Thursday 12th April: Weather 10°C all day but 14°C after 4pm. Misty until 4.30pm when sun came out
Porlock to Lynmouth: 24k walk to Lyntown: 9hrs from 9am to 6pm: Total Ascent/Descent 1200metres
Accommodation: Gable Lodge Guest House at Lynton, 1k further walk and 130m above Lynmouth
Goodbye Lorna Doone
CPebbly Beach at Porlock Weir
Pretty walk through the woods
Coffee at 800yr old Culbone Church
Twin lambs at Silcombe farm
That’s Wales across Bristol Chanel
Only views are ghostly trees
Guildhall Corner - 7 miles to go
Egg and bacon baguette at Sisters Fountain
Trimmed trees improve view of mist
Mist lifting
Afternoon tea with our first glimpse of cliffs down to teh ocean
Cliff top views down to ocean
Exmoor meets the ocean
5pm with rising mist
Steep road down o Lynmouth
A glorious 12°C afternoon
Highlight of the day was at 4.30pm when the mist finally lifted and the sun came out revealing for the first time the spectacular cliffs and inlets of the South West Coast Path.
Awake at 4.30am and do some blogging, photo sorting and dehanging our clothes from the curtain rail - everything is dry and clean after washing last night. Breakfast is at 8am - meusli, toast, yoghurt, fruit and super hot coffee made on skim milk. We’re offered the choice of a variety of traditional English breakfasts, and are pleasantly surprised to find it includes the option of a baguette with fried egg and thick bacon to take away for “ron” - which we do.
After collecting our egg and bacon rolls (such a nice touch) we’re out the door at 9am and follow a boggy narrow laneway for 1k towards the beach which is a mountain of pebbles piled into a ridge, much like a dam wall. Apparently this natural sea wall kept the sea at bay until 1996 when the wall was breached and the land behind was inundated with salt water, destroying hundreds of acres of farmland. It’s a 1k walk along a track on the landward side of the stony ridge through the marsh until we reach a footbridge over the creek now passing through the breached wall. Then a further 1k on top of the pebbly ridge to Porlock Weir, a small 10 house hamlet with a few fishing boats tied up.
Turning up a path between two old buildings, it's a gentle climb on a pleasantly dry track through the woods before reaching the 800 year old church at Culbone where we find a seat that’s perfect for a morning coffee. It’s a cold 10°C, not as damp as yesterday, but still misty. Twenty minutes up the track there’s a fork, right to walk on the rugged cliff path through the woods, or left up through laneways to Silcombe Farm. The coast path looks muddy so we choose the high route.
There’s sheep paddocks all around belonging to Silcombe farm with sheep in various stages of gestation. One field is full of sheep who have recently given birth to mostly twin lambs. The laneways are solid bitumen covered with a smear of pooey mud, but at least not ankle deep. The mist thickens as we climb higher and we meet an English couple walking who have especially came for a 5 day hike to see the views across the Bristol Chanel to Wales - we haven’t seen a tree one hundred metres in front of us, let along Wales! The path across the cliff top through farmland eventually becomes a bit more of a muddy lane bewteen high hedges and we’re sidestepping to avoid as much mud as we can.
A sign points us to the County Gate (Border of Somerset and Devon) but we’re headed down hill on a “permitted” public footpath through a privately owned farm and eventually we reach the Guildhall Corner sign post which marks the junction where the coastal wood path meets the clifftop farm track. It’s 2pm when we reach the Sisters Fountain, and find a wet stony seat to eat our egg and bacon baguette from breakfast. It’s so big and the bacon is so thick, we can only eat half. Just a short stop as it’s 7 miles to Lynmouth (UK still measures in pounds and miles) - that’s just over 11k.
The path becomes a balcony walk along the top of the cliff edge and the shrubs have all been trimmed to improve the view across the Bristol Chanel - hmm. At 4pm there’s a seat, perfectly situated for the view, but the mist is still like pea soup and we can only see ghostly trees ahead. But within 10 minutes, the sun comes out for the first time since being in the UK, and the mist lifts a little revealing a spectacular coast line of steep cliffs falling to the ocean. The temperature rises to 12°C for the last 2 hrs of the walk through moorish clifftops with views 300 metres down to the ocean.
Eventually the path meets a steep road which we follow down into Lynmouth - a pretty little fishing port crammed between high cliffs, and popular with the poets Wordsworth, Sothey, Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. In 1952, the River Lyn became a raging torrent and 32 people died in Lynmouth. There’s a town memorial dedicated to this horrific event. It's easy to understand how this could happen given the narrowness of the gorge and the fact that the high cliffs on either side prevented any escape from the deadly waters.
Lyntown is perched 130metres above Lynmouth and accessed by a steep Railway Line or a zig zag track which we take and 20 minutes later at 6pm we’re at the Gable Lodge Guest House. We’re warmly greeted by Anne and David and taken to the top floor into a recently renovated room but told the power might be cut to the village within the next hour. Hurriedly we have a shower and do some washing before Ian trots off to the Cost Cutter’s supermarket and buys three bottles of beer to go with our left over nuts, cheese and the remainder of our egg and bacon sandwich.
By 9pm, the power still hasn’t gone off but we’re tucked in bed for an early night our washing strung along the oil heater almost dry.