Thursday, September 13, 2018
I was feeling much better after a day off, and the weather cooperated as we headed south. We were walking along a great bay that runs all the way from Land’s End to the Lizard–from the westernmost point in England to the southernmost.
The first half of the fourteen mile walk took us through a more pastoral landscape with long beaches and longer vistas.
And the weather at the start was glorious.
For whatever reason–perhaps because of the spotty weather, or perhaps because I was under the weather–we hadn’t had too many conversations on the path since the first day. That changed today. As we left Porthleven, we were walking along with a woman and struck up a conversation. It turned out that she was a marathoner, probably in her late 50’s, who was taking in great gulps of the path in a short time–more than 20 miles a day. She was walking alone, since her husband was no longer up to this kind of pace!
This is the approach to Loe Bar, a long beach with a berm behind it that retains a large lake, the Loe.
And here is the Loe itself.
This was the first in a number of long beaches that we crossed in the morning.
The skies became dramatic in the late morning.
The walk in the later morning was full of interest. We passed an ancient church, St. Winwaloe, that was something of a pilgrimage site along the path.
And soon after that a monument to Marconi…the first transatlantic signal was sent via cable from these shores. As we trundled along we struck up a conversation with an older gentleman who was out for a stroll from the cottage he had rented nearby. A South African, he had worked as a photographer, covering wars, politics, sports, you name it.
We had had a big breakfast and didn’t want a full lunch, so we stopped for a cream tea at the Mullion Cove Hotel. Despite the chill breeze off the water, we sat on the terrace and soaked up the view out over Mullion Cove…more or less our halfway point for the day.
Mullion Cove marks the boundary to the Lizard National Nature Preserve, a region of grasslands along the high cliff tops; the coast here is notoriously treacherous, with rocks, shoals and vicious currents. It was some of the most spectacular country we walked through on this trip.
This is the view back to the hotel across the mouth of the cove.
As we passed through the long stretches of grasslands, we started playing hopscotch with a group of four walkers, three men and a woman. Very nice folks, and interesting to chat with. We learned that night that they were English college chums who now lived all over the world but came together every summer to walk.
The grasslands border a rugged, rocky coast; the path sometimes runs right along the cliff edge.
Although there are unusually long stretches of flat walking along the Lizard peninsula, the coast is nonetheless broken with a series of dramatic coves that take the breath away in both senses of the word–steep, rocky descents are followed by steep, rocky ascents. Kylance, the most famous of the coves, resembles the Baths on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands, with its sandy beach broken by huge rock formations. If you look closely at the photo below, you will see the shadowy outline of France across the English Channel.
It was a long day–14 miles of up and down–and I was glad to catch sight of Lizard Village at the high point of the peninsula as we walked up the path from Kylance Cove. We had to leave the path to get to the village, and it was a bit of adventure as we tried to choose the right cow track. But we were soon checking in at the Top House Inn…only to find our friends from the day’s walk. We had a very good fish and chips at the inn’s restaurant, chatting with the college group at the next table.