Big Trip part 5

The next days drive was a long one down to the Cornish coast, via Exeter to pick up George so we could take her back home to Norwich with us. We left the city early after buying the obligatory postcards and set off to our first stop, the mystical city of Glastonbury. My prime motive in seeing Glastonbury was as an alleged centre of paganism and magic since before Christianity. The National Trust managed the Glastonbury Tor, a large hill with a solitary tower on top, so we decided to take advantage of our NT membership (that thing just paid for itself) and have a look. Getting to Glastonbury proved to be the difficult part, every road we turned up seemed to head in the opposite direction and all the roads heading towards it were unmarked. We decided that some sort of mystical spell had been placed over the town, making it difficult to reach whilst the traveller could always see the Tor taunting and beckoning through the mist and the hills. We finally got there though, and after parking, got into the little shuttle bus that took you through the town and up to the Tor. Once we got off the bus I think we may have questioned our desire to walk up the hill but neither of us voiced that and we headed straight up the path, stopping to ‘admire the scenery’ more frequently then required. When we reached the top the views were magnificent, heading for miles and miles over flat farming land and offering views of the spurs and hills offering natural defence and protection for the communities constructed into them. We spent a long time admiring this view, soaking in the vivid green and huddling against the cool wind that swept around this exposed position. Whilst this position up on the Tor was a natural defence position, but is also alleged to have been an important and sacred place for Pagan people of the region. We walked back down and waited for the shuttle to take us back into the town where we pottered through the book shops offering many texts on the occult and witchcraft, a good few by Neville Drury who I got to know last year through my uni course which I was a bit excited about. There was an open farmers market by the main road where I stopped to buy supplies for dinner that night and for the journey back to Norwich. Nice veges and cheese and it was at the Cheese stall that I had my very own “I li’ doogs” (translation “I like dogs”) moment, straight from Snatch where the man yelled something out after me that was in such a strong accent that I had absolutely no idea what he was saying so I ran away as fast as I could and broke into hysterics when I found Stu and told him what had happened. We left what was obviously a potent centre for religion and spirituality a little bemused that it had been overrun by ageing hippies and wealthy mystics. We drove along happily to Exeter, me excited to be picking up George and Stu possibly excited about getting as far away from the loonies as possible (he was still trapped in the car with one).

We were picking up George from the train station in Exeter and so after easily finding our way there we shoved her into the car and one of the first things she said was something along the lines of “Drive, just drive very fast”. Apparently Exeter is not too exciting. It was great seeing George again and we chattered and laughed the whole way down to Boscastle, stopping at a truly amazing example of British eccentricity in a King Arthur museum, charging ten pound entry where we effected a very hasty retreat, trying to save face before entering the bizarre world where Arthur’s castle was a playground set and the round table existed in a thicket down by the back fence. We got sneaky views of the coast which we hadn’t seen since leaving Mallaigh in Scotland. The road into Boscastle was a tight windy path, meandering down the ravine that the village was built on, a ravine that cost the village a considerable amount of trouble when flash floods tore down the valley and swept the houses into the harbour below.

Boscastle seemed to be popular at that time of the afternoon but we parked the car and walked down to the youth hostel to check in so we could wander around the village and get a much anticipated Cornish tea (very similar to its cousin the Devonshire tea). The hostel was amazing, brand new and built like a little slate cottage typical of the area, it was positioned right at the edge of the harbour and from our room we had a beautiful view of the river streaming down into the ocean, running quickly over large river rocks. Whilst the sun was still shining and the weather still warm we took the path up to the headland and walked above the harbour where the boats were stranded from the low tide, sitting on their sides in the silty mud. The walk out to the headland was beautiful, the rocks covering the edge were shelves of smooth beautiful slate and we sat here and admired the breadth of the ocean and the coastline before us that seemed to go on forever. The water was a beautiful turquoise closer to the rocks yet it was still very easy to imagine what this place would be like in bad seas and storms, easy to understand how the land and the sea could transform into different creatures at their whim. This position over the sea offered an expansive view over the large tracts of farmland, with their stone fences extending towards the coastline. We spent a long while sitting in the setting sunlight and walked up another track to a higher point where you could see the sheep tracks but also the more natural aspects in this environment of the native grasses and the brown shrubs covering much of the rocky hillsides.

That night we made a magnificent dinner in the brand new kitchen of the hostel and headed to the pub up the dark street in the cold crisp night air. We sat in the ‘snug’ of this rather large local pub and upon going down to the bar to get drinks I saw a sign advertising for extras on the BBC show Doc Martin. I made enquiries to the lady behind the bar and she said that Doc Martin was filmed just a few villages along the coast and that the filming was a lot of fun and paid very well…don’t think that I didn’t seriously consider postponing returning to uni to spend longer in this beautiful part of the world. We returned back to our hostel where I had the best sleep of my life, ever. It was so good that I kept waking up through the night and thinking to myself with genuine excitement that only comes in the wee hours of the morning “I am having the best sleep of my life” before smiling insanely and returning to sleep. I woke up in the morning to the sound of the water coursing over the river rocks, with the sunlight reflecting off the yellow walls feeling impossibly happy at being well rested and in this beautiful part of the world. I went down to reception to ask if we could stay another night but our rooms were not available, so sadly we left a place that had very very quickly attached itself to my heart, I’m aware that it sounds conceited yet the place was so physically beautiful and the very brief time I spent was with two wonderful people, so it is a place I still think about constantly.

We left Boscastle, encountering another “Adverse Camber” sign and headed towards Tintagel where the oldest post office in Britain was situated in a very odd medieval building and where King Arthur was supposed to have lived in his castle on the edge of the coast. Tintagel was just waking up by the time we got there, therefore the post office was not open yet and the locals were just taking their dogs out for walks in the cool Spring morning. The village was very quaint and we parked miles away from our destination, obedient to the signs directing us to do so. We started our search for the castle, walking up the main street of this sunny town and heading out to the edge of the village. We could see from here a hotel, built like a castle set amongst the vast green fields. We turned away and walked back into town where we found the real turn off to the castle, all the while the hotel looking back at us, poking its tongue out saying “tricked ya!” The walk down was steep but took us down to the kiosk where we had to pay the English Heritage scum money to get in. The castle was a rambling series of rooms and broken rocks, the skeleton of what would have been an amazing structure perched on the very edge of the sea. I didn’t quiet understand the relevance of the place but I assume that it was here that they believe the figure that Arthur is derived from lived and held his court. There were magnificent views of the very blue sea below us and whilst it was cool to be in the wind, the sun was warming as we walked over the hills and explored down steep stairways. We sat at the top of a hill in one spot of admired the vastness of the ocean before us, and took the opportunity to call people at home due to our good mobile reception. Good one Arthur!

While I have a natural hatred of hills, I was coerced to walk down the bottom of some very steep stairs to a small rocky beach in an inlet where birds were attacking a dead jellyfish in the water. It was lovely to be down by an ocean again and the water was so clear and so blue. It was here that due to an accident my camera went for a bit of a swim, lucky it was weather proof and all the important bits were protected by rubber seals! Luckily Stu understands cameras so I gave the camera to him to debrief from the trauma, the rocks, the freezing water, the grit. After walking back up the enormous hill we stopped in at the pasty shop right across the road and loaded ourselves up with pastries, the most enormous Cornish pasties you have ever seen with a huge golden crust and literally splitting from the filling inside them. I wasn’t allowed to start eating them until we got back to the car so I don’t remember much about the walk back as I was staring inside the bag longingly at my pasty and when we got to the car there was silence for a few minutes as we all stuffed ourselves with our huge pasties. But we had a very long drive ahead of us that day so we set off, pasties half consumed to Norwich.

The drive through the Salisbury plains was beautiful, long rolling fields of green and yellow. It was interesting to note the temperature difference between north and south of England as all the flowers that had just been opening up in Scotland had long died and been replaced down on the south coast. After driving a while we were passing Stonehenge so decided to stop in for a look. It was a bizarre experience, lining up with a huge crowd and watching the cars zoom past as I tried to concentrate on the religious significance of this place. The clouds were beginning to come over here so the sunlight was coming through in long sheets across the wide, flat land. Significantly placed rocks were situated all over this property, it was surreal to think about what land I was walking on and the importance of this site to our common cultural heritage and to individual spirituality. We decided to leave after battling the French Chav teenagers in their white tracksuits and with their bling around their necks and after getting in the car, set off for our last leg to Norwich.

The longest part of the journey was the London Orbital, a ring road surrounding London designed to distribute and divert traffic all over the country. But eventually, towards the afternoon we arrived in Norfolk, a very distinct landscape of flat farmland broken up by close clusters of trees so that one could never really look that far our of the window. It was a weird feeling to be heading back home again, knowing that this meant I got to see Meags and Joel again and show Stu more of Norwich, but also that it brought the time that Stu would be leaving closer and closer. It was easy to navigate back into Norwich to the uni, (we just followed the bus routes) and after dropping George back to her place, we got back to the flat and I felt relieved that the long drive from Cornwell was over. But I felt flat that our trip was ended and that the blessed existence I had just lived for the past two weeks, seeing beautiful parts of the world with the companionable presence of Stu, was gone for now. We headed that night to Georges place for pizza and sat in quietness as we contemplated the greasiness of our dinner and the finality of what had just occurred. It was a feeling I have come to understand as Coming-Back-From-Holiday-Itis.

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