A Short Walk From Home
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
-T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
For many of us, until recently, there was little need to ever justify a journey. For centuries, humans have been travelling to remote corners of the earth for no other purpose than to satisfy curiosity and procure pleasure. In a society which championed freedom and celebrated its great explorers as heroes, just six months ago, we were free to venture wherever we wished, without ever being required to explain ourselves.
Things are different now. With the onset of COVID-19, as borders were closed and lockdowns imposed, the world rapidly fragmented. Confined inside our homes, we stared at newsfeeds awash with grim statistics, increasingly aware of what was taking place all around the globe, whilst each new day in isolation brought a greater sense of remoteness. Commanded to stay indoors, with new laws passed to ensure our compliance, unnecessary travel became not only foolish, but criminal.
At the height of lockdown, just stepping outside required justification. A short walk to buy bread meant risking the possibility of being stopped and questioned, with unsatisfactory answers resulting in punishment. For many, the unrecognisable state of the world inspired a re-assessment of what was most valuable in our lives. Old freedoms that had long been taken for granted suddenly became immeasurably precious.
Even now, months after lockdown was first imposed, as some of those old freedoms are gradually being restored, travel remains a delicate business. Though discouraged by the government, unnecessary journeys are now permitted, but a dilemma still awaits us at the doorway. The threat of Coronavirus, though reduced, remains present, and leaving home to go anywhere involves a degree of risk. Lingering over our heads the moment we step outside of our homes is the question of why? Why are we doing this? What is to be gained from this journey? Why is it worth the risk?
As a travel writer, these questions are not entirely foreign to me. Last year, I returned from a long journey which involved crossing from one side of the world to the other on a motorcycle. There were many moments in the saddle, somewhere between England and New Zealand, when I questioned why I had undertaken such a task. And though I did return home with some answers, I realised that the value of other, lesser journeys might have been more difficult to describe.
Nevertheless, my voyage across the world left me convinced that all travel, however small in scope and humble in means, is valuable in some way, even if I could not articulate precisely why. But in the wake of Coronavirus, with the very idea of travel for travel's sake under threat, I realised that a more compelling response was needed. If I was going to maintain that even the most basic, modest, and ostensibly purposeless journeys can be worthwhile, I needed to be able to explain myself.
I felt that the best way to address the question would be to go on another journey, but this time, I wanted to strip travel back to its bare essentials. Besides, even though lockdown was beginning to be lifted in England, it was not yet possible to venture further afield. So, after several months of being trapped at home, I found a pair of old walking boots in my garage, sat down in front of a map of the West Country, and set about planning a walk. It took me all of ten seconds to decide upon a route.
Just a stone's throw from my house - running around the coastlines of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, and Dorset - lies the South West Coast Path, Great Britain's longest national trail. Spanning 630 miles of beaches, headlands, and cliff-tops, the trail is known amongst ramblers across the globe, and for as long as I could remember, I had wanted to walk a portion of it. Yet, in the twisted irony of our modern world, despite the fact that I had spent the previous two years travelling 20,000 miles overland to New Zealand, I had never once set foot upon the Coast Path, even though its start lies just twenty miles from my doorstep.
Two days after deciding upon the route, I found myself in Minehead at the beginning of the trail, accompanied by my best friend, a titan of a man named Sam, like me. Both out of work due to Coronavirus and fat with time, we had decided to set off along the coast and see how far we could walk. With many restrictions still in place, we knew that we would have to be entirely self-sufficient, so we each carried a 20kg pack, filled with tents, stoves, and everything else we needed to survive. Apart from gathering our kit, we had done no other planning. Our sole objective was simple: walk forward and keep the blue ledge of the ocean on our right-hand side.
Sam and I arrived in Minehead early in the morning and set off along the flat promenade, walking west in the direction of Land's End. Unused to the burden of a heavy pack, I found my spine bending under the rucksack's weight, but my legs felt eager and strong. Beside me, Sam paced his way along the seawall in a series of effortless strides, his vast 6'5" frame casting a long shadow across the rocky shoreline.
Soon, after passing Minehead's little harbour, we began to climb up a steep track, making our way across a slope of thick woodland. At times, the rubble-strewn path was almost vertical, and we found ourselves ascending rapidly, unable to talk between our heavy breaths. Though we had started early to avoid the midday heat, a tenacious sun beat its way through the canopy above us, adding to our labour. After half an hour of climbing, we eventually emerged from the treeline onto the heathered slopes of Exmoor, where we collapsed in an exhausted heap, staring down at the cool ocean three hundred metres below us.
I had read that walking the entire length of the Coast Path involves an elevation change which is equivalent to scaling Everest three times, but we had not expected the going to be so tough on the very first day. As we stood upon Exmoor, Sam and I could see that the coast beyond Minehead was furrowed with tall headlands, each higher than the next. We began to realise that we might have underestimated just how difficult the walk would be.
Pressing on, we continued west, following a path that was little more than a faint line of rocks carved into the cliff-side. Rarely did the trail run flat for more than a few precious minutes. Most of the day, it rose and fell, delivering us again and again to the feet of near-vertical ascents. With our bags so heavy, we had left Minehead with only a small amount of water, re-assuring ourselves that there would be taps or streams along the path. Greedily, we gulped down our supplies in the first few hours of the day, long before the sun had reached its full strength, but there was no more water to be found. By early afternoon, all our rations were gone, and we were both severely dehydrated, our thirst made worse by the vast shelf of tantalizing water that hung over our shoulders, mocking us with its unrelenting glare.
Six hours later, after ten miles of walking through debilitating heat, Sam and I reached the small village of Porlock and stumbled towards its pebbled beach. In desperate need of a drink, we limped over to a little cottage belonging to the National Trust with an old hosepipe protruding from its outer wall. The cold, green, metallic water that dribbled out of the rusty spout was the sweetest draught we had ever tasted.
In this country, we are all guilty of taking water for granted. It is such a throwaway element of our lives that we never give its abundance a second thought. Yet, after just six hours of walking, to Sam and me, water had become the most desirable thing in the world. Our morning's short journey had refashioned part of our lives and transformed something mundane and unexceptional into something rare and precious. To us, that rusty National Trust tap might as well have been cast in solid gold.
I believe all journeys possess this ability to recast the most familiar and overlooked elements of our lives in a new and unexpected light. When we go somewhere different and do something new, the world is presented to us in strange and novel ways, and the result is that things we once took for granted are suddenly revealed to be special, even sacred. Therein lies the true merit of travel.
For Sam and I on the Coast Path, water was just the beginning. Another aspect of our lives that we all take for granted is the sun. It ascends and falls day after day, but we pay it no attention. It is a token, sometimes present, sometimes not, easily replaced by the glow of an electric bulb. But on the Coast Path, the sun became the guiding principle of our lives. When it rose, we rose, and when it set, we retreated to our tents to sleep. For several weeks, as we passed from Somerset to Devon and then into Cornwall, I watched dawn and dusk unfurl across the sky every single day, and I came to respect the immense power that the sun yields. When it was too strong, we suffered. When it was masked by rain, we suffered. Something which for so many years had been but an inconsequential light in the sky suddenly became the single most influential force in my world and the chief dictator of my days.
But this encouragement to reconsider our surroundings, inspired by travel, goes beyond a re-assessment of our material needs and the powerful factors than govern our lives. When we travel, we pay more attention and take an interest in realms that might never have interested us before. Sam and I became aware of more than just the influence of heat and water. There was much to be cherished in the little details too.
We had been told to keep a keen eye on the wildlife as we walked, particularly the wide range of birds that nest along the path. At first, so intent on covering distance, we paid little attention to the nature around us. But after several days of walking, one morning, we spotted a triplet of peregrines strafing along the cliff-edge, each flying a metre from its brother's wing: a jagged arrow of speed, racing on the wind, searching for their breakfast. Then later that day, further down the coast, we saw a hunting kestrel poised above a field of grass, flapping its wings furiously but hovering perfectly still, as if pinned to the sky. Two species living side by side, surviving by two vastly different methods, together a testament to nature's endless ingenuity. A lesson that we might have missed entirely had we not been looking.
The further we travelled down the coast, the more the little details around us took on new significance. From the luxury of a hot dinner, to the image of a stone arch wreathed in Atlantic fog, to the subtle but unrelenting taste of salt in the air - time and again, portions of the world were delivered to us in remarkable new ways, forcing us to reconsider our perspective. But it all started with the rusty tap in Porlock.
As Sam and I sat on the pebbled beach that first day after gorging on the green water, still breathless from our march, I realised that the name Porlock was familiar to me. I knew that I had never visited the village before, but all afternoon it's two syllables chimed in my head, though I was unable to place it. By evening, I finally remembered that the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge had lived in a cottage somewhere close to the village for a short time. His poem 'Kubla Khan', an opium-inspired dream vision, was famously left unfinished because Coleridge was interrupted in his work by a 'man come on business from Porlock'.
That night, as we camped in a damp wood high above the village, I remembered something that Coleridge had written in his great critical discourse, the Biographia Literaria. Whilst considering the value of poetry, Coleridge argued that art has the power to 'rescue the most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.' Put simply, he believed that good art makes us look at familiar things in provocative new ways, and so keeps life interesting and vital. That first night on the Coast Path, still immensely grateful simply to have a canteen full of water beside me, I lay in my tent thinking that travel benefits us in precisely the same way that Coleridge felt poetry can - by peeling back the film of familiarity and forcing us to reconsider our perspective on even the most mundane elements of the world.
In the end, Sam and I only managed two hundred miles of the path. A series of heavy storms and many consecutive days of wet weather left my partner suffering from early onset trench foot, and with no hotels or campsites open to the public, we had no choice but to beat a reluctant retreat home. We left Newquay several weeks after we began, promising to one day return and finish what we started.
Though our walk had come to an end, it continued to affect me. When I arrived home, I peeled off my wrecked boots and cast them onto the garage floor. To anyone else, they might have appeared as merely physical things, as a tattered collection of old leather and string crusted with pale mud. But to me they were much more than that. Wrapped up in their dirt and decay was every step that I had taken on the Coast Path. Two hundred miles of memories lay embedded in their eroded soles. They were more than just a pair of old boots. They were talismans that had been transformed into relics of the path.
I think the reason why travel is so effective at forcing us to see the world in a new light is in part due to the fact that we travel to unfamiliar places, full of things that are strange to us, but also because we adopt a certain mindset when travelling, one that is characterised by curiosity, receptivity, and gratitude. Similar characteristics define the mindset we adopt when we watch a play, study a painting, or read a poem. We are more open to seeing, more open to questioning, and the reward for our receptivity, as Coleridge puts it, is 'that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily convalescence.'
Convalescence. Healing. These things are needed now more than ever. They are available to us through travel, through art, but also in our everyday lives, so long as we are willing to approach the world with a certain frame of mind.
The most striking thing about returning home was the silence. After weeks spent falling asleep to the ocean's vicious lullaby, the quiet of home was enormous. There was much solace to be found in its novelty.