England's Coast: Off the Beaten Track

Finding solitude on England’s coast isn’t as hard as you might think, despite the headlines that say otherwise. 

I live in Cornwall, in a small coastal town. Over the last few years we’ve experienced the deathly silence of lockdown and the clamour of the busiest holiday season on record. It’s an odd thing to feel like a stranger in your own town, especially when it’s small. Everyone knows everyone. 

Still, there’s a lot of coastline here in North Cornwall where it is still possible – just about – to find yourself alone, even on a busy bank holiday weekend. This possibility – that there are still places to go where you can get away from it all on our, apparently, overcrowded island – got me thinking. I asked myself if it was still possible to get off the beaten track.   

I started by looking at maps. Near where I live there is a beach that doesn’t quite fit onto the OS map. It sits in a corner like an island, alone and almost forgotten. Spurn Head is like that too, so I went there. What I found was like a deserted island, adrift in the Humber, save for the birds and the twitchers and the ghosts of the MOD.  

It was a good start.  

Next I found a list of the least popular OS maps. Number six was the Solway Firth and the village at the end of Hadrian’s Wall, Bowness on Solway, a gorgeous place on the edge of the world, shrouded in mist and smelling of the salt flats. Lovely. 

Maps, as always, gave me the answers I was looking for, providing me with all the clues I needed to start exploring.  

After Spurn I went to Suffolk to my luck at getting over to Orford Ness, another lost land. But tickets go quickly for the National Trust ferry from Orford like a Cold War Glastonbury so we had to be content to walk from Aldeburgh, leaving the summer crowds licking their ice creams behind us.  

I looked at ancient routes too, tracing the lines of Roman Roads through Hardy’s Wessex between Maiden Castle, Old Sarum and Winchester. The old Drove roads around Salisbury, and the whistling wind at Whinn Hill in Cranbourne Chase, gave us views over the empty plains. Silence reigned.  

Rivers offered more inspiration, taking me down the Tweed along the Scottish border to Berwick’s lovely, unhurried coastline and to the Cambrian Mountains up the Teifi from the incredible, tiny beach at Mwnt, near the Estuary at Poppit Sands, to the Teifi Pools, the most isolated place I’ve been in a while. 

Finally, I walked home, along Bude’s lost canal to its impressive working sea locks at Summerleaze Beach and for a swim at the Sea Pool. For 14 miles I tramped along the old, overgrown tow path, over fields where it had been lost to the plough and down inclined planes until the smell of the Atlantic – the smell of home – invaded my nostrils. I took off my boots and changed into my swimmers. The sea pool, twinkling in the summer sun, was glorious. As I slipped into the water among the wild swimmers, kids and families I felt as if I was the keeper of a great secret: we’re not full up. There is plenty of space. All you have to do is go looking for it.  

By Martin Dorey