Day: 063
Date: Tuesday, 02 August 2022
Start: Stratton
Finish: Tintagel
Daily Kilometres: 37
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 1783
Weather: Overcast most of the day, periods of drizzle and very windy.
Accommodation: Hostel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Cereal, toast & jam.
Lunch: Egg & cress sandwiches
Dinner: Chilli con carne/Chicken korma, icecream.
Aches: Dave - now on the anti-inflammatories for left ankle and right calf problems, and some more nasty chafing on the hips. Julie - nothing reported.
Highlight: Endless spectacular and wild Cornish coastal scenery. Jagged cliffs descending steeply into a wild green ocean, with occasional protected tiny grey-sand coves.
Lowlight: A very strong and gusty wind made hiking quite unpleasant for much of the day. Whenever we were up high, which was often, we were buffeted to the point where it was difficult to walk in a straight line, with our packs acting like sails. It was scary on one narrow ridge where the cliff edge was only a metre or two to our right and the wind was trying so hard to blow us off the cliff that we were both visibly leaning sideways into the wind as we carefully made our way forward.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Although we were very late going to bed, we woke at 6:00am and were walking by 7:30am after making ourselves breakfast in the hotel guest kitchen. We knew we had another day of arduous terrain, though hopefully not as far as yesterday, and didn’t want to start too late. It was quite a miserable morning with a heavy grey sky and periods of light drizzle. We stopped in at the same supermarket as last night and picked up supplies for the day before following roads for 6 kilometres to Upton where we rejoined the Coast Path.
The miserable start to the day seemed even more so when we reached Widemouth Bay, a windswept and forlorn-looking beach resort. We plodded across the beachfront grey dunes, blasted by wind-blown sand and passed shuttered ice-cream kiosks and a cafe where people huddled out of the wind.
The serious climbing and descending then began as we ascended to cliff-tops and then descended to cross streams at the bottom of narrow ravines, on one occasion passing through a beautiful protected woodland, and on others to some lovely little coves and hamlets. Inevitably, our progress was slower than hoped, and we didn’t reach the pretty, but touristy, village of Boscastle until nearly 5:00pm, much later than hoped.
We still had 7 kilometres to go, with more ups and downs and, after an ice-cream, we set off hoping to reach our hostel in Tintagel before 7:00pm. This last leg was enlivened by Julie treading in an unseen hole on the edge of the trail on the descent into a ravine. With a little yelp, she disappeared off the side of the trail into the ravine, falling a couple of metres and landing on her back (and pack), like an upturned tortoise, in some vegetation on a ledge, holding grimly on to some other vegetation. One more roll and she would have dropped another couple of metres into the rocky stream. Some people on the other side of the creek witnessed the fall and one ran around to help, but Julie was OK and with some help from Dave climbed back up onto the track and we resumed our hike. Lucky!
We reached our hostel a little after 7:00pm and checked in, later getting some microwavable dinner from a nearby store and having a late meal. It had been another very tiring day, with another 2,000 metres of ascent and descent, and we were very happy to finish.
No comments:
Post a Comment