This is my sixth year walking a stretch of the South West Coast Path with my friend Jill. The South West Coast Path will be familiar to many readers through Raynor Winn’s bestselling memoir The Salt Path, which recounts her journey along the 630-mile trail with her husband, Moth.

Previous sections walked:

2021 – St Ives to Land’s End – 25 miles
2022 – Hayle to Newquay – 40 miles
2023 – Minehead to Combe Martin – 36 miles
2024 – Combe Martin to Instow – 42 miles
2025 – South Haven (Poole) to Weymouth – 34 miles

The path is graded as easy, moderate, strenuous and severe. We’ve only attempted one ‘severe’ section before – St Ives to Zennor in 2021 – and it was a brutal introduction. I had naively imagined a coastal walk would be a gentle stroll. Instead, the climbs left our lungs screaming and the descents had our knees begging for mercy.

This section promised another ‘severe’ experience between Hartland Quay and Bude, although we were kicking off with a 12-mile ‘strenuous’ walk between Westward Ho! and Clovelly.

This year, though, the challenge wasn’t simply going to be the terrain. For the first time in six years of walking the path, I wasn’t entirely sure my fitness was up to what we’d planned.

So, I had reservations. Last year I was fully recovered from a Graves’ Disease relapse and was training for a half marathon, which was going well. My VO2 max was above 30 and I was happy with my weight. A couple of weeks after walking from Poole to Weymouth, I had Radioactive Iodine treatment to ensure that my thyroid would not become overactive again. I then went on to complete the Royal Parks Half Marathon. But at the beginning of this year, I became ill with a severely underactive thyroid.

Would I be fit enough to complete a gruelling 34 miles of the coast path? I was about to find out.

On Monday afternoon we arrived in Westward Ho! – the start of our adventure.

Westward Ho!’s claim to fame is being the only town in the UK to have an exclamation mark in its name. It was named directly after Charles Kingsley’s 1855 bestselling novel, Westward Ho! What amazed me was how quickly the tide came in. In the time it took to drink a pint, we had gone from walking on a fairly large beach to watching the waves lap against the sea wall.

The next day we were off.

We quickly realised that it was a lot warmer than we had anticipated. A couple of miles in, I needed to stop to change from leggings into shorts. Fortunately, there weren’t any other hikers on the path, so it was a pretty uneventful transition.

The first section was comfortable. We probably became a little complacent. The views were glorious and the weather was perfect for hiking. But then we entered the woods. The path to Clovelly snakes through dense woodland with a number of steep ascents and descents. What was disappointing was the lack of sea views. We were deep in the woods.

We stopped to eat our lunch in Buck’s Mills before another climb into the trees.

The descent into Clovelly was a three-mile walk along The Hobby Drive, a 19th-century carriage track. It should have been a pleasant descent, but the hardness of the ground, courtesy of the slate and the dry summer, made it a little hard going. We were accompanied along the way by a number of juvenile pheasants who, fortunately, were unaware that their days were numbered, the shooting season being imminent.

Finally, we caught a glimpse across the cove of the pub where we were eating that evening, The Red Lion. However, as we approached Clovelly, we realised that our B&B was another 20 minutes away – up a steep hill. And away from The Red Lion. Fortunately, the landlady of the B&B offered to drive us there and pick us up.

We had completed Day 1 – 12 miles of a ‘strenuous’ path.

The next morning, we awoke to rain. I felt sore but was fairly optimistic, as the path that day was rated ‘moderate to strenuous’, so a little more forgiving than the day before. Usually, we would have done a little exploring the evening before setting off, but that hadn’t been possible. The thought of looking around before starting our walk was unappealing, so Clovelly remains a place to revisit.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, picking up the coastal path was not straightforward. We managed to walk all the way back down to the harbour before we realised we had missed our turn. Once we were back on track, we found ourselves in woodland again, with the usual ascents and descents. But it had been raining, it was still raining, and the path had become slippery.

It was inevitable that one of us would take a tumble. It wasn’t me, but I slipped a number of times. It was wet and windy and, frankly, not enjoyable.

Three miles in, we reached a signpost. An opportunity to discuss our options. Carry on along the coast path – seven miles – or walk to Brownsham and then on to Hartland – four and a half miles – where we were staying. We agreed that the coast path was simply too precarious to continue on it.

After making this decision, it wasn’t long before we found ourselves in a tearoom, enjoying a hot drink and a slice of homemade cake.

We then took a fairly leisurely stroll to Hartland, where we enjoyed an evening of shanty songs.

We had already decided that tackling a ‘severe’ path the following day was just not going to be sensible, so we looked at our Day 3 options.

Bude was to be our final destination, so we decided to get the bus there, drop off our backpacks and walk the Bude Canal and Coast Path instead. Five and a half miles of an ‘easy to moderate’ path. It sounded divine.

The bus took an hour to get to Bude, but unfortunately any pleasant views of the passing countryside were obscured by thick mist. Fortunately, by the time we arrived, dropped off our gear and found a coffee shop, the skies had cleared.

I bought some duck food, which I dispensed along the canal to numerous ducks and a couple of swans. It was delightful. The sun even came out. As we crossed towards the coast, we came across a more familiar coast path experience: rolling hills with beautiful views. Hardly a tree to be seen.

Five miles later, we were descending back into Bude, back onto the canal and into the pub.

Not the walk we had planned, but I’m not disappointed. If I had been back to full fitness, I’m confident that we would have completed our planned 34 miles. But sometimes resilience is having enough judgement to say, this isn’t sensible today.

Wet, windy conditions, slippery paths, accumulated fatigue from the previous day and my current level of fitness changed the risk calculation. We didn’t fail to complete the walk; we decided the walk wasn’t worth the risk. There is always next year when, hopefully, I’ll be fully recovered.

Our final mileage was 25 miles, of which 18 miles were along the South West Coast Path, bringing our tally to 195 miles.

435 miles to go.