It takes a week to cycle from Penzance to Berwick. It took me 40 years. Because on the way, I wanted to include every town in England, in what amounted to some two years of day-rides. Most of these rides were point-to-point, but some were loops, and some looked on the map like a dropped noodle. It wasn’t a continuous line, but many separate lines, and all rides included towns I had not visited before. I used trains to get to starting points. Each ride had to be at least 20 miles, and in each new town, I had to touch a central feature, ideally the market cross or town hall. This is just one of hundreds of rides on this lifetime’s journey. A few more journey writeups can be found at my “Riding the Shires” website, from which this was taken, at Riding the Shires (along with a couple of long memoires of the Soviet bloc).
This tour is Day 2 of a soggy pedal around South Devon, in autumn 2017. I’d spent the night in a vicarage guesthouse at the village of Malborough.
I’d quite liked the idea of night in a rural vicarage. I wasn’t best pleased with this one, though. The shower didn’t work, and you had to wash yourself at a hand-basin that was little bigger than an egg-box. I was particularly narked that there was no toilet paper in the loo, which of course I discovered too late. Thankfully I had tissues in a pocket. But what kind of a guesthouse leaves its bogs without toilet paper?
Before making an early start, I had a look at the church, which, like that at St Columb Major in Cornwall, effectively had three naves rather than one and two aisles. Its simple spire was coated in something that looked at a distance like concrete, creating an ugly effect very much in tune with the weather, for it was a sullen, damp morning that promised more rain.
I swept down at eight o’clock into nearby Salcombe, another lovely-looking town lounging along the western shore of the Kingsbridge Estuary. This was the rush-hour in the rest of England, but the streets here were almost unnaturally quiet. It was full of upmarket clothes shops like Jack Wills, “outfitters to the gentry,” and vendors of boating paraphernalia. The whole place was clearly geared to the needs and tastes of people who could afford to keep a yacht; there wasn’t much in the estate agents’ lists under £300,000.
Above and below, Salcombe
The complex Kingsbridge Estuary, which stretches inland half-a-dozen miles and gathers together as many creeks and small rivers, is the dominant feature of this rather exclusive, pastoral knob of land sticking out into the Channel. It’s a little domain unto itself, protected by its remoteness from the unwashed hordes from upcountry. You can get there easily enough, of course. It just takes time. They tore up the railway line to Salcombe years ago and the nearest motorway is miles away.
From Salcombe, I took the ferry over to the east side of the estuary. You expect ferrymen to be grumpy, gnarled old salts in bobble-hats, but my pilot here was a fine-featured young man with blond locks who looked like he had walked off a Duran Duran video. It turned out he was a son of the family who run the service. We bobbed away from a waterfront of white villas with gazebos and verandas perched on the hillside. Yes, Salcombe was nice, he said, without great enthusiasm, “but it’s all holiday homes now. And a ghost town in winter.”
More or less the moment I disembarked, at East Portlemouth, where the church was advertising an “animal thanksgiving” service, the climbing began again. The view back from the top was of a fleet of small leisure craft, dotting the estuary like a mediaeval flotilla attempting a coastal raid.
It was a pleasant scene, though, and a still more welcome one awaited as I pulled away from the village: a rare plateau, with a road that actually stuck to the high ground for a few miles. It took me towards Prawle Point, the southern tip of this near-peninsula, giving what would have been sensational views out to sea and, inland, down steep little valleys had the weather not been so misty and overcast. I found the place names round here delightful. Apart from Prawle Point, this coast had a whole list to note down: Shag Rock, Pig’s Nose, Gammon Head, The Books, Outer Hope and Inner Hope, The Bull, Starehole Bay, and way up by Dartmouth, Dancing Beggars rocks.
It felt more like Cornwall than Devon here, with stone-walling and slate-roofed cottages clinging to the cliff-tops. How on earth did they manage to carry heavy loads, like coal and building materials, around this terrain before the motor age? Some of the steeper lanes looked impossible.
Drifting along the plateau lane, I pondered that “animal thanksgiving” service at East Portlemouth. I’d never heard of these things. I read now that they are basically for pets. But my mind had gone back to central Japan, where, in the old yard of a derelict livestock farm, I once found among the bits of concrete and weeds a Shinto shrine, to the “spirits of all the animals” that had been slaughtered there. I knew from my journalistic work there too that some meatpackers hold annual Shinto rites for the spirits of the animals they processed, attended by Board members in their suits. The Japanese hold services for the animals they kill and eat, and we for the animals we keep and love.
Now I turned north to Stokenham, still dodging big climbs, and now heavy rain, for the weather had broken again. But it didn’t last long. So down to the shore at Torcross, for a late, pricey and crummy full English breakfast in a terrapin shed café. After this refuelling, the road led out along Slapton Sands.
A solitary memorial column thanked surrounding villages for their help in the preparatory training for the D-Day landings that took place here. But another monument, a Sherman tank, recalled what Slapton Sands is less well remembered for: the tragedy of April 28, 1944, when the German navy got wind of the exercises here and, misidentified by Allied radar, managed to get close and shoot them up. Over 700 men died in the massacre, most on the water, more than would later fall at Utah Beach. The disaster of Exercise Tiger was kept secret, to avoid undermining morale, which is one reason why it’s so little-known today.
Here, I very briefly joined the 500 miles of purgatory known as the South West Coast Path, which took me up onto the cliffs via six flights of wooden steps, a bit of a drag when you have to carry a laden bike up too. Almost immediately after I’d recovered my breath, the road plunged back down to Blackpool, a half-hidden cove with a story of its own. According to a plaque, in 1483, a naval raid here by a Breton force was thwarted by troops and villagers who fired arrows and threw stones at them from behind a ditch they’d dug along the beach to make the foreshore marshy.
The other interesting thing about this little crescent beach, which is gravel rather than sand, is that it’s privately owned, by the rich and ancient Newman family. I don’t know if they opened it up out of the goodness of their hearts or with an eye to a commercial opportunity, but they sounded a right uptight lot. Not only were dogs banned, but the cafés wouldn’t sell plastic straws, because some of them end up stuck in the noses of sea turtles.
The local authority, South Hams, has likewise waded into the noble struggle against plastic, according to a local rag on sale further on in Stoke Fleming. I stood reading the story while watching the bumper-to-bumper traffic inching its way through the narrow little cliff-top town, much as it had done in the previous place, Strete, and many others on this itinerary. Chronic congestion and inadequate roads — try driving a double-decker bus or a muck-spreader in a hurry along the lanes here — were the issues in these parts. Yet town halls seemed more interested in waging a silly, pointless war on one of the most useful materials known to man. That’s what gets up my nose.
Blackpool. The Devon one
A few miles on was Dartmouth, which, with its marina, estuary and well-heeled boating residents, was a bit like Salcombe, but with a more dramatic waterfront, more bustling streets, and, to my ear, a greater sprinkling of Brummies. It also had a few celebrity associations. Agatha Christie had lurked in the hills overlooking the Dart, and Christopher Milne had a bookshop here.
Christopher, son of A. A. Milne, never escaped his literary alter ego and hated being seen as the living embodiment of a fictitious character. Winning a scholarship to Cambridge University, he fought in the Second World War, and eventually opened a bookshop in Dartmouth in 1951. “There he sold autographed copies of the Pooh stories, donating the money to Save the Children,” says an Independent obit by James Kusick. He refused Winnie-related royalties.
It’s not hard to see why he wasn’t happy with either his dad or his lot in life. You can imagine his boardroom pitch had he instead gone into management consultancy: “Hi. Doug here integrates manufacturing processes. Charles kicks ass in transnational tax law, and as for me, well, I’m the ‘real Christopher Robin.’” Of his father, Milne wrote, “He needed me to escape from being fifty.”
Above and below, Dartmouth
Dartmouth also had a steam railway, or rather Kingswear across the water did, which I’d planned to use to get up to Torbay and the mainline station, ending the circuit in real style. But there was a long wait for the next departure and a pretty steep fare for a seven-mile ride, so instead I just watched them fussing over the steaming engine a bit, and then took the bus to dreary Paignton.
© text & images Joe Slater 2024
