The South West: Where the Hills Have Eyes (and the Pasties Have Crust):
There comes a point in every British summer when you look out the window, see grey skies that have been grey since approximately March, and think: "You know what? Let's drive six hours to find more of the same, but with better cream teas." That, dear reader, is how I found myself navigating the narrow lanes of the South West, a region that somehow manages to be both achingly beautiful and utterly determined to test your clutch control.
I should confess from the outset that I am not, by nature, a country person. My idea of "getting back to nature" used to be choosing the table nearest the window at a Caffè Nero. But there is something about the South West that gets under your skin, much like the midges in Dorset, though considerably more pleasant.
We began in Somerset, because every good English adventure should start somewhere that sounds like a cheese. Glastonbury was our first stop, and I must admit I approached it with the kind of scepticism I usually reserve for horoscopes and people who claim to enjoy running. The Tor rises from the landscape like a giant's pudding, and climbing it in inadequate footwear (I had optimistically packed for "Mediterranean mild") left me wheezing like a retired accordion. But the view from the top, with the flat Somerset Levels stretching out in every direction, was the sort of thing that makes you forgive England its weather. I stood there, wind-whipped and slightly emotional, and understood why people have been trudging up that hill for thousands of years. Though I suspect the ancient Celts had better boots.
From there we wound our way into Devon, a county that seems to have been designed by someone who really, really likes hedgerows. The roads are narrower than my patience after three hours in the car, and meeting a tractor coming the other way is less a traffic inconvenience and more a spiritual experience. You back up, you smile tightly, you question every life choice that brought you to this hedge-flanked standoff. But then you round a corner and find yourself looking down into a valley that is so impossibly green it almost hurts your eyes, and you remember why you came.
Dartmoor was, for me, the revelation of the trip. I had expected bleakness, and found instead a landscape that shifts and breathes. The granite tors stand like sculptures left behind by a race of giants who got bored and wandered off. We walked across the moor on a day when the mist was doing that thing where it sits low and moody, and I felt, rather embarrassingly, like I was in a Victorian novel. I kept expecting to see a hound of the Baskervilles, or at the very least a brooding gentleman with a complicated past. What I actually saw was a pony, eating something it probably should not have been eating, and looking at me with the kind of disdain usually reserved for people who put milk in first.
The coast, when we finally reached it, was everything the brochures promise and nothing like the postcards. We stayed in a little village in Cornwall where the sea was that particular shade of turquoise that makes you check your eyesight. I have always been slightly suspicious of British beaches, having spent childhood holidays in places where the pebbles outnumbered the grains of sand by a ratio of roughly a million to one. But here, walking along the South West Coast Path with the Atlantic doing its dramatic crashing thing against the cliffs, I understood the fuss. The path is not so much a walk as a negotiation with gravity, and my fitness tracker thought I was having some kind of episode, but the scenery demanded the effort.
Cornwall itself has that particular quality of being simultaneously rugged and charming, like a fisherman who writes poetry. We visited St Ives, which manages to be an artist's colony, a tourist magnet, and a working fishing port without entirely losing its soul. I ate a pasty that was roughly the size of my head, and felt no shame whatsoever. There is a certain honesty to Cornish food: it does not pretend to be anything other than what it is, which is generally pastry wrapped around something comforting, designed to be eaten while wearing a jumper and watching rain.
What struck me most, looking back, was the pace of it all. Not the driving, which was frequently terrifying, but the rhythm of the place. In London, where I live, we measure time in meetings and missed trains. In the South West, time seems to be measured in tides, in the turning of the seasons, in whether the local pub has started serving food yet. I found myself slowing down, actually looking at things rather than photographing them for later consumption. I talked to strangers without the usual metropolitan suspicion. I stood on a clifftop and did absolutely nothing for ten minutes, something I have not done since I was about seven.
Did I come back relaxed? Not exactly. I came back with mud on my shoes, a slightly sunburned nose, and a newfound appreciation for roads wide enough for two vehicles. But I also came back with the sense that I had seen something real, something that has been there long before the motorcar and will be there long after. The South West does not perform for you; it simply is. And perhaps that is the greatest luxury of all.
Would I go back? In a heartbeat. Though next time, I am bringing better boots. And possibly a narrower car.
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