Clovelly to Bude (SWCP day 7)

The major road next to the campsite beat the cockerel to the morning wake up call. He crowed anyway but you could tell that his heart wasn’t in it. From 5am cars and motorbikes accelerated enthusiastically, foot to the floor from the roundabout outside the campsite. The boy racers had only stopped showing off to each other how loud their exhausts were a little while earlier.

Today we will attempt to round Hartland point and as a stretch without beaches it is a stretch without anything else for the visitor. Campsites are in the wrong places for walking, there are no cafes, a few car parks for walkers and just path until Bude 26 miles or 40 something km away. We could wild camp. A marathon is 26.2 miles or 42.2km long, but predicted distances have been underestimates on this trip.

We could stop early at Hartland Quay at 10 miles. But we intend to push for Bude. Or almost Bude. As Bude is in Cornwall if successful we will be leaving Devon. My feet are not looking forward to this but I am in a hurry to leave this campsite.

I was wrong. The campsite owner stopped for a chat as we were packing away early in the morning, gave us all the knowledge a walker needs for the next section and then drove us back to the coast path at Clovelly. He described what we would come across, where we should look, what we would find. There would be a cafe at the lighthouse at the point, the hotel at Hartland Quay and a couple of tea rooms after that but would probably be closed by the time we got there. I said by that point we’d be forging on to the finish anyway. Starting the day saving your feet from more than 2km of tarmac feels amazing.

The sun was a weird colour all day, what little we saw of it. Pale orange giving tangerine sparkles off the water. Less than an hour in we dropped down to the Blackchurch Rock for coffee and food. A pair of anglers were already down there with an electric bike propped up against a ruined limestone kiln.

A long stretch to Hartland Point and its lighthouse led us towards an unexpected feature. A cylinder with a ball on top tens of metres high. A radar tower. Around this and closing on to the point we found the cafe. A small set up in the car park and we were the first people she had seen today. The weather was grey and damp, good for walking.

Hartland Quay is a tourist spot with a hotel just a little further down the coast and down we were heading, both in a “turned to the south by the point” and a “down toward the sea” kind of way. This section is a high headland with cliffs launching up more than a hundred metres out of the sea. Anywhere there is a stream the water has eroded the rock back down to sea level, giving steep descents and steep climbs. On the OS map peering at tightly folded orange contours I counted three to Hartland Quay and thirteen to Bude.

The Quay soon appeared and the path became busier. The stretch of coastline is famous for wreckers of old, when beacons lit on shore confused trade ships passing to the Bristol Channel and pulled them onto the knife ridges of rock extending out to sea. The wrecks were picked clean and added to smugglers’ and villagers incomes. Smuggling was big business in the 1800s.

Hey, do you like steps? The South West Coast Path is for you! Come and have a go on all the steps your heart could ever want! You like ups? You like downs? We have both! You can spend your whole day going up and down steep, rustic, remote, state of the art steps!

This is a fantastic and tough stretch. The views have no end,, you’re raised up to heights to see what’s ahead and dropped down to get a closer look. More level patches let you gain some distance but on the whole it is slow. There is even a large radio base with huge satellite dishes and who knows what else to keep you interested.

We both lost count of the ups and downs. At Lower Sharpnose Point (I saw the sharp nose) next to the radio base we could see the start of Sandymouth beach and Bude in the distance. With extremely tired feet, somewhat tired legs and a fading brain we motored to the finish with just a minor detour through gorse bushes. I blame the lack of signs as we got to Bude and the multiple sheep/tourist/locals paths.

It was one of those evenings when, if we weren’t out there doing this when we were doing it, we would have missed that weird sun going down. A beautiful finish that almost made me forget about the rain showers.

Exhausted we made camp, ate in the dark and managed to stand up long enough on painful feet to shower. We are now in Cornwall. Vs of honking geese flew low over us in continuous waves to the south.

40km and 1916m of ascent.