Evening Standard
When I came round the corner, the Johanna had gone. The last time I struggled around Hartland Point in the teeth of a westerly wind, the remains of the Panama-registered coaster were still on the spray-wracked rocks below, but now, on a sublime spring day with the sea wearing an expression of complete innocence, there was no sign of the wreck. The Johanna had been dismembered and the beach picked clean by a combination of man and tide. It may look benign on a calm day but the north Devon coast is a wrecker’s paradise.
Even the cliffs look like shoulders of land who have rolled up their sleeves and plunged their arms deep into the water to rifle through the pockets of dead mariners lying below. In the Wreckers Retreat Bar of the Hartland Quay Hotel, a weatherbeaten place which would not look out of place in the Hebrides, the walls are covered with pictures of hulks on rocks.
The hotel itself is perched on a rocky shelf in a no-man’s-land between Hartland and the deep blue sea, and you can choose to get personally wrecked on a pint or two of Wreckers Ale here, but it is not such a great idea if you are, as I was, intending to complete a long walk. Especially not where the path runs along some of Britain’s most dizzying cliffs.
It may be only 200 miles from LonÂdon, but the furthest end of north Devon feels like the western tip of Ireland. It has that same liberating sense of freedom, with a giant canvas of sea and sky backed by gentle, unduÂlating countryside, where small, well-kept villages are popped comfortably into the pockets.
It has a similarly endearing eccenÂtricity with the local aristocracy still holding its summer ball at Hartland Abbey and the Hartland Times Spaniel’s pups and recalling the day when the Emperor of Ethiopia passed through in 1906. And it has a big radar beacon which sends signals up to airÂcraft incoming over the Atlantic, welcoming them to England.
Last week, the county of Devon was voted the best place to live by Country Life magazine, which particularly commended its tranquillity and the quality of its landscape. The likes of Damien Hirst, Jennifer Saunders and Rik Mayall have moved here, and the couple who created the Downe Cottages complex of luxury cottages where I was staying (complete with fully fledged spa and gym) had a previous existence in corporate law in London.
Framing this picture of rural idyll is the south-west coast path, running along a volley of headlands, diving into valleys with birdsong and the smell of wood smoke, and then climbing up again into a sharp sea breeze to find that someone has subtly rearranged the scenery. This 630 mile path, which bends round Lands End and back towards Dorset, is 2 years old this year and attracts around two million people annually Hartland is one of its most dramatic stretches.
One of the beauties of a coastal path is that it requires no navigational skill If the sea is on one side and the land on the other, then you’re heading out. If the two are reversed, you’re coming home. But because it is on the edge of the known world it has another, more spiritual, dimension. It allows you to step out of yourself for a moment and look back on life with a sense of perspective.
I am happy to report that, in the course of that day’s walking, I conÂcluded that my life was tickety-boo – but it was hard to do otherwise in such magnificent scenery with the coast-path-as-therapy scenario, and for most of the day it certainly reinvigorated me.
Towards the end, though, the spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. By the time I’d reached Welcombe on the Cornish border – a vale of sea pinks, sea campion, wild carrots, and a lone surfie packing up to go home – I was pretty much ready to do the same. I walked far enough to be sure I’d really crossed into Cornwall and then staggered back to Hartland via the narrow country lanes.
That evening it was I who was wrecked, but the damage wasn’t serious. Nothing, anyway, that an hour in the Downe sauna and a session in the Wreckers wouldn’t restore.