Tuesday 17th April: Weather 7°C to 13°C Overcast, very windy gusting to 70kph, mizzle in the afternoon
Westward Ho! to Clovelly: 19k walk: 7hrs 30 mins from 9.30am to 5.00pm. !,000m Ascent and Descent
Accommodation: The New Inn Hotel
Westward Ho! to Clovelly
Morning shopping at Tescos Express
Windswept beach Westward Ho!
Farms to the cliff edge
No mud here
Clovelly way off in distance
I can handle this mud easy
Morning tea
This muds a bit wide
Now what
Whoops! Wobbly fence and no where to go but in the mud
Looking back to Westward Ho!
Washing the mud from shoes
Clean socks in wet shoes
Clovelly Harbour
Pretty village of Clovelly
Down, down to the New Inn Hotel
Steep down to the harbour
Highlight was definitely getting to and seeing Clovelly, this tiny little village of about 50 cottages jammed either side of one very narrow steep cobbled path running from the cliff top down to the water.
Up at 6am and the usual phone calls and emails before breakfast at 7.30am. The heater in the room wasn’t set to come on early so our clothes are still wet. At breakfast, Sally apologises for the power being turned off but its on now. Maybe the clothes will dry while we’re having breakfast. There’s enough to feed an army and after fruit, muesli, yoghurt, toast and jam, the traditional English breakfast goes into our traditional take away container for lunch/dinner.
It’s 9am when we leave Mayfield House - a truly magnificent BnB deserving of 10,butby the time we pick up some bread, cheese, butter and honey from Tescos, it’s 9.30am when we start our walk along the windswept foreshore with the surf rolling in.The path rises up between farm fences and the cliff edge, and at times, the wind gusts of around 70kph bring us to a stall, too precarious to move in case a gust took us closer to the cliff edge. We can see Clovelly through the misty rain way off in the distance, as a white patch of buildings rolling down the cliff to the water. It’s 19k around the bay.
The path is a bit of a roller coaster close to farms along muddy paths and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to side step or tippy toes around the mud. The wind is relentless, but strangely it’s not as cold as yesterday with a strong south westerly coming off a weather system to the south of the UK. At 11.30am, it’s coffee time on a cliff top seat with views across to Clovelly. We’re about one quarter of the way around this bay.
The wind is getting stronger, the mud getting deeper and the rain getting heavier. We meet one of our English walkers from yesterday, but his friend has had enough of the mud and rain and went home by bus from Westward Ho! this morning. The track is a bit like that, grin and bare it or bus out. We meet another guy walking towards us and he has had 7 days of mud coming from Land’s End.
Lunch at 1.30pm is a quick egg sandwich huddled behind some bushes with the wind and rain blowing over the top. We can see Clovelly in the distance. We’re getting closer.
My new shoes aren’t looking new anymore. Tip toeing around the mud hasn’t been successful as the mud patches are deeper, wider and longer. I struggle to straddle across. When we arrive at a particularly long stretch of mud, Ian chooses to take the right hand edge through the prickles and nettles, I choose the left hand edge to hang on to the fence. Big mistake. Within five steps, the fence gives way, and I slip ankle deep into the slimy mess with no way out. Bummer!
The next hour is a hard slog up and down muddy tracks through a woodland. My feet are getting heavier with the clay sticking to the bottom. We know the track joins a road 3k from Clovelly, which should be drier and less muddy, so when we cross a running stream close close to this junction, it’s time to wash off my shoes. The water is cold but not alpine icy cold and while I’m washing shoes and changing into dry socks, Ian makes a cup of tea.
In less than 1 minute, we timely arrive at the road junction and walk on a stony wide track all the way to the Clovelly Car Park and brace ourselves for the walk down the steep cobble stoned path into Clovelly. No cars are allowed down into Clovelly - not that they’d fit. The New Inn Hotel is one of the first places we see, and the bar man shows us to our room, a family size room big enough for 3 people, but the only room available when we booked on line. The shower is over a bath, perfect for doing our washing and stomping the mud out while showering.
Thirty minutes later our washing is strung up with a makeshift clothes line, and we walk the 3 metres over the road to the lounge/bar of the hotel for a cold lager. There’s no shop in the village, the locales tell us. We’d thought as much, but we have enough in the kitty for lunch tomorrow.