A lady walking along a coastal path
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Influential

There can’t be any more secret hideaways only the locals know about left. Someone calling themselves something like Travel_Insider100 has no doubt filmed a 10x speed video and overlayed it with circa 1998 fonts and shared it with their 22.8K followers who are all stunned at the location you would never believe is actually England and have since endeavoured to wild camp / swim / block the narrow lanes as soon as possible. Thus crumbles the likes of Pedn Vounder.

Now, if I had any influence whatsoever you would have known about the following secret hideaways more than fifteen years ago because they are places I go back to time and time again, usually to eat the same things, walk the same walks, take the same pictures, and espouse the same waffle. But you can’t blame me for any sudden influx of drones or sugar hit superficiality with a jingly soundtrack. I mean, you’d have to read my stuff for a start.

So off we go, again…

I believe I saw Kingsand and Cawsand recently pronounced as twin fishing villages like going back in time but without the crowds. Now in my earliest memories, there have always been some crowds, just not the crowds of St. Ives or Padstow. Unless it’s a stormy February, the ferry is always busy, the shorefront simmering away, the narrow lanes dotted with people gawping into tiny porthole windows. But there does linger a peaceful charm, even with Plymouth being just around the corner.

A calm cove with pink flowers in the foreground

A newer and arguably welcome development is a spot of half decent waterfront dining / snacking / drinking just as you scramble ashore from the ferry. There is an ice cream van also conveniently adjacent. In between eating savoury and sweet you can wander the lanes, bumble with the bees, cram into a tiny deli to suss out the local cheese, and just semi-seriously enquire as to the price of that vacant cottage. The ice cream is at least within reach.

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You’ll never believe what I have seen two or three times in the last few weeks. Someone has had a camera with them and had the ingenuity to discover one of the best half day walks on the South West Coast Path. It goes between Looe and Polperro, and, like many, I have discovered it before. It’s lovely and reasonably convenient and, yes, you can check out the top ten landmarks of Shipton Abbott if you wish. But for me the highlight is saving for a home deposit by skipping the car park fee at Polperro. There you go, a free travel hack.

A wonderful lady with a pasty and a seagull waiting with menace

Save your pennies instead for a Sarah’s pasty or two in Looe, only enjoyed on edge as murderous-eyed seagulls encircle. This provides more than enough nourishment for the undulations all the way to Talland Bay, where you can stock up again on cakes or ice cream or simply refresh with a cup of tea. Tea and tranquility the antidote to salty seagull frenzy.

I thought it was a short hop, skip and jump from here to Polperro but I underestimated the climbing which turns into a bit of a wheezy slog all the way up to a memorial cross. But it is the Polperro Parish memorial cross so that is something to commemorate, despite the village still out of sight.

A view of coastline and green hills through the trees

Walking along the coast path you’d have no idea Polperro is even nearby, such is the abrupt cleft in which the ocean creeps. It is only as you are almost upon it that an entire Cornish model village reveals itself in a glare of whitewashed cottage and kaleidoscope of bunting. The soundtrack is all gull and diesel trawler, the smells seaweedy pilchard with the odd waft of tidal mud. Lobster pots are as ubiquitous as postcards. Lanes are there for getting lost.

A picturesque harbour with cottages and boats

As we pottered about gradually inching towards the top of town and a bus stop, it was pleasing to see that some evil genius had propped open the toilets with a container of kerosene. No 60p fee today, times two. Maybe this is the best budget-saving half day adventure in Cornwall after all? Just make sure you use the toilets, free or not, because it sure is a long two pound bus ride back to Plymouth.

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Bus wankers. But check this out. People in 2025 actually being friendly and talking with one another on a bus! How quaint in white lettering with a black background. This amazing experience can happen on the 35 from Ham Green to Plymouth City Centre, where every stop is bustling with old dears and yet another hopeful pram. An old geezer in a flat cap is the latest addition, greeting the blue rinse set with a healthy morning ladies in dulcet Janner tones and a twinkle in his eye.

It almost seems a shame to pick up a car, but also not a shame at all because this is offering the chance to revisit places virtually out of reach of public transport. In cool late afternoon sunshine we head to the north coast of Cornwall, where I am keen to nudge speed limits in a quest for lush green pastures and sparkling blue sea and dream-like cake. Is Boscastle Farm Shop the best place for refreshments on the South West Coast Path?

Tea and cake and clotted cream and green hills with cows and blue sea below

The happiness of life at this point in time is amplified by free parking after 4pm and a walk out to the headlands of Boscastle Harbour. It is a tad blustery and the waves are reasonably wavy, a state of affairs garnishing the dramatic beauty of what may or may not be Dragonstone. Dark slabs of rock at angles forged in the earth’s furnace mighty enough to stand up to the swelling, pulsating ocean. Cosplay Targaryens blissfully absent.

A sinewy harbour in a narrow valley

Coastal plants with a bridge and rocks in the background

A dramatic island linked to the coastline by a suspension bridge

So another travel hack is to arrive at places like this late in the day, but not so late that the farm shop has closed. Tintagel is equally as quiet, the town sleepy with an air of desperation, the headlands peaceful with an air of salt and ozone. It’s late enough for the castle to be closed and free entry to a little part of it, the mainland part of it. Good value if you are walking the coast path penniless, fabricating encounters and manipulating illness to write a book or something.

It turns out all the characters are down at Trebarwith Strand, seemingly gathering for some kind of birthday or Friday night supper in the encroaching gloam. Bodies adorn and litter the rocks and I can only imagine slow shutter speed sunset seekers tut-tutting and rolling their eyes. The beach is disappearing as quickly as the light and even quicker than any remote hope of a majestic sky.

A rugged beach with late sun and reflections from a rock pool

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Hey, have you heard of this crazy type of rain? The locals call it mizzle and you should definitely not check it out. Despite looking innocuous it soaks you to the bone and lures you towards cliff edges. There is a sea down there somewhere but you can hardly hear it because this incredible precipitation phenomenon also absorbs sound. Wow, living my best life.

Yet for its very damp bleariness there is cocoon-like comfort associated with a walk in the mizzle. From far-reaching vistas the focus shifts to the immediate and mundane; your breath and your footsteps, the infinite shades of long grass below, the teardrop of water coagulating upon the tip of a leaf. The outline of a shady Hotel Camelot and a cat on a wall. It’s not clearing, so bugger it let’s go and get a hot drink.

A misty view of cliffs with a signpost and overlooking wild seas

If Tintagel was a little downbeat the evening before, early morning was positively ghostly. There is probably a tall tale of the spectre of a headless knight roaming the streets here seeking plastic swords and a genuine pasty. Today they are reincarnate in the bus load of German tourists that have found themselves in a branch of The Cornish Bakery, ordering pasties and bitter black coffee at ten in the morning. I feel both delighted and deflated at the realisation that their lasting impression of an iconic delicacy will be that thing there.

I just hope their cream tea experience proves more impressive. Mine certainly does. It’s a scene almost worth filming and sharing a smartarse clip where you break open the scones and zoom in on the jam and slather the cream all over a camera lens and then stroll beside the sunny cottages decorated with bright flowers hand in hand. But I don’t want to influence you or, frankly, encourage you. It is all mine to remember. Or mostly mine, for there is nothing finer than seeing your new wife embrace this experience with gusto. Totally under the influence.

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Cornwall Coasting

In unprecedented developments I went to Looe and didn’t buy a pasty. Instead my bag was packed with a leftover barbecue sausage sandwich and bag of crisps. It was one of those cost-of-living crisis kind of days, what with the £2 bus fare as well. As if a £2 bus fare balances out a decade of incompetence and self-sabotage and party time plunging living standards.

Anyway, walking is free, as they say. And the bus dropped me off at West Looe, a tidally fulsome river away from cellars of lard and pasty caverns. If only I were a seagull. About to hop along on two webbed feet all the way to Polperro. After a snack.

This was a walk I had started once before, in my youth on a hot, sunny day. Quite probably commencing at Looe Guildhall, where antique plates or boxes with flowers stuck on were being flogged. I felt flogged climbing one hill too many and turned back to make sure I could get my body-sized slot in the back of a red Citroen van. To think I was younger and allegedly fitter then.

Let’s say some thirty-something years later, the weather wasn’t so hot but it was sunny and the shelter of the coast path, straddled between perpendicular hills and scrubby cliffs, made it feel nice. In some ways this was a reacquaintance with and continuation of my three day walk along the southern Cornish coastline last year. Only in the other direction and missing a chunk (Polperro to Mevagissey 2024 anyone?). Amazingly, it was like I’d never been away, I muttered as I hauled myself up the first skyward incline.

The steepest part of this stretch is likely to be when leaving Talland Bay, a gorgeous enclave and half way point populated by a small beach, a church on a hill and a café. The café is the kind of thing that makes the South West Coast Path such a civilised affair, despite the occasional wild meandering through shrubbery. Walk a bit, have a cream tea, walk a bit, regret cream tea as you sweat your way up the world’s steepest footpath.

I spent a bit of money on the cream tea, so after some more gentle walking surrounded by exquisite beauty I was overjoyed to enter Polperro for free. This is an unprecedented state of affairs. Normally I require a bank loan at eye-watering interest rates to visit Polperro. Today, not a penny…although I later found out to spend a penny I would need fifty pennies. The fleecing is still alive and well, including the tacky plastic King Charles Coronation flags that – a week or so after the event – were at least discounted to a pound.

Anyway, this is a far better way to arrive into Polperro than the car park of extortion. Turning a corner that you wouldn’t know was there until it is in your face, the sea surges into the embrace of a snug harbour fringed by whitewash and kaleidoscopic bunting. Lobster pots pile up along the sea wall and old bits of rope look as though they would barely tame a seagull, let alone a trawler.

A poky old pub tempts with Tribute, a bakery window is piled with scones, Roly’s fudge is being freshly made. And all I can pay for today are crumbs… admittedly delicious fudge crumbs that will be adorning ice cream for many months to come. I’ve still got to fork out for the bus ride home.

The £2 bus fares continued to tempt during May but I wasn’t convinced about taking a two and a half hour ride to Bude or Padstow. Not only because of the duration but also because you would get 15 minutes in either place before having to board the return journey. Either that or you could take a connecting bus to Launceston and then wait another two hours for a tractor to Liskeard via a maize maze and then hitch a lift to Carkeel roundabout before rolling down a hill.

So I took a train to Truro instead, got incorrect bus times online and then eventually made it to St. Agnes, a total journey time of, erm, about two and a half hours. Still, I got there around lunchtime which made it prime time for giant sausage rolls. And an iced bun for takeaway. I had utopian visions of savouring the iced bun with a cup of tea at Chapel Porth, several miles away. But following the plunge down to Trevaunance Cove and the goat track up again, icing was in a perilous state of affairs and needed rescuing.

Unlike the Looe to Polperro adventure, this was reasonably familiar ground. I had first discovered St. Agnes’ penchant for novelty sausage rolls several years back and ended up doing the same walk as today. This is not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all. For not only do you receive an abundance of the essence of Cornwall (azure seas, rolling surf, plunging cliffs, tin mines, seagulls, thrift, heather and gorse and Poldork), but it ends with a hedgehog.

This is Chapel Porth‘s signature dish, an almost impossible to control combo of ice cream, clotted cream and roasted hazelnuts. Shame that iced bun never made it here, though I still would have been quite satisfied with it alongside a cup of tea. As it was, I took the ice cream down to a rapidly shrinking beach, the tide high and a keen wind mustering the first sensation of being a bit cold today. Perfect ice cream weather, right?

All this eating might make one plump but you can pretty much guarantee you will burn it off again on the next climb. For me, this involved veering away from the coast and cutting back to St. Agnes via the beacon. It was a walk I may have enjoyed more, were it not for the fact I seemed to be in an increasing hurry to meet the bus.

With five minutes to spare, I settled under a shady tree near the bus stop, pleased to have a sit down and gather myself for the journey home. Five minutes became ten and twenty and an hour and there it finally was, grinding up a hill in a puff of diesel. Delivering me back to Truro where trains were delayed because a boat had hit a bridge. This is almost as Cornish as the old cows on the line excuse. Suddenly the two pound buses don’t sound so bad.

Not that it really mattered. What else was I to do? Other than sit at the platform and take salvation in an emergency bag of M&S crisps for dinner, thankful once again for the sunshine and the South West Coast Path. A strenuous brute of a thing that yet is so comforting, so uplifting, so more beautiful than pretty much anywhere else there is.

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Down on the south coast

Apparently, the Cornish pasty has been a feature of the British diet since the 14th century. Originally the preserve of rich inbred gentry it wasn’t until the 18th century that the pasty became a nourishing treat for the masses. Today, go to any coastal town or village in Cornwall and the pervasiveness of pasties for the people persists.

In some spots the choice can appear bewildering. This includes the chainstorisation of Britain making its presence felt at heavily branded outlets offering crafted goods from industrial Solihull. But at the other end of the scale, it’s possible you may stumble across bona fide nooks hidden down narrow passageways, replete with evocative odours and large steel trays of steaming hot goodness fresh from the oven.

Looe has such a place (along with the odd chain) and it’s become a site of regular pilgrimage, competing with a cream tea in the what-will-Neil-eat-first adventure. Today – a Monday at the end of November – Looe is unusually becalmed. Indeed, many shops and eateries are closed. But thankfully Sarah’s is trading and offering a few remaining pasties as the day nears half one. Despite tending towards lukewarm, a two and a half year gap in this experience generates immense delight with that first bite.

Eating beside the seafront, the tide is low. Apart from the beach, this doesn’t exactly provide the most favourable impression of Looe. The river estuary empties to leave a patchwork of boats tilting high and dry. Salty seaweed spreads across oozing mud, offering a pungency almost as bad as the aroma of entrails swept from the fish market. And of course, everywhere, seagulls lurk desperate for winter pasties few and far between.

So, after a pause to collect further delicacies at Roly’s Fudge, Mum and I hot foot it out of town and head on to Polperro. This is – on paper – a more charming prospect though one you’d do well to steer clear of in the height of summer. That’s why I thought we could give it a shot today.

Indeed Polperro was quiet. Deathly quiet. Barely anything was open but this didn’t deter two very Polperro occurrences. First, we have the sight of a delivery van somehow trying to squeeze through a gap between whitewashed cottages as locals roll their eyes knowingly at one another. And secondly, there remains the rip-off parking on a cold grey day in November when jack all is open.

I expected non-summertime parking rates but forgot this was Polperro where the emphasis appears to be on doing everything possible to deter day trippers. As one of a handful, I felt a touch conspicuous trawling the streets with my camera and decided it was a good day to warm my head with a Plymouth Argyle beanie and thus parade – admittedly Devonian – credentials.

In low sun, the beanie was a handy addition as half of the village sat in perennial shade. While a series of cute cottages on the east side of the harbour beamed in fine, holiday-let whitewash, others faded into the dark and damp recesses of an impending winter. Striding out to the headland I could see Mum sat on a bench on the quay in the last receding corner of sun. And with a brief hello to the South West Coast Path, I set off back down through the shade to join her.

By now we were both thinking afternoon treat, or at least a coffee beside the tidal mud. But of course, nothing suitable was open. Being here in November was to prove both a blessing and a curse; cherishing the lack of bother and stress associated with thousands of tourists, taking advantage of quicker than usual drives and – sometimes – free parking, yet being more at mercy to the weather and missing out on some of the usual local treats and delicacies (I never did end up having an ice cream for instance).

A similar picture played out a little further along the south coast on a different jaunt to Fowey. At picturesque Readymoney Cove, where I parked nearby for free, the kiosk supposedly open year round was obviously shut. Yet I was able to drive through the town and park again by the water, a prospect unfathomable in summer. Here at least a few spots were open and a coffee carried through attractive streets to a riverside bench offered contentment.

Lunch was a different matter, in brief taking in the disavowal of cold pasties in Fowey, a fruitless search for something in Lostwithiel and dismissal of a covidy café at a hoity toity garden centre (seriously, why not let us sit outside?). As a result, lunchtime had been and gone and options were running out. The last real opportunity was to return to Looe.

If you’ve actually been reading any of this babble you would know a pasty was a possibility here. But I was concerned at what would be left on the tray and how warm it might be. And the clock was clearly ticking over towards afternoon cream tea territory. So, we took a punt off the main drag, up a small hill. A short deviation that I’m sure will be repeated again. Daisy’s Café added to the what-will-Neil-eat-first adventure list. Making Looe the place where a wicked dilemma can finally be resolved: is it possible to have a pasty and cream tea on the same day? Roll on 2022!

Food & Drink Great Britain Green Bogey
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Changing of the guard

Britain is a pretty unspectacular place. It has no alpine peaks or broad rift valleys, no mighty gorges or thundering cataracts. It is built to really quite a modest scale. And yet with a few unassuming natural endowments, a great deal of time and an unfailing instinct for improvement, the makers of Britain created the most superlatively park-like landscapes, the most orderly cities, the handsomest provincial towns, the jauntiest seaside resorts, the stateliest homes, the most dreamily-spired, cathedral-rich, castle-strewn, abbey-bedecked, folly-scattered, green-wooded, winding-laned, sheep-dotted, plumply hedgerowed, well-tended, sublimely decorated 50,318 square miles the world has ever known – almost none of it undertaken with aesthetics in mind, but all of it adding up to something that is, quite often, perfect. What an achievement that is.

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And if you are thinking that is the most masterful, evocative, and passionate paragraph I have ever written (or, alternatively, overly rose-tinted, nauseating and contentious), then you are just plain wrong. For the always marvellous Bill Bryson had that to say in a Christmas present I bought myself, courtesy of some shady international bank transfer originating in Switzerland. With researcher instinct and the preposterous suggestion that someone might a) read b) notice and c) sue me for breach of copyright, that would be Bryson (2015, p.33).

montage1aNow, back to some original nonsensical drivel, and Christmas in Great Britain finally came and went. Blink and you may have missed it. I think I was part of it – my waistline certainly attests to such – but already it seems a world away. I remember a Christmas jumper and a gargantuan dinner and a predictably endless game of monopoly. I recall a losing battle to eat my way through four types of cheese and multiple slices of ham and final dollops of clotted cream with practically anything. I recollect a Boxing Day trip to Argyle and another success to stay top of the league. This part sounds the most fantastical, and perhaps I really am just dreaming.

montage1bA fond memory persists from Christmas Eve, rain sweeping briskly through to provide a few bright hours pottering in Polperro and tackling a cloying coastal path. Sunlit and sedate, contentedly winding down towards the Christmas weekend, it was all rather lovely. With the addition of a Doom Bar in a low-ceilinged, cosily log-fired, jauntily handsome pub, it delivered a moment to cherish.

I like to think it was quite a feat for me to make it through to Christmas…November and December testing my patience for all things grey and damp. But in reality it was barely a chore. Over almost half a year I came to love the variety, the luxury of choice for walks and wanders near and far. I marvelled in some unseasonable early autumn weather and wallowed in a shifting, fading, tinted landscape. I discovered new wonders like the Jurassic Coast and sublime pockets of South Cornwall and cultural and historical hotspots of London town. I also found comfort in the familiar, the cream teas and BBC and old friends and Plymouth Sound. True, I struggled to adapt to an unending parade of TV soaps (how much Emmerdale does one really need in life?), but became wearily accepting of the indifferent coffee. I adjusted and accepted and it became the norm.

Now things shift back to Australia once more and a counter-adjustment is in flow. No bothersome soaps and plenty of amazing coffee. Warmish temperatures (not that it ever got cold in England), but still some rain. Pitiful ‘Devonshire’ Teas. An absence of a delectable coast path, but a plethora of sweeping bushland trails in its place. Happy reunions proving some compensation for forlorn farewells. A new year commences with a newish start in what feels – at this point – a new place. A novelty that will quell my curiosity for the weeks and months ahead, until England – and its people – comes calling again.

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Reference

Bryson, B. (2015). The Road to Little Dribbling. More Notes From a Small Island. London: Transworld Publishers

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Gap Fillers 1: Southeast Cornwall

I am behind, seriously behind. Numerous distractions scattered within a 30 mile radius of Plymouth have conspired to infiltrate the memory card of my camera and ingratiate the memory banks of my brain. Blogging was so much easier when I was marooned in Canberra, with just the occasional escape to regurgitate and local tree pictures to upload. Today I forget what day of the week it was yesterday and where I popped out in the afternoon after labouring in front of my computer doing work (eeek).

So, in an effort to catch up to the present day, here is the first of a non-sequential, scattergun melee of words and pictures. To provide some semblance of logic, the focus is on Southeast Cornwall and various trips I have made across the Tamar to this somewhat understated of back yards. It’s an area that can get overlooked – in fact I have been guilty of such – for the drama and mystique of the North Cornish coast. But there are many gems, some of them new to me, littered within the rolling fields and crystal coves of the south.

Literally just across the Tamar are the twin villages of Cawsand and Kingsand. It’s a small pedestrian ferry ride away from the salty sewage and sinister seagulls of Plymouth’s Barbican. Despite the influx of Janners, it is undeniably charming courtesy of its narrow streets and pastel ocean tones. Stick around as a sunny Sunday afternoon lengthens, and you can gleefully soak in the mellow vibes with a Doom Bar outside the front of the Devonport Inn.

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Around the corner from here is Whitsand Bay. An area that I frequently bypass in pursuit of those finer grains of sand. Come at high tide and there will be little of it to walk on. But when the tide is out, the bay stretches on and on and on. The ribbon of road skirting the cliff tops bears a passing resemblance to a small section of Great Ocean Road, and steep tracks lead down to the sands and rocks and pools far below. Not so bad to reach, but harder to return.

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There is a great sense of space here – of vast ocean and big sky, Plymouth hidden by the hulking spine of Maker Heights and Rame Head. Small fibro shacks with names like Eddystone View and Shipwreck Haven add a rough and ready, ends of the earth, windswept aura. It could be coastal Tasmania, Devonport around the corner and Launceston up the road.

Along from Whitsand Bay the trappings of modernity return at Looe, a place of many a childhood day. There is nothing overly special about Looe – it’s just your regular run-of-the-mill southern Cornish fishing port nestled into a steep valley. Peppered with fish and chips and amusements it is a resort town, though not of the same ilk as Skegness or St Tropez. Two prime assets are its leafy branch rail line linked with Liskeard and Sarah’s Pasty Shop. Both in the same day make it worth an afternoon.

scorn03Many of the emmets and grockles and – indeed – locals combine a trip to Looe with a stop in Polperro. Polperro is undoubtedly the prettier of the two, with narrow (mostly car-free) streets, cosier cottages, and a ruggedly fishy pungency. Pasties look no more than average, but the recent revival in crumbly fudge (as opposed to the bland, processed slabs packed in Huddersfield) has blessed the town with a new outlet to be commended. Cornish sea salt is the fitting and fulfilling way to go.

From here I am going to skip a huge section of the coastline and return to it in a jiffy. Mainly because I want to build this post up towards a marvellous, heady climax. So, shifting further west, if I was to pick a line between Mevagissey and Falmouth I would be marking unchartered territory. It excites me that I still have unchartered territory in this part of the world. I made a small incursion into it the day after returning from London and it confirmed that if I was ever to move back to the UK it would not be in London (but never say never right?!).

scorn04Gorran Haven is, I suppose, nothing remarkable and its town beach would disappear with a high tide. But it offers a less touristified alternative to nearby Mevagissey, possessing enough steep narrow streets and cobbled harbour walkways to keep seaside amblers happy. I think it’s the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and their business, which is no doubt discussed in lurid detail at the local RNLI supporters group meeting every third Tuesday of the month following the gathering of the Retired St Austell Druids and Mystic Circle Society. But I think I might like that. Its fish and chips and fairly remote and secret sandy beach around the headland might also make it bearable.

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But if we are looking for blissful sandy beaches in azure seas there is a gem amongst gems, a golden crown gleaming through the rubies and pearls of Southeast Cornwall. I had not set my eyes on it until a month or so ago, benign and more subdued under cloudy skies. A sunny day in early September gave me inspiration to return.

Eschewing another day of winding lanes and tractor blockages, I took the train for a change, disembarking at Par for a bus to Fowey. Fowey is kind of like Looe and Polperro, being yet another steep harbour lined with pastel cottages and granite townhouses. I like it the most out of the lot of them, maybe because it is a bit more upper class when I am not. I could live here but doubt if I could afford it. You can tell it’s on the Islington radar, with a beautiful bakery and organic butcher and delicatessen and many a cosy cafe to wait for a water taxi to take you to your yacht. I think this might help explain why I think I could live here.

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scorn09I could just as equally live in Polruan, across the river from Fowey and gateway to another luscious corner of cotton wool clouds hovering over creamy fields spilling into the sea.  No fancy bakery, no organic quinoa, just good old fashioned St Austell Ales and the sound of circular saws emanating from the boatyard. A steep, steep hill laden with bunting, or a slightly less severe meander lead to St Saviour’s headland, and expansive views south, east and west.

scorn08Back in classic South West Coast Path territory, the trail dips and rises steeply once again, the glare from a becalmed sea radiating heat like the sun through a windscreen. Turn a corner and you cross over into the Mediterranean, as the horseshoe cove of Lantic Bay welcomes the weary. Islington-on-sea may have anchored down below, but the ultimate satisfaction is to arrive on foot, rewarded for effort beyond expectation. I cannot think of a better place to eat some of my provisions from that bakery and delicatessen, marvelled by the colours from on high.

A jewel for the keeping.

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Great Britain Green Bogey Photography Walking