2. A Tale of Two Weather Patterns

Tarr Steps - Exmoor

After a few days in The New Forest we wended our way to mid Devon with the aim of finally finishing off walking The Two Moors Way, which runs from the English Channel, across Dartmoor and Exmoor to meet The Bristol Channel at Lynmouth.   Central Devon, which we’ve rarely visited was lovely and so was bleak Exmoor, what we could see of it and where by experience we learnt it rains every day.  Drizzly aerosol rain steadily increasing in intensity, mist and wind for the morning and clearing by lunchtime.  One such morning on a featureless, pathless and wrongly signposted section we were reduced to the use of my trusty compass to get us across the moor.  So we eventually finished the 115 miles in 11 walking days spread over nearly three years due to my various gout and knee problems.  The highlight of this session had to be Exmoor’s Tarr Steps and the walk north along the River Barle in an unexpectedly fine sunny spell for Exmoor.  The Tarr Steps is a bridge 180 feet long with seventeen spans made of boulders with flat stones laid on top to form a multi-arched bridge two or three feet above the river.  It’s wide enough for a person leading a pack horse.  They’re thought to be prehistoric but have of course been repaired many times.  The river and bank is home to Kingfishers, spotted - none: Otters, spotted - none:  Salmon, spotted - none and Dippers, spotted - none but it was a magnificent walk.  Not sure about those colons but they looked better than commas or perhaps they should have been semi-colons.

We met virtually no-one in our four days walking so there are no anecdotes to recall, except to say that a shoe shop in Tiverton has a sign outside offering a free left shoe with every right shoe purchased.   I did get engaged in conversation while washing up at one site by a woman who just wanted to ask questions.  How long are you here, isn’t it a lovely site, have you got a caravan and so on.  I was trapped by soapy water.  When she asked where we had come from I couldn’t resist and explained that we were living in our van having given way our furniture and put everything else into store.  Full-timing it’s called.  “Oh, how long have you been doing that” she said.  “A week” I replied.

Eastbourne Pier

Whipping back through Dorset to our store to change a few things and see a few people we headed towards Eastbourne to begin walking the South Downs Way which runs (or walks) about 100 miles to Winchester.  From Eastbourne coming west past Beachy Head and The Seven Sisters chalk cliffs had to be one of the finest day walks we’ve had although there is a lot of uppy-downy stuff.  The weather was totally unlike the conditions on Exmoor because here it was sunny and warm with a cool breeze and clear visibility.  According to my phone pedometer we walked just over 14 miles that day and climbed the equivalent of 83 floors.  The iphone unit of height isn’t feet or metres but floors, a somewhat imprecise measure in my view but 83 floors does sound a lot.

As we got to Beachy Head, it was cordoned off 50 feet or so back from the edge of the cliff with about six coastguard vehicles and a dozen or so coastguards.  It seemed clear someone had gone over the edge, a disturbingly common occurrence here.  Now these cliffs stand more than 500 feet above a rocky shore and if some poor devil had gone over, this was a recovery not a rescue and I suggested to Heather that it seemed over the top (a poor choice of phrase I realise) to have so many people and vehicles there.  She thought I was heartless.

The Seven Sisters

I think it’s worth saying that I wasn’t expecting Eastbourne to be worth writing home about but here I am doing just that.  It is much more attractive, especially the gardens on the front, than I expected, although to be fair it was bathed in sunshine.  The town was lively and buzzy and but for the fact that the area seems positively vindictively anti motorhome as far as parking goes, we would have had a better look at the place.  ‘The area’ includes some of the villages, particularly Alfriston where even the coach park doesn’t allow motorhomes in, not even for ready money.

We did take a very slight detour to see the Long Man of Wilmington, one of the famous English (I’m not aware of any Welsh or Scottish ones, but happy to be corrected) hill figures.  Not as endowed as the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset or as impressionistic and elegant as the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire but impressive nonetheless at about 180 feet high, he stands upright holding a staff in each hand and with no facial features.   As we were leaving a couple walked past and the husband’s opinion to his wife was “is that it ? A bloke skiing.”  Culture indeed.   I have to say though that it was a bit disappointing to find out later that Will, as he is known to his friends, isn’t even incised into the chalk but is an outline of concrete blocks regularly whitened.  However, just like the Cerne Giant nobody knows how old it really is.  Apparently some locals believe that Will is prehistoric but with absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support the argument it’s almost as valid an opinion to say that it was cut by fairies or appeared after targeted overgrazing by sheep with artistic temperaments.

So, we’ll continue walking this wonderful rolling, short springy turf, blinding white path landscape to Winchester.  People are few and far between up here away from the coast and as we pass at a closing speed of about six miles an hour there isn’t much time for more than mornin’ or aft’noon.  It isn’t just people that are few and far between, we’re up on the famously permeable chalk so there are no villages and very few farms anywhere near the ridge.  Habitations begin and tend to stay in the valleys where there is available water.

For any of you who wonder why a range of hills are called The Downs, it’s a corruption of the Old English word for hill, Dun (or something like that).  Unfortunately, my Old English is a bit rusty having not been spoken in our family for forty or fifty generations.