It was mothering Sunday, and as the family were concentrating on other mothers, we decided to go for a holiday down day.
A down day for us is not having anything planned, and quite possibly just sitting around catching up with ourselves. It being March, there wasn't much possibility of sitting out on the patio, but it wasn't so bad that I couldn't don my walking boots and head off for some exercise.
We'd bought a couple of the very excellent Ordnance Survey 1:250,000 scale Land Ranger maps and I was delighted to see a marked national footpath, or trail, going pretty much past our front door. I put some layers on, sweatshirt, rain jacket, neck warmer, gloves and hat, and headed off through Lower Whiddon Farm and the trail. Well, it's a good job that my boots are waterproof. It's barely stopped raining here since Christmas and it was certainly wet underfoot. This section of the trail was what's known as a Green Lane, a pathway that has historical vehicular rights. It's a public right of way, and it's technically possible to drive your car along it, only it's very narrow and pretty much just a muddy track, not least because it's used by tractors to access fields, and by horses. Obviously tractors can make a mess with their mighty tyres, but horses can be particularly destructive because their hooves cut up the track's surface and rain sits in the resultant cuts, turning everything to sloppy mud. So it was that I ended up picking my way along ankle deep mud and similarly deep puddles of water that stretched across the track. There's no escape, either, because this being Devon the track was bounded by eight-feet high hedgerows. Still, that's what I came for.
The pathway led down into a steep-sided, wooded valley with a gurgling stream in its base. I could have carried on down the track as it followed the stream, and very fetching it looked, if a tad muddy. But Opted to cross the stream and gain some height using the road on the other side. Because the path I'd just come down is, theoretically at least, a road, it had a ford across the stream. If you don't know what a ford is, you've never lived in Devon. It's a road that goes through a stream or river, not over or under it. There used to lots of them on little back roads here, but they're mostly gone now, but it was nice to see this one.
I headed north up the proper road, asphalt at least, if not much wider than the pathway I'd just come down. This is a feature of roads in Devon, they can be just wide enough to drive a tractor along, but it'll be all but touching both sides of the road, bounded as it will be by a bank, low stone wall, or hedgerow. There are the occasional passing places, but if you try these roads, the chances are you'll end up backing to a passing place, on many occasions. As a pedestrian, I had to flatten myself against the bank, and face the oncoming vehicle to make sure I was not going to get swiped by a wing mirror. The speed limit on these roads is the default 60mph, but you'll be lucky if you can do 20mph. The marker of these "Devon Motorways" is the strip of dirt, moss, and even grass, down the middle of the asphalt. I have to say that driving these roads is not fun.
The road certainly gained some height, and was in the 10% region for much of the time. Still, while the going was slow and I was puffing like an ancient steam locomotive, it was great to climb out of the wooded valley, through the incredibly green fields and the occasional farm yard. At the point where I was to head home, I could look down on our cottage and it's surrounding buildings from the other side of the valley, and very fetching it was, too.
The home leg was on a slightly wider road (no green strip down the middle and mostly wide enough for two cars to pass), and as was downhill, my legs felt like springs after the climb. Of course the rain caught me the, but I was prepared, even though all my warming clothes were proving a bit too warming with all the exercise. It was on the road back into the farm, back on the national trail, that I saw an early middle-aged couple dressed in expensive hiking Lycra, or Spandex, and I thought I must have looked quite amateurish next to them. That said, you can keep your Lycra, I just don't have the legs for it.
Back at the cottage, I clocked my walk statistics; only an hour and a tad over 4Km, but the uphill section had been way more exercise that I'm used to.
Back to the down day, and as the weather had looked like it was brightening up we decided to go for a walk along the sea wall at Teignmouth. I have history with that South Devon resort at the mouth of the River Teign as it's where I started school, way back in September 1963. My brother escorted me daily on the bus from Dawlish, and I have some quite vivid memories of the school, and the town. The best place to park for the walk was right opposite the site of the school, which had been the church hall attached to the Catholic Church of Our Lady and St. Patrick. The church is still there, the terrace where the school was is still there, but the school itself is not. Indeed, it's been left to re-wild itself, I suppose waiting for someone to build on it. To access the school, we used a little doorway in the retaining wall of the terrace, but it opened straight onto the busy road between Dawlish and Teignmouth, and while you can still see it, it's long been bricked up. As we made our way from the car towards the sea wall, I took in the view that I'd enjoyed from my school, oh so long ago.
The car park was Pay and Display, and payment was through the RingGo smartphone app that I'd installed a last week. Time was bought and paid for while sitting in the car, which was handy.
We walked towards the sea, over the railway, and down past the Coastguard station. The slope down afforded great views of Teignmouth beach, looking south west across the river mouth and over to Shaldon, and the Ness, a great red sandstone cliff that guards the entrance to the estuary and the harbour.
Teignmouth's beach has very coarse, dull, red sand that will stain absolutely anything that comes into contact with it, which is why it's not a great place for a beach holiday, albeit that the green, grassy area immediately behind the beach is full of interesting diversions like Mini-golf, and other exciting things. The town's famous Grand Pier, a Victorian cast iron structure jutting a fair way out into the sea, is a very sad shadow of its former self. When I was a kid there was a pavilion thing at the end of the pier, but fire and the intervening sixty years of English Channel storms has reduced it to a few forlorn iron posts, at least where the pavilion was. The remaining structure attached to the seafront is still functioning, as an amusement arcade of course, and it pretty much mirrors the fate of so many of those Victorian piers England's south coast.
Back to the sea wall, Brunel's Great Western Railway runs right along the edge of the sea from Teignmouth, where we stood, to Dawlish Warren, and is one the England's great railway journeys. On one side are towering red sandstone cliffs, and on the other Lyme Bay and the English Channel. The railway goes through a series of short tunnels and runs on a built up terrace just above the beach. Every year that terrace gets pounded by stormy seas, and there have been some major collapses of both the cliffs and the terrace. But, this is now the main line between London, Plymouth, and Cornwall, so vast amounts of money have been spent to rebuild and shore up the railway corridor. As we walked along the wall towards Dawlish, feet from the railway, but fifteen feet above the beach, we were crunching through a layer of red sand, lifted from the beach by the sea.
It's a great walk, with views along to Exmouth in the east and Brixham in the west. The railway, even on this Sunday, had a constant stream of trains; seven heading west and three heading east. We took photos because the grand baby will be very keen to see them. I don't know how long we walked, but we went beyond Sprey Point before the rain came rushing in and forced us to turn around. There were lots of other people about, and with their dogs, which was nice too. Beaches tend to send dogs into a delirium, and those we saw all seemed to be madly dashing about. Dogs are not allowed on the beaches in the summer, so I guess they like to make the best of their time.
As we were about to turn for the car park, we had a look in the open snack bar, and what a great selection of stiff they had, not least for the vegans. We weren't in the market for snacks, but top marks to the enterprising owners who opened up on a cold March day, and were rewarded with lots of customers who were, like us, out for a stroll.
With my morning exertions, and now the walk along the sea wall, I felt I had done some good exercise.
Just to close this episode, I had remarked to Dear Wife that I always thought of Teignmouth as a rusty looking town. As we walked past the seafront buildings I realised that the pervading colour was not rust at all, but the red of the sandstone that gives the beach its distinctive hue. Teignmouth is washed in the stuff and it's only taken me sixty-odd years to realise it.
No comments:
Post a Comment