The Salt Path Read online

  ‘How is it? Can you carry on?’

  ‘It’s like hell, but what else are we going to do?’

  By eleven thirty we’d packed everything away, put the rucksacks on sore shoulders and climbed out of the heather. Anyone who writes about wild camping stresses not only the fact that it’s technically illegal in England and Wales, but that if you do it it’s important to camp away from public places, set up camp late and get away early, and always leave no trace. I looked back; the heather was crushed. So, a fail on every point then. Maybe we’d get better at it.

  Descending into Bossington, I was struggling to decide if going downhill with a weight on my back was actually worse than going up. Already making mental lists of everything that hurt – sole of my foot, hips, shoulders, and on and on – by the time we reached the bottom I’d concluded that they were inseparable in pain levels and I was probably insane for thinking we could walk this path.

  When we arrived in the idyllic village, the sign for a tea room was irresistible. We knew we couldn’t do tea rooms, or cafés, or much of anything else for that matter, but we went into the garden all the same. We ordered our first and last cream tea of the whole summer while I took my boots off. Only eight miles in and a pair of boots that I’d had for over ten years had turned the ball of my foot into one huge blister two inches across. Was it caused by the weight of the rucksack? I added to the weight I had to carry and hungrily shovelled the scone and clotted cream into my mouth. If I’d known then it would be the last I might have taken more time. I created a patchwork of blister plasters across my foot and put my socks back on.

  ‘Walking the path then, are you?’ A large man and his tiny wife and child were sitting on a table next to us, obscured by the exuberant shrubbery.

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘You’re in for a great time. This is the best bit of the whole path. Got to have a head for heights though when you go over Exmoor.’

  ‘Is it steep then?’

  ‘Is it steep?’ He started laughing. Were we so funny? Moth looked really unimpressed; he hadn’t been good with heights since he fell off the barn roof.

  ‘So how come you’ve got so much time? I wish I had that much.’

  ‘We’re homeless. We lost our home and we’ve nowhere to go, so just walking seemed a good idea.’

  It came out of my mouth without a thought. The truth. But as the man reached out and pulled his child towards him and the wife winced and looked away, I knew I wouldn’t be saying it again. He called for the bill and was gone in moments.

  We crossed the marshlands, where the sea had broken through the shingle ridge and turned the farmland into salt marsh. The skeletons of white, salt-burnt trees stark against the grey sky. Dead but still inhabiting life.

  As we passed through the cluster of buildings that form Porlock Weir, a voice shouted from a hole in a wall.

  ‘Doing the path? You need some chips before you go into the woods.’ Two men were looking out of what appeared to be a three-foot square hole in a wall, which was actually the serving hatch for a tiny chip shop.

  ‘Best chips you’ve ever had.’

  We caved instantly.

  ‘Go on then.’

  The round-faced man explained the process of triple-cooking chips, which actually did turn out to be the best chips we’d ever had. And the most expensive. Two miles had cost us sixteen pounds. We couldn’t do this. But we were so raw, so lost in spirit, we were saying ‘yes please’ to any scrap of comfort that came to us. It had to stop, or very quickly we’d have no money at all.

  We climbed away from Porlock Weir and up into the woods. Moth was tiring and finding every step a struggle. I was leaden and achy. It could have been our lack of fitness, the emotional exhaustion, the CBD, or maybe it was just the chips. Paddy said we would be here at the end of our first day, but in the late afternoon of our second day we were just about done.

  The track broadened ahead and in the clearing a man stood on the path who appeared to be practising yoga. We stopped, not wanting to interrupt him, thinking he’d look up and allow us to pass. Utterly oblivious to us, he faced towards a wooded valley. A tall, gaunt, string-thin figure. He looked ill, or something else, suffering some self-inflicted, emotional torment. Bending at the knees he reached out towards the valley and then drew in something invisible, some essence, of what I don’t know. Pulling the unseen thing into his body, pressing it through his core and down through his legs. Over and over, repeatedly, cloaking himself in the unknown.

  Eventually we gave up and passed him. He continued, utterly absorbed in his movements and unaware of our passing. The path led into the valley and down to Culbone Church, the smallest church in England, ancient, and once the site of a leper colony. Did the man believe there was some power here? I sat in the graveyard and let the utterly peaceful place wash over me. It was profoundly spiritual, nothing to do with God or religion, but a deeply human spirituality. Something of the knot I’d been carrying started to loosen. Maybe there was some power here. I cupped my hands and threw some air at Moth just in case.

  As we sat and let the green light seep into our aching joints, the yoga man walked slowly and precisely down the hill. He didn’t look at us, but stopped. Shouldn’t we be here? Was he going to tell us to move on?

  ‘Hi. We’ve just visited the church. It’s very peaceful.’

  ‘I know. You passed me on the path.’

  ‘Oh, we thought you didn’t see us. We didn’t want to disturb you.’

  ‘I didn’t see you; I don’t see anything. I heard you.’ He was blind. Why hadn’t we noticed?

  ‘We’re just walking the path.’

  ‘You are, and you’ll travel many miles.’

  ‘Well, two hundred and fifty to Land’s—’

  ‘You’ll see many things, amazing things, and suffer many setbacks, problems you’ll think you can’t overcome.’ He reached forward and put his hand on Moth. ‘But you will overcome them, you’ll survive, and it will make you strong.’

  We looked at each other wide-eyed, mouthing a silent ‘what?’

  ‘And you’ll walk with a tortoise.’

  We carried on up the hill and camped in a field above the road, hidden from a farmhouse by high hedges.

  ‘You don’t see many tortoises running wild in the south-west, do you?’

  ‘Not generally, no.’

  The morning came, eventually, after a night of cold and lumpy ground. The packs made it on to our backs by eleven and we crept out from behind the hedge, checking each way for onlookers before creeping through the gate to the road like escaping convicts. The path climbed and fell, in and out of fields and along narrow green lanes bounded by high hedges where the wind could barely penetrate. In normal life, we’d rarely pass a day without a bath or a shower, but it had been three days of travelling, walking, and sleeping in the tent. Without a breeze, the smell in the lanes was rich, and not from cows. I’d thought it wouldn’t matter that we couldn’t afford a campsite so would never be able to wash: we could swim every day. I hadn’t accounted for rarely being at sea level. The only time we’d spent near the sea had been in Minehead and the really stony shore at Porlock. We were humming. It was a relief to get on to the wooded cliffs, where hanging forests of oak stood hunched towards the cliff and the sea wind cut through the leaves.

  The oaks turned into rhododendrons and we stopped, exhausted. We’d passed into north Devon without even realizing, our first milestone achieved. Two days in and we were still moving. Rhododendrons closed around us, above and below, spreading across the cliffside. Resilient and persecuted plants that, contrary to belief, lived in the UK millennia ago. Fossils have been found that prove they grew here before the last ice age, but native plant status is reserved for plants that flourished after the ice had receded. Reintroduced to the UK in the mid-eighteenth century, they rapidly colonized the countryside: a wave of migrants with rich, glossy evergreen leaves, bringing texture and colour to drab, grey, leafless British winters,
followed by a stunning spring display of lush purple and mauve flowers cloaking the hills and forest undergrowth. In a much-loved valley in Wales, May had been a blaze of beauty through a dark ravine until the National Trust decided the non-indigenous invaders had to go. What followed was months of hack and slash plant slaughter, leaving behind hillsides that resembled a battlefield. Years later and debris of the massacre remains, tiny scant attempts at indigenous growth have taken their place, an occasional wisp of birch and heather. But the rhododendron stumps are regenerating, fighting back with tough green speed. Eventually one side will win the battle, but neither will be the better for it.

  The cliff rose above and fell below, with barely more than three feet of level ground to support the path in between. We got the stove out and made cups of tea regardless, sitting on the flat of the path. We could hear the Americans coming: the tone of voice in the distance was unmistakable. She was talking about problems at work, unable to leave them behind. I stirred the tea with the odd realization that I had no work to concern myself about, no domestic problems to resolve; I had no problems at all really. Other than that we were homeless and Moth was dying. They stopped for a moment, looking a little put out. I thought maybe they were downwind, but then realized they couldn’t get past us.

  ‘We’re late already today, should be in Lynmouth by four, we’re behind schedule.’

  They pushed by apologetically. He was sweating magnificently, sweat dripping from his chin and elbows.

  ‘Sure you wouldn’t like to stop and have a cup of tea, bit of a rest for a minute?’

  She looked at me as if I’d committed a heinous crime.

  ‘No, there’s no time; we have to keep to the plan. Y’all don’t have a plan, do ya?’

  They were gone, but for the next few minutes, as her voice trailed into the distance, we heard just how glad he should be that she’d come away at all, with such a full diary and ‘y’all should just be grateful’.

  ‘Do we have a plan?’

  ‘Course we do. We walk, until we stop walking, and maybe on the way we find some kind of future.’

  ‘That’s a good plan.’

  Trudging on through the woods it began to rain gently, but the dense canopy of the rhododendrons protected us. As soon as we left the shelter of the trees the weather ripped in off the Bristol Channel, gentle rain developing into a howling gale. Struggling along, waterproofs flapping, I could barely see through the water pouring down my face. Moth was wobbling from the height, the wind and exhaustion as we turned on to the cliff path. Exposed and high, the weight of our packs caught the wind, unbalancing and unnerving us. Around Foreland Point a perfect rainbow formed ahead of us, picking up the colours of the hill and adding a muddy green, brown and purple to its display. Moth clung to the grass at hand height, steadying himself against the growing swirl of black and grey mist where the sea had been. A two-foot wide path, then a void of cloud. Were we on a grassy slope, or a cliff edge? There was no way of knowing. Then suddenly, out of the fog, we could see a church tower.

  ‘You know that plan? It’s time to stop walking now.’ Moth fell into a pew in the church. His shoulder was in agony from bracing himself against the wind and his leg had started to buckle randomly, causing him to stumble. We contemplated spending the night in the aisle of St John the Baptist, until the bright lights of the Blue Ball pub caught our eye. We staggered the short distance from the church to the pub, sloshing through the door, pouring water across the floor and over a dog sitting by the entrance.

  A bald man behind the bar looked at us without expression. Then at our steaming packs, and the puddles on the floor. Moth picked his pack up, always the first to make things easy for others.

  ‘I’m really sorry about the mess, mate, we’re doing the Coast Path and we got caught out. Shall I leave the pack outside?’

  ‘The Coast Path? No bloody way, put your stuff down there.’ The barman broke into a torrent of welcome in an Australian accent and we collapsed on a squashy sofa in front of a log fire. As I hung my socks from a chair to drip, I realized we’d come into a pub but couldn’t rationally afford to buy anything. A huge dog the size of a small donkey came out of the dining room, sniffed at the socks and, taking one in his big slobbery mouth, went to the bar. I followed him, pulling at the sock, trying to get him to drop it while ordering a pot of tea, which seemed like the cheapest possible option.

  ‘Bob, drop the sock. Okay, tea, very English. Thought you looked like you were up for a night on the single malt.’

  ‘If only.’ I took the sock, now with a big hole in it, and headed back to the fire. Single malt, log fire, hot bath, comfy bed. I hate whisky, but if we had some money it would be a different trip. Instead we spun out the tea and dozed in front of the fire while the socks dried and the rain stopped.

  It was pitch black at eleven o’clock when we finally felt ready to leave the warmth of the pub, erect the tent in a niche in the cliff slightly protected from the gale and fall asleep as the wind ripped overhead.

  I knew the moment would come. The one thing I’d avoided thinking about when I’d come up with the ridiculous notion of living wild on the South West Coast Path. The moment when I’d have to face the big unanswered question: do bears shit in the woods? Now I had the answer: I wasn’t a bear, there were no woods, but without a doubt the answer was yes. Six thirty and I could hear the gulls coming and going over the cliff and the now familiar early-morning battle with boots and tent flaps took far too long. As I stood up I was overwhelmed. Not only by the desire to sit on a white, shiny, flushing toilet, but mainly by a wave of vertigo. Somehow in the dark and fog of the night before we had pitched the tent two metres from the edge of the cliff. Tent, path, scrap of grass, hundred-metre drop. I regained my balance and looked around for somewhere slightly disguised. All I could see was an open hillside with a small clump of gorse bushes. There was no waiting; it would have to do. I frantically tried to dig a hole with the heel of my boot – we hadn’t carried a trowel for this, far too much weight and anyway we’d always find a public toilet. My thumb ripped through the waist of my leggings in the rush as I squatted behind the spikey sharp gorse with as much relief as Renton in the toilet scene of Trainspotting.

  Dog walkers. What is it about dog walkers?

  ‘Morning. You found somewhere to camp then?’

  The Australian from the pub walked up the path towards the tent. I couldn’t stand up, the gorse wasn’t that high, so I stayed squatting and whispered in a small voice: ‘Morning.’

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it then. Have a good walk.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  The dog dragged him back the way he’d come as I created an artistic wigwam of dead gorse and the crimson embarrassment drained from my cheeks. I watched him disappear through voluminous transparent clouds lifting out of Lynmouth Bay and pouring over the headland, now racing to catch up with the storm that was already miles away. A large area of flat grass appeared through the clouds; we’d walked straight past it in the gale the night before. It didn’t really matter; we hadn’t fallen off the cliff so our niche was fine. I got back into the tent as Moth woke.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘Not before the dog walkers though. Thought it was you who was going to be losing bowel control, not me?’

  The Coast Path is said to have been established by the coastguards who needed a view into each and every one of the endless coves and bays as they patrolled for smugglers. But the many sites of ancient history described in every guidebook or tourist pamphlet suggest that the path has been trodden by man for as long as he has walked over the land. Natural England primarily funded the creation of the path as a whole route, joining the dots to create our longest National Trail. They finished the last section in north Devon in 1978, the year before I left school. Big hair and kipper ties, running free into a future of outcomes we couldn’t see. The trail and us, thrown out into the world together: were we always destined to meet?

  The South West Coast Pat
h is said to generate in the region of three million pounds a year. We had forty-eight pounds a week, which certainly wasn’t going to add much to the local economy. I was becoming very reluctant to open my purse, but after diverting up a steep, winding road into Lynton I had no choice; we needed more food supplies.

  We stood outside a grocery shop on the corner of the street as I counted the coins in my hand, trying to decide what to spend. At the same moment, a woman in a bright yellow and blue sailing coat walked around the corner with a large, white, angry-looking dog. I shouldn’t have stood there, between the shop door and a rail where a black Labrador was tied, waiting for its owner. The huge white dog clearly hated other dogs. He lunged for the Labrador, who had been quietly dozing, contemplating the can of dog food that was on its way out of the shop. As he leapt forwards he grazed past the rucksack on my back, sending me spinning into the wall. The coins leapt out of my hand and disappeared down the hill. I threw myself to the ground as a pound coin spun off the pavement, almost catching it as it slipped from my fingers into the drainage grill. Moth followed a two-pound coin as it rolled away, weaving between holidaymakers walking up the hill. From my viewpoint on the tarmac I could see him trying to stoop to catch it, just as a small boy snatched it up with glee.

  ‘I’ve caught money, I’ve caught money.’ No, no, we need that.

  ‘Well done, mate, ice cream van’s at the top of the hill.’ Oh Moth, I’d have liked an ice cream.

  The woman with the white dog prodded me with her foot. I was still lying on the pavement with my hand in the gutter.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, are you drunk?’

  I was momentarily stunned by her assumption.

  ‘I’m fine, it’s your dog that’s the problem.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my dog. You tramps should learn how to control yourselves. Rolling around in the street – it’s disgusting.’

  I took my hand out of the gutter and stood up as the black Labrador uncurled itself from the end of a lead stretched to its limit. A tramp. A homeless tramp. A few weeks earlier I’d owned my own home, my own business, a flock of sheep, a garden, land, an Aga, washing machines, a lawn mower; I had responsibilities, respect, pride. The illusions of life had rolled away as quickly as the pound coins.