Tintagel to Lulworth
The Tintagel of Merlin and Arthur is a magical place to commence the five-hundred-mile adventure of the South West Coast Path. Deep in these cliffs lie veins of tourmaline, a dark rock with a subdued and milky gleam. Expert cutting and polishing releases a dazzling rainbow spectrum, like sunlight filtered through a dash of sea spray.
Jeremy Gardiner’s Port Quin Hamlet and Cove recalls winter walks on this harsh north Cornwall coast – a white sky to the north beyond Kellan Head, the sea icy, the cold colours of the rocks in the cove, and the pallid wintry look of the sere grasses and bracken on the slopes of Doyden Head. In winter storms the hunched shapes of Atlantic Breakers, great rock stacks known as Bedruthan Steps, break the hammer blows of the sea as it bashes and roars in on them, shaking the ground beneath your feet. Watching from the path on Sliding Cliff, you see that it is the Atlantic that will one day break the Steps.
South and west lies the redundant Cornish tin mining coast, where abandoned engine houses lift their chimneys like admonitory fingers to the sky. You skelter steeply down a rough path to Towanroath engine house. Sea and rocks glint with the dull sheen of cut tin, and you picture the miners wet to the knees and working in the dark as the pumping engine panted far above.
Out at Land’s End the sea stack known as the Irish Lady casts a restless and furtive shadow, hunched up in her cloak of granite, an emigrant figure heading for the far west horizon where the fabled kingdom of Lyonesse lies drowned beneath the waves.
Now the coast path turns from south to east as it commences the long home run up the English Channel’s northern shore.
Christopher Somerville,
Walking Correspondent, The Times
