anyway.

  ‘I have a dream of cycling and canoeing through France, towing my canoe behind the bike. You could come. I’ve got a house in northern France; you could rent that for the winter, five hundred pounds a month. We’ll cycle there.’

  ‘That sounds amazing. We’ll be in touch when we finish the path, whenever that is.’

  We left the café in the heat of late morning. Someone had offered us a place to stay. We couldn’t afford it, it was in another country and, stronger or not, it was doubtful that Moth could cycle six hundred miles towing a canoe. But all the same, someone had offered. Even if it was based on the notion that we had a sackful of money from a house sale and they probably wouldn’t have offered if they’d known the truth. There were possibilities; there was hope.

  Geevor was a working tin mine until it finally closed in 1991; in the same decade that saw the last of the English tin mines close, its pumps were switched off and the shafts flooded to sea level. Some miners dispersed as far as Australia, others went to work on the building of the Channel Tunnel. The end of an era that had lasted centuries – Cornwall’s mining history was over. But not for long; as with most things Cornish, it became a tourist attraction and now forms part of the Cornish Mining World Heritage Site. The site no longer turns out tonnes of metal ore; instead it mines the pockets of the visitors, a more sustainable and long-term project. The mining may be over but the heritage remains, and we’d be the poorer without it. After all, without the tin mines we might never have had pasties. Or Poldark.

  That day it was closed, a silent, deserted tin mine in a perfect state of repair. Beyond Geevor, back on the path, and the ruins of a dead industry are all around. Shattered engine houses and broken chimneys, a land of shale and destruction, a war zone. Man’s battle with the rock leaving desolation that can never heal. The earth in submission. We passed the surreal landscape, and the tourists revelling in it, as quickly as we could.

  The path stayed just back from the cliffs between gorse, blackthorn and brambles, and always to the right was the mound of Cape Cornwall and the mine chimney that marks its summit. In old Cornish it used to be called Kilgooth Ust, or goose’s back of St Just. It didn’t resemble any goose I’ve ever seen, but it had the edge-of-the-world presence of an island in the foaming water. Until two hundred years ago it was believed to be the most westerly point in Britain. And it should be: it feels remote, projecting, a last sentinel heading into the ocean. We sat with our backs to the warm granite of the summit chimney and looked out to the horizon. Even the phone sprang back to life in the heat.

  Land’s End was only a few miles to our left, but from the chimney we had the impression of being on a huge liner heading out into the ocean, as far west as we could be. A baked-bean-label plaque on the chimney commemorates the purchase of the cape for the nation by the Heinz Company in 1987; it now belongs to the National Trust. Moth’s always been a big fan of baked beans and as the sun dropped lower and the sky lit into endless, bright, late-summer whiteness, reflecting from the foaming water in blinding brilliance, he stood on the seat, arms outstretched, shouting into the wind.

  ‘Thank you!’ Even if it was a clever tax dodge, it would have been a crime for this place to be lost to development.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Heinz!’

  The End was so close we could almost touch it. Longships Lighthouse was clearly in view, standing on the tiny islet of Carn Bras just off the final headland. We could have made it that day, but there was no rush. Why hurry, when beyond there was the great unknown? If the earth was flat, then Land’s End was the edge. We wandered on in the early evening, the path closed in with low, tough, scrubby growth. Resilient to wind and salt and impossible for camping. A few flat patches in Porth Nanven were taken by camper vans, so we climbed away from the rocky beach with a sense that we might not find anywhere for the night and would have to keep walking. Glancing back as the path turned away into more scrub, we saw a flat green patch on the side of a finger of rock pointing out from Carn Leskys into the sea.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Exposed, really exposed.’

  A narrow path led to the tiny green shelf, just big enough for the tent if we didn’t
use all the guy ropes. At the edge of the ledge the cliff fell vertically away twenty metres to the rocks below, where the waves crashed, fizzing spray almost within reach.

  ‘Just don’t get out in the night.’

  ‘We’ll be on Pirate FM tomorrow; “Last seen on Leskys’ Ledge”.’

  The sun finally dipped from sight between the peaks of the Brisons islet, sending shafts of every colour across the sea, swathing the headland in pink and orange. We lay awake with the tent flap open, herring gulls perching on the crags close by, as Longships Lighthouse began to flash.

  ‘What is that? That light moving; look, coming out from behind the lighthouse.’ We were on the corner; it was our first sight of the shipping lanes of the English Channel.

  ‘Oh fuck, Moth, we’re here, what are we going to do?’

  ‘Sleep. Sleep and see what tomorrow brings.’

  I slept and the morning brought water sprayed repetitively at the tent. Half opening the flap the water came again with fizzing closeness. The tent roared in a vibrating frenzy, wind-whipped. There was no rain, just a sky full of fast-moving cloud and bursts of water every thirty seconds. We packed everything, put waterproofs on and raced the rucksacks to dry ground between breaking foam. The Atlantic was driving something big our way, but thankfully it hadn’t arrived yet. By the time the tent was down we were dripping, but dry again in seconds thanks to the high winds as we climbed out of reach of the waves. Swells and troughs out at sea came to shore in a boiling mass of white spume. Something was definitely coming. The wind turned the rucksacks into sails, but thankfully the path rolled rather than jerked and stayed away from the edge, falling easily down towards Sennen Cove. The beach was deserted, lifeguards in their hut with the door shut against the sandstorm swirling and eddying inland in a salt-scouring dermal abrasion. Then the rain came, light and mixed with sand at first, then furious, horizontal shards, thundering against waterproofs, painful on exposed skin. Doors were closing, shutters unrolling, Sennen Cove battened down. We ducked into a café and took up the seat by the window, a thin pane of glass between us and the howling beast outside.

  Always hungry, we gave in and handed over a cherished note in exchange for mackerel baps and tea. A party of walkers passed by; it was hard to tell in the driving rain if they were backpackers or just deranged. One and the same. By mid-afternoon, the owner wanted to close; we’d been the only customers and she was ready to go. We hoisted our packs and stepped back out into the mouth of the gale.

  ‘So, Land’s End then?’

  ‘Nothing better to do.’

  The end of the land. The start and end of epic journeys. A tourist honeypot, a design disaster, an ecological horror story. Foot-scarred cliff paths led through the clouds to the huge concrete development. Deserted. Late afternoon and even the photographer at the signpost that points the way to John o’ Groats had given up and locked his door. We jumped the barriers and took rain-streaked photos on the phone. No welcome committee, no celebration, just two wet people clinging to a post. The shops were closed, the exhibition centre was closed, even Arthur and his knights had abandoned the Arthurian experience for something drier. We stood alone, running with water in a concrete enclave.

  ‘Is that it then?’

  As I said it, a double-decker bus pulled into the empty car park. We walked towards it, zombies leaving the post-apocalyptic wasteland. The doors of the open-top coastal cruiser opened. Water was pouring down the steps from the top floor and rushed out as the doors opened.

  ‘Where’s the bus heading?’ Moth was shouting to be heard above the roaring wind.

  ‘St Ives. It’s not bad there. Bloody awful here though.’

  ‘Really awful.’

  Over two hundred and fifty miles of pain, exhaustion, hunger, wild nights and wild weather were behind us. We could get on the bus and head away, back to the familiarity of Wales, to put ourselves on the waiting list for a council house and find a cheap campsite for the winter. Moth held my hand as the bus doors closed.

  16. Searching

  We watched the bus drive away from the shelter of the archway entrance to the visitor centre. Sitting on our packs, dripping. Mid-September and it felt as if autumn had arrived. We could have stopped, but we had nothing to lose and everything to walk for. We were free here, battered by the elements, hungry, tired, cold, but free. Free to walk on or not, to stop or not. Not camping out with friends or family, being a burden, becoming an irritation, wearing friendship away to just tolerance. Here we were still in control of our life, of our own outcomes, our own destiny. The water ran from our rucksacks as we put them on our backs. We chose to walk and seized the freedom that came with that choice.

  Within a few hundred metres of the Land’s End theme park, the wilderness returns. The cliffs are some of the most impressive we’d seen in Cornwall: sheer faces of castellated granite, lashed by seas that hadn’t stopped since deep in the Atlantic Ocean, splitting against the first and last headland with unimaginable power. We stood face on to the breathtaking force of nature as immense plumes of sea were driven through the archway of the Armed Knight rock arch just offshore. Two figures alone on a cliff of stone and grass cut bowling-green low by the razor wind. No shelter, no trees, just the prospect of a damp tent. Five pounds twenty, one Mars bar, one bag of rice, one banana and half a bag of wine gums. But it had stopped raining.

  The light was going when we hid the tent amongst some rocks, slightly protected from the wind. Two sheets of nylon between us and Canada.

  Brief scurries of rain passed, but the sky lifted from the land and rushed away on the morning breeze. We sat on Gwennap Head, our boots off drying in the wind, and shared the Mars bar. We were achy and slow, creaking from the wind and rain of the previous day. Heading east felt like the start of a new journey. Or were we going south, or south-east? We’d been getting closer to the goal, reached it, but now we were just walking, ambling through the day with no real sense of purpose. As we reached Porthgwarra the landscape had already changed. On the north coast, we had come to know a vegetation of low, tough shrubs, grass and thrift, with any trees stooped and gnarled. By comparison Porthgwarra dripped with lush vegetation, trees still stunted but upright and gardens of exotic flowers. We had turned the corner into another country.

  In early evening we sat at a picnic bench in a mown field near some houses, considering putting the tent behind some trees. Until the cars came, and it was obviously a car park.

  ‘Maybe something’s going on in the village. Where is this?’

  ‘Who knows, haven’t looked at the map for a while. Maybe it’s bingo night.’

  We boiled some water, drank tea and shared a banana as the car park filled and people headed away, hats on, carrying blankets.

  ‘Outdoor bingo?’

  A Land-Rover pulled up next to us and an old couple got out.

  ‘Wait until this group has gone, then we’ll head down.’ They leant on the truck, watching the scene, obviously not keen on crowds.

  ‘Excuse me, what’s going on here, where’s everyone going?’

  ‘To the theatre. This is the Minack, the famous outdoor theatre.’

  ‘Oh right, didn’t realize it was here.’

  ‘You’re not going to the play then?’

  ‘No, we didn’t know. Don’t think we could afford it anyway.’

  ‘What are you doing, camping?’

  ‘Yeah, camping, walking the coastal path. We’ve come from Minehead.’

  ‘Well, do you want to see this play? I’ll get you a ticket but we need to go or we’ll miss the start.’

  We followed the couple through an entrance building and on to the open cliff.

  ‘Goodbye then. You’re at the top; we’re down there. Good luck with the walk.’

  ‘Thank you so much. I’ll pay you back. What’s your name?’

  ‘It’s David. Forget it, just enjoy the play.’

  The cliff tiered down in terraces of seats formed into the natural amphitheatre of the headl
and and at the bottom was a stage against the backdrop of the sea. In the early 1930s, Rowena Cade decided it would be a great idea to have a theatre at the end of her garden, somewhere to stage plays by the local dramatic society. So she moved half the hillside to create one. So it says in the brochure, but as with all such projects, the gardeners did the work and she instructed and pottered around with a little wheelbarrow, or so the man sitting next to me said, and he would know, as his father was one of the gardeners. Or so he said.

  The play unfolded, which wasn’t a play, but an opera: Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. It was hard to catch what was going on as dramatic singing swirled around the amphitheatre. From high on the cliffside, we heard the light waft of voices carried away on the wind. As the sea grew dark and the moon rose behind the stage, we were momentarily transported to a magical world where shepherds were sprinkled with fairy dust.

  ‘Where are we going to camp?’

  ‘Wait ’til everyone’s gone; it’ll have to be in the car park.’

  We followed the last people up the steps and away from the theatre.

  ‘Oh my word, what are you doing with those big bags?’ A man with his hair in a hairnet was hurrying up the hill. I recognized him as one of the actors in the play.

  ‘Walking the coastal path. We’re camping.’

  ‘Well, where on earth are you going to camp in the darkness?’

  ‘We’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘Jill, Jill, what are we to do? These poor people need somewhere to camp; we must save them from the tempest.’

  You think this is a tempest? You should have seen it yesterday.

  A fairy bounded up the steps behind us.

  ‘Treen campsite, but hurry, hurry or we’ll miss last orders.’

  We bundled into the back of a van and bumped around for what felt like miles, while the cast of shepherds, innkeepers and fairies chattered loudly.

  ‘How did you forget your words, Gerald? I had to repeat the whole verse to cover for you, I’m almost hoarse.’