There’s more to Devon than cream teas, pasties, fish and donkeys on the beach. I’ve always been conscious of that, but up until now, I haven’t spent a huge amount of time there, to get a true flavour of the county. With two national parks, Dartmoor and Exmoor, and miles of glorious coast line, not having done much walking there, for a keen walker like me, is a notable omission. But over the next fortnight, I aim to put that right.
We’re walking the Two Moors way, across Devon from Ivybridge in the south to Lynmouth in the north. But to make it a complete ‘coast to coast’ walk we have added a further 16 miles along the Erme Plym trail from Wembury. The total route amounts to around 117 miles and will take us 10 days. The whole route is promoted these days as ‘Devon’s coast to coast’.
We started the route last night by visiting the beach at Wembury and walking the first couple of miles from there to the pub and back to our B and B. Today we did a further 15 miles, across a pastoral, peaceful landscape of wooded combes, field edges, holloways and riverbanks to the town of Ivybridge.
The views when they opened up were the patchwork quilt of fields and hedgerows you see in many parts of the country, particularly the south of England. Thankfully, this part of Devon seemed to have escaped the worst of the reduction in hedgerows that has happened elsewhere. On the horizon you could make out the vague shape of Dartmoor tors, where will be walking in the next few days.
Today we saw hardly anyone, apart from a lost cyclist who asked his way. At one point our path was blocked by mother cows and their calves; we diverted briefly to a lane to avoid them. Otherwise it was an uneventful, perhaps unremarkable walk, pretty but not especially memorable, and a good warm up for the tougher moorland stretches of the walk, which start tomorrow.
Across the Alps to the Adriatic 