9 June 2025

Distance on Coast Path: 15.7km; ascent: 362m

Total distance: 16.7km; ascent: 412m

Walking time: 4h 18′

Total time: 5h 21′

Overnight: Self-catering, Helston

Logistics: To start: 34 bus Helston – Poldhu Cove. Finish: 34 bus Lizard – Helston

An unassuming moss-covered granite column on Poldhu Point to the south of Poldhu Cove is all that remains to mark the site of Guglielmo Marconi’s radio station from where he successfully transmitted the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901. The Path carefully avoids the grounds of a large white building, originally a hotel and now a care home. A little further is a more modern wooden hut which is the home of the Marconi Centre, owned by the National Trust and open during the summer months on Wednesday and Sunday afternoons. It’s run by volunteers from the local amateur radio club. Passing by on a Monday morning it was deserted and the gates were locked.

From Poldhu it’s only a short walk to Mullion Cove. Mullion itself is a small town about 2km inland to the north-east; given the size of the town I was surprised the Cove was just a pair of stone and concrete jetties forming a small harbour with no boats.

Mullion Cove

From Mullion Cove onwards the Path is easy going, passing through the separate sections of The Lizard National Nature Reserve. Much of the route is level and open through a landscape on the borderline between heath and moorland. Placid cattle and a small herd of ponies were no hazard, to the relief of two young women walkers I had seen ahead of me for several miles but who had slowed so I could catch up as they were understandably nervous about the first herd of cows (actually young bulls!). The cattle hardly bothered to look as we passed by.

The SWCP guidebook rates Kynance Cove as the highlight of the section (if you don’t count Lizard Point, I suppose). It has a car park and a café, and reaching it around lunchtime on a sunny day it was busy! But the cove with its jumbled rocky outcrops with little beaches between them is certainly very attractive. I found a spot for my own lunch on the hillside on the far side

Kynance Cove

As a sidenote I should mention a slight navigational misjudgement. Approaching the cove the Path goes across a wide flat open field with no obvious defined route. Leaving it slightly too long to turn down the descent to the cove I found myself at the top of a very steep, very narrow stony gully no more than a metre wide. There was definitely a path continuing at the bottom so I gingerly negotiated it, then followed the stony path below which shortly led me out onto the easy open green slope I should have been coming down the whole way.

It’s only about 3km from Kynance Cove to Lizard Point. Both have car parks and the path between is easy so not surprisingly there was a fair number of people going in both directions. Old Lizard Point looks to be further south than the approved Lizard Point a short distance away, but looking at the map the rocks below the official southernmost point of the English mainland do extend further. There is a small gift shop, two cafés, a National Trust shack and toilets. The self-proclaimed “Most Southerly Café” was closed but the other was busy. Unlike Land’s End there’s no iconic photo spot other than to stand on the cliff edge.

Looking back (west) from Lizard Point (Spain off to the left)

Rather than walking straight up the road into Lizard for my bus I carried on below the lighthouse and round to the next bay – Housel Bay – where a footpath leaves the Coast Path just before the Housel Bay Hotel to follow a track which joins the road just short of the village. With just ten minutes before my bus was due the day’s timing had worked out well.

The story is set in Iceland but could have been set anywhere – only the names of the characters and places show the connection. The book feels like it was written to be adapted for a TV series. It gets better as it goes along. As the writer’s first novel I rate it

☆         rubbish
☆☆       poor
★★★     OK, more or less
☆☆☆☆   pretty good
☆☆☆☆☆ excellent

13 May 2024

Distance on Coast Path: 5.7km; ascent: 77m

Total distance: 6km; ascent: 77m

Walking time: 1h 25′

Total time: 1h 42′

Overnight: The Nook, St Ives

The domineering entrance to Tate St Ives

As forecast, the weather was awful when I woke up – dark grey sky, heavy rain and a strong gusty wind thrashing the trees about. I lingered over coffee and a couple of breakfast cereal bars I’d bought yesterday, then washed some clothes and hung them on my expanding travel washing line. By about 11 o’clock the rain and wind had eased enough for me to head for the town and the Tate Gallery, which occupied me for an hour or so before I left to find some lunch. I would have spent longer but several galleries were closed while the Gallery prepared for a new exhibition opening in a few weeks’ time.

A hot dog later I walked up to the bus turn-around, got a bus back to Lelant and rejoined the Coast Path which at first followed a gravel side road and then became a footpath alongside the railway and golf course. I was surprised to find a Camino St Jacques sign pointing westwards towards St Ives, which had me wondering how the trail got from the tip of Cornwall to somewhere on mainland Europe.

Camino Inglés waymark pointing towards St Ives and Land’s End

Soon the Path enters the new development of the Carbis Bay Estate, a hotel and holiday resort. ‘Exclusive’ doesn’t do it justice – the place reeks of wealth and privilege. I found myself once again suspicious of where the money behind both the development and its clients comes from, and enjoyed the experience of tramping through the manicured grounds in booted feet and muddy trousers. How long, I wondered, before the public footpath is diverted.

By the time I got back to St Ives it was dry and sunny, but still with quite a chilly breeze. I wandered round some of the picturesque narrow streets away from the shops and ended up at the harbourside for a glass of wine outside in the late sun, although the cool wind meant I didn’t linger. I had an early meal – fish & chips, for the first time this trip – in the Beach Restaurant overlooking the harbour, then walked back past the Tate, watched the surfers for a while, and finally plodded back up the hill for an early night.

A back lane in St Ives

St Ives harbour

5 May 2024

Distance on Coast Path: 14.0km; ascent: 538m

Total distance: 15.0km; ascent: 612m

Walking time: 4h 19′

Total time: 6h 51′

Overnight: Trewetha Cottage B&B

Old slate quarry and residual rock stack

My 9.15 taxi from Boscastle dropped me off at the top of the road leading down to the castle and the coast in Tintagel. If Bude to Crackington Haven had been a day of Big Mud, leaving Tintagel definitely brought me into the world of Big Slate. Although there is little left of any buildings the scars on the cliffs are obvious. In places the whole cliff has been cut away; elsewhere, peering down into tiny coves I could see man-made caves and holes. Rock which wasn’t slatey enough had been left unquarried, sometimes in great spoil heaps sliding down to the sea.

Heavy cloud warning of rain – Port William [sic], aka Trebarwith, with Gull Rock.

There was rain forecast for an hour or two around mid-day and the heavy cloud building up confirmed it was on its way so I put on my waterproofs as the first drops blew in on the wind. The official SWCP guidebook rates this leg as ‘Severe’, citing six “sometimes precipitously steep” valleys cutting into the route and overall being “remote, lonely and often tough”.

I managed to get into a mindset of steady progress, taking the descents into the valleys carefully and the climbs up the far side slowly, mentally ticking off the down-and-ups until I lost count at number 4 or 5. The rain arrived, heavy for twenty minutes then lighter until clearing away as forecast after about 90 minutes.

Throughout my planning for this trip I’d had problems finding affordable accommodation along the route for a solo traveller. In some places a two-night stay combined with bus journeys was feasible. At other times I had to book somewhere a little way inland, and Port Isaac was one of those; my B&B was a kilometre out of the centre up a hill. But I was making good progress and it looked as if I would get to Port Isaac with time to spare.

The footpath to Trewetha Cottage left the Path at Port Gaverne, a village which precedes but merges with Port Isaac. I was promising myself a drink and a rest there before heading out but there were no facilities or cafés and the Port Gaverne Hotel was out-of-season silent. It was a dreary place.

In contrast I couldn’t have had a warmer welcome at the cottage from the hosts Di and John. No problem about early arrival, cup of tea offered and accepted, pleasant room. Even more, John said he would drive me into Port Isaac so I could have a meal, and pick me up afterwards.

I didn’t know that Port Isaac was the location for the Doc Martin TV series – I’d never watched it – nor that it is the home of the sea shanty-singing Fisherman’s Friends. I hadn’t expected it to be squeezed in to such a tight valley, with narrow higgledy-piggeldy streets in the centre by the harbour. At six o’clock on a fine Bank Holiday Sunday everywhere was busy. John had suggested The Golden Lion down by the harbour as a good local pub which did food, so I went there in search of a beer and possibly some food. It was packed both inside and outside on the small terrace overlooking the harbour. Most people seemed to be local as they all appeared to know each other. I stayed long enough to have a beer but I wasn’t comfortable so I moved on.

Port Isaac harbour

I spent ten minutes wandering the central streets near the harbour and decided I liked the look (and the menu) of a seafood restaurant just behind the Golden Lion called The Mote. There were a few tables outside, all occupied, but I could see there were empty tables inside so I went in and got a table on the understanding I would finish by 8.15, which I happily agreed to. The meal was good – a starter followed by an excellent dish of crab linguine with a glass of white wine.

With time to spare before John was due to pick me up I had a second glass of wine in The Slipway, which was less crowded than the Golden Lion had been. John was on time , so I was back at Trewetha Cottage by 8.30.

Date: 2015

The Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford is on Walton Street in Jericho. I took these photos on an open day visit on 30 January 2016.

Blavatnik building exterior

Informal seating area, Blavatnik building

Swooping curves, Blavatnik building

Staircase, Blavatnik building

Natural and artificial light, Blavatnik building

Intriguing curves in the Blavatnik building

Informal meeting space, Blavatnik building

Spiral staircase, Blavatnik building

Blavatnik building, Oxford - interior

Welcome to my website. It’s mostly book reviews and accounts of my walking, hillwalking and mountaineering trips over the years, plus a mixed bag of other articles. If you want to get in touch please email me – I’m always pleased to hear from anyone who’s read anything here!

So I tried doing the same. Walking in the lowland English countryside, trainers are certainly much lighter and less tiring than boots. But …. after seven or eight hours of soaking wet shoes and socks my feet were not pretty. And the blisters were large and rather painful.

“How do you manage?” I asked. Some swore by shoes with a Goretex layer. I’ve tried this, but my feet get too hot unless the temerature is below about 10 degrees. Some just walk with wet feet and have got used to it. And someone mentioned waterproof socks.

The idea of waterproof socks has been around a long time, but I only started hearing positive comments about them about a couple of years ago. A particular brand was mentioned – Sealskinz. I looked them up. They seemed to get good reports from walkers and cyclists, and they come in various lengths and thicknesses. I bought a pair of mid-weight, mid-length ones and tried them out for the first time a few days ago wearing trainers on a fifteen mile walk in the Chiltern Hills, complete with mud, puddles, wet grass and (near the end) rain.

Mid-weight mid-length Sealskinz sock

The good news is that while my shoes were soaking and muddy for the whole of the day, my feet were still dry at the end of the walk. Nor had they been too hot, although the temperature had been about 14 degrees most of the day. And no blisters! So full marks to Sealskinz for doing the job.

What of the socks themselves? The first thing that struck me when I took the packaging off is that they don’t feel like normal woollen socks. They have three layers: the inner is a blend of Merino wool (soft, comfortable, non-smelly), acrylic and polyester plus some Elastodiene and Elastane, all knitted into loop pile padding at the heel and toe. Then there’s the breathable waterproof layer (no, it’s not Goretex). The outer layer is nylon with a little Elastane. The Elastane makes the socks stretchy – they stretch more across the sock that along it. The middle layer makes them slightly stiff, more like lightweight neoprene. They don’t quite stand up by themselves, but you feel they nearly do. They don’t hug your feet like wollen socks, it’s more like they contain them. But they were comfortable to wear for 15 miles, and most of the time I forgot I was testing something new.

Inner layer – loop padding on heel and toe

The washing label says you can machine wash them at 40 degrees, but I hand-washed mine instead. Because of the membrane I squeezed them rather than wringing them and hung them indoors to drip dry. This took a lo-o-o-ng time! They might dry quicker after a machine wash and spin.

It remains to be seen how robust they are and how long they will last. Once the waterproof membrane goes there won’t be any point in wearing them just as socks. Until then they will be my winter wet walking socks. I’ll report back on how they last. I’ll also consider buying a lighter weight pair to use on the bike.

I recently retrieved from the back of a drawer a small notebook with a blue cover. I knew it was there – I’ve had it since 1963 – but I’ve only rarely taken it out to look at it, maybe once every five years. But a few weeks ago I thought I really ought to make a copy of it, a back-up in case of accidents. The obvious choice was to make a digital copy which could easily be duplicated, so I scanned the pages and re-typed the text.

The notebook is the diary I kept during a five-week cycle tour in Sweden and Norway which I did in the summer of 1963 when I was 18. Looking back and re-reading what I wrote I get no impression of the young man I was then. Although I can sense a time-line, some kind of continuity between the person I am and the life I lead now and how things were then, the line is tenuous in many places. The 18-year-old is the both the same person and very different. The account is almost entirely factual, matter-of-fact in tone. I must have deliberately chosen not to write anything personal, though why I don’t know. Instead I seem to have been obsessed with food, the condition of the road surfaces, and the nationality of fellow youth hostellers because I recorded these all the time. So while I’m still able to remember something about this journey I wanted to fill in some of the background which is missing from the bare account I wrote back then, nearly 50 years ago.

Another documentary source is the map I took with me. It’s a complicated folding map covering the whole of Scandinavia in four sheets bound together. My bike ride fits on one of the sheets, which is at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (1cm = 10km) and on which I drew the route I (we) took. Thanks to Google Maps I’ve been able to digitise the route. I still have my old youth hostel card (do they still have them?) on which I collected stamps from the hostels where we stayed.

And then there are the photos I took using a folding bellows camera my father had lent me. I can’t remember the make, but it was Eastern European – possibly Leica. It used 120 film, and for reasons I can no longer remember I decided to take colour transparencies rather than prints. Too big for a standard slide viewer, these pictures have lain in a drawer ever since until early this year (2012) I had them scanned and digitised by SLX Photographic. They’ve survived remarkably well (with the help of a little restoration) and I’ve put them into a slideshow.

In the summer of 1963 I was still at school, due to go back for a final term to sit for an Oxford scholarship and a place at the university starting in 1964. My companion was a school friend, Jan L. I don’t know whether Jan had done much cycling before, though I don’t think he was a novice. I already had several cycling holidays under my belt and the previous summer I had ridden solo through the Benelux countries for three weeks, a feat celebrated by the national letters GB, B, L, NL, D carefully stencilled in big red Letraset letters on my white rear mudguard. My bike was a lightweight Viking “Severn Valley” which I had paid for myself and of which I was very proud. Bikes then mostly had only 5-speed blocks at the back and triple chainwheels were virtually unkown, so my “double-clanger” at the front gave me 10 gears. My wheels were, I think, steel rather than alloy (no bad thing for the roads we were to meet) and had narrow-ish tyres – an inch and a quarter to my best recollection.

I don’t know why we chose Sweden for our holiday, but it had been agreed for long enough for me to learn the basics of the language and a small vocabulary from “Teach Yourself Swedish” earlier in the year. Ironically Jan had a Swedish passport as his father was the Swedish Consul in the London Docks, but he had never been to Sweden and didn’t speak any Swedish. This meant plenty of confusion when we checked-in to youth hostels or cashed travellers’ cheques. Maybe our choice had something to do with me being able to get a free passage on a boat. My father had contacts in the shipping industry at the time and was able to get the two of us a berth on a small cargo boat from Newcastle to Nyköping on the Baltic coast of Sweden south of Stockholm. We hadn’t made any definite plans but had a rough idea that we would cycle up the Baltic coast as far as we could, maybe to the Finnish border, and then see where we felt like going from there.

Our plans changed after a few days as we experienced the cost of living in Sweden. The numbers don’t mean much fifty years later and I can’t recall how much money we took with us, though for some reason the figure of £60 each sticks in my mind. Anyway, we found that just buying food and paying the cost of youth hostels would use up our cash in only a few weeks. We’d heard that food and accommodation in Norway would cost about the same number of kronor as we were paying in Sweden, but in Norway a pound would get us 20 kronor instead of only 14½ in Sweden. [I checked these exchange rates in the Financial Times for August 1963. It shows how memory falters: I couldn’t really remember the numbers but had a vague idea it was 10 and 6 kronor respectively. The point about relative costs still stands though.] So that’s why after a few days we left the Baltic coast and headed inland to cross into Norway, and probably why we became obsessed with road surfaces.

Click to view in Google Maps

Thanks to Google Earth I can see that our route took us through some areas which even now are seriously remote, on roads which are still only thin lines on the map. I would probably be more worried now than we were then, sheltered by our ignorance of what could go wrong. There were several days when we were riding through isolated, unpopulated, near-wilderness country with few resources or services.

Let me explain about the road surfaces. Once we started heading inland we were surprised to find that tarmac roads were rare. Instead we found ourselves cycling on what we were told were “oil-gravel” surfaces. These seemed to be something like a mixture of sand and gravel sprayed with a heavy oil. As the surface became more compacted, slippery and eroded, maintenance vehicles which we christened ‘juggernauts’ were sent out to harrow and level the surface. While suiting cars and lorries, these roads were hell for bicycles with narrow high-pressure tyres. They were easiest when well-compacted, though this also meant they were full of ruts. When the juggernauts had been along it was like trying to cycle on the beach. In wet weather – and we had a lot – spray from our wheels carried a slurry of fine sand into all the moving parts of our chains and gears, where it acted as a high-quality abrasive. Once the water drained away it could, and did, leave moving parts locked solid.

[I now read that in the early 1960s Norwegian engineers were developing just this kind of surfacing, which became known as “Otta Seal”. See Wikipedia for an American overview, or this full guide from the Norwegian Road Service.]

All that hard work meant we must have been rather fit. I don’t think either of us trained before the trip although I used to cycle regularly. By the time we were ten days in we were able to take a 136 mile day (to Dalholen, 17 August) in our stride. We hadn’t planned to ride that far, but you’ll have to read the log-book for that story! I only record being ill once: an upset stomach at Åndalsnes which it seems made me “bloody fed up”. Even so I managed to climb 850 metres (2800 feet) up the Trollstigen on a virtually empty stomach the next day.

One curiosity was the border crossing on 16 August. In 1963 traffic in Sweden still drove on the left, while in Norway they followed most of Europe and drove on the right. We crossed the border in a remote area on an unmade road. Two concrete traffic islands, a cairn and a “cross over” sign were the only border markers, and the tyre tracks in the gravel formed a neat “X” between the traffic islands. It was another four years before Sweden switched on H-day (H for Högerkörning) from driving on the left to driving on the right.

Having cash to pay our way was something we had to plan for. There were no credit cards or ATMs in 1963 and like most of my acquaintances I didn’t have a bank account. The only way to take money abroad was in cash or travellers’ cheques. Shops and hostels didn’t accept the cheques so they had to be cashed at a bank: there weren’t many banks on our journey and those that there were kept short opening hours. Between us we managed to stay solvent, despite Jan losing his wallet.

One last memory – the kit. Neither of us took much: I only had a single saddlebag. It was made of strong black canvas, not waterproof, and it had to carry everything for five weeks, plus any food we bought en route. I guess in modern terms it might have been about 20-25 litres capacity. I’m embarrassed to think how smelly we must have been for much of the time!

Click to open notebook (18.5Mb)

So there it is. I’m glad I’ve put this page together and preserved my diary but I don’t expect or encourage anyone to read it. To be honest, it’s boring: it doesn’t tell you much about anything. If you do decide to look at it though, there are a few notes below on some of the more cryptic or obscure references in the text. Alternatively you can look at our route on Google Maps, where the info-box for each day’s route has a link to the individual page or pages just for that day, and smaller copies of any photos taken on the day.

Explanatory notes:

bomp-bag

a light bag slung over a cyclist’s shoulder (a musette).

double-clanger

double chainwheel

fast-disappearing Lapp

A joke. We saw people in Lappish costume but as Jan said, such sights were fast disappearing.

flicks

The pictures/cinema/movies.

fly-over

aircraft which passed overhead. I was almost out of my teenage phase of being a plane-spotter but it seems I couldn’t resist noting down any registrations I saw.

juggernaut

Large road maintenance vehicles used to rake and level unsurfaced roads. Not popular with cyclists.

noshup

An unspecified rough-and-ready meal, probably some kind of stew.

ph

Photo. (I kept a record of where I had taken them.)

pølser

frankfurter-type sausage.

We left from the car park by the Visitor Centre and followed the path by the river until it turned uphill to join the path on the east side of the glen about 200 metres from the Ben Nevis pub. We stopped while I explained that our walk would finish at the pub where the coach would pick us up at 5 o’clock, hopefully after we’d had time for a celebratory drink.

The climb was unremarkable apart from one of those bizarre Ben Nevis events when, not far into our day, we heard a commotion behind us as we were overhauled by a group of firefighters. They were wearing full protective gear and some had breathing apparatus as well. They trotted past us, the breathing apparatus amplifying the puffing and gasping. It turned out they were from Ealing (or somewhere like that) and on a training exercise. Hours later, still on our way up, they passed us on their way down.

And so the day progressed. Half way up the zigzags we were almost in the mist so we stopped for lunch, then pushed on to the summit. Everyone was fine: some a bit tired, some a bit aching, but all in good spirits. We stayed about half an hour while the mist came and went, giving us views now in one direction, now another. Then it was time to go.

As we started down the main descent onto the zigzags it became obvious that I’d got two groups, not one. There were six greyhounds who were eager to get down as quickly as they could, and two whom I privately dubbed the ‘halt and lame’ – a 30-something man with a knee which became very sore as soon as the downhill started, and a man about 60 who despite his two walking poles lacked confidence on the stony path and needed to move slowly and carefully. It soon became clear I wasn’t easily going to be able to keep these two groups together.

But the weather was fine, we were out of the mist, the path could hardly be clearer. I gave the greyhounds permission to go ahead at their own pace as far as the path junction above the lochan we’d passed on the way up, where they should wait for me and the others. The four of us – me, the two halt and lame, and a young woman who was happy to keep us company – made our steady way down.

So far so good. We arrived at the path junction, the others hadn’t waited too long, everyone was OK. No reason not to do the same again for the last part of the walk. I reminded the greyhounds we’d seen the pub on the way up – all they had to do was follow the tourist path until they saw the pub and go straight to it. Anyone with any problems should just wait on the path for me and the other three to reach them. Off they went.

As the four of us eventually came in sight of the pub I guessed we were 10 to 15 minutes behind the others, an estimate confirmed by the nearly empty glasses on the table in front of them. But instead of the cheery “What are you having?” I felt I deserved I was greeted with a chorus of “Where’s Dan?”. “With you”, I said, suspecting a wind-up. “No, he was behind us. We thought you’d pick him up.”

I’d never lost a guest before. I quickly established that Dan had been fine, but had found the greyhound pace a bit fast so had lagged behind. I reckoned he couldn’t have had a mishap: there were plenty of people around, there would have been a bit of a commotion, he’d be by the side of the path. So where was he? How could he just vanish? I could only think of one explanation. About a mile back up the track a path goes off to the side, leading to the Youth Hostel down in the glen. You hardly notice it on the way up, but coming down you see the junction and the path below is in clear view. There’s even a sign to the hostel. Dan must surely have gone down there by mistake. So how to find him? What would he do once he realised he’d lost us? He’d either stay put, walk back up the hill (less likely), or walk down the glen road to our morning car park.

Weighing up the options I headed for the Visitor Centre car park and asked after a smallish American man in his sixties wearing a bright coloured t-shirt. He hadn’t been seen there, so I started up the road hoping to see him coming towards me. They hadn’t seen him either at the Café Beag a mile up the road. Slightly anxious now I carried on towards the youth hostel when, round a bend, there he was. We were both relieved, each for our own reasons.

A mobile phone call broke the news to the rest of the group still at the pub and arranged for us to be picked up in Fort William. A second call told the HF house all was well. An offer of a lift into the town from a waitress at the Café Beag going off duty was accepted with gratitude, and within 15 minutes from meeting we were sitting on a bench in Fort William waiting for the coach.

Dan’s story was as I’d guessed. He was walking on his own and just followed his feet downhill. He never saw the path junction, and was down at the road before he realised he’d gone wrong. He was still debating what to do when I came round the corner. “I’m so glad I found you in time”, I said. “The paperwork I’d have to fill in if I’d lost you is unbelievable.” “If anyone asks”, he said, “let’s just say I was ‘temporarily mislaid'”.