by Gary Hayden
At each stage, you say to yourself that this can’t possibly last, that sooner or later all of this grandeur and beauty must give way to something less inspiring. But it doesn’t. Each twist and turn of the trail brings fresh delights.
The gods were smiling upon us as we started out from Newquay. We had always expected that by this stage of our journey we would be battling with autumn winds and wet and cold. But instead we found ourselves bathed in the warm sunshine of an Indian summer.
The thirteen-mile stretch of coastal path from Newquay to the seaside town of Perranporth is categorized as challenging. But we were now so fit and lean, and so used to carrying our backpacks, that it felt like a mere stroll in the park.
About two miles from Perranporth, the SWCP winds its way across Penhale Sands, an area of grass-, moss-, and lichen-covered dunes to the rear of Perran Beach. The route is waymarked, but the waymarks are so often hidden by the dunes that they’re difficult to follow. So we abandoned the ‘path’ and walked along the beach instead.
Perran Beach is wide and sandy and spectacular. It overlooks Perran Bay and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and is backed by Penhale Sands to the west. At its southern end, close to Perranporth, the dunes give way to cliffs, arches, and stacks.
As I walked along, enjoying the autumn sunshine and the gentle breeze blowing in from the sea, my thoughts wandered back twenty years to one of the best days of my life. Wendy and I were travelling around Australia at the time, and were camping by the sea, a few miles from St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne.
We had nothing planned for the day. So Wendy decided to hang around the campsite and catch up on some personal chores while I opted to take a walk along the beach.
I was in no hurry. I had nothing to do, and all day to do it. So, rather than taking a slow, lazy saunter along the sand, I decided to take an even slower, lazier paddle in the sea. I splashed, ankle-deep in the balmy waters of Port Phillip Bay all the way to St Kilda. Then I turned around and splashed my way home again.
My memories of that day are hazy. I recall sunshine, blue sky, warm water, and lapping waves, but nothing more specific. I can’t recall what I thought about as I walked, either. All I know is that my thoughts wandered freely and pleasantly.
It has often struck me as curious that a day like that, with no excitement or stimulation, and with nothing achieved and nothing gained, should stand out in my memory as among the happiest I have known. What was it, I have often wondered, that made it so special?
In the ‘Fifth Walk’ of Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau asks himself the same question as he looks back upon the happiest period of his own life: two idle months he spent on the Island of Saint-Pierre, on Lake Bienne, in Switzerland.
He passed his time there indulging his interest in botany, watching the labourers working at the harvest, and – sweetest of all – taking a small boat out onto the lake.
Of this last activity – or rather, non-activity – he says:
[T]here, stretching out full-length in the boat and turning my eyes skyward, I let myself float and drift wherever the water took me, often for several hours on end, plunged in a host of vague yet delightful reveries, which though they had no distinct or permanent subject, were still in my eyes infinitely to be preferred to all that I had found most sweet in the so-called pleasures of life.
At evening time, Rousseau would often return to the lake shore and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot.
[T]here the noise of the waves and the movement of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie . . . and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought.
Here, in describing the blissful hours he spent at Lake Bienne, Rousseau identifies precisely what it was that had made the hours I spent on that Australian beach so blissfully and unforgettably sweet. Namely, the experience – which most of us seldom get to enjoy – of simply being.
In our everyday lives, our thoughts, affections, and desires are continually being dragged away from the here and now to some other place, some other time, or some other possible state of affairs. We are forever plotting, analysing, regretting, longing, grasping, or clinging. Seldom just living.
But that day, on that Australian beach, those thoughts were quieted. I was ten thousand miles away from the cares and concerns of my everyday life. The past and the future were sufficiently remote to have lost their accustomed influence upon me. And so the present moment – the lapping of the waves, the warmth of the sun and the blue of the sky – was everything.
At St Kilda, I enjoyed this blissful state for just a few hours. But on Lake Bienne, Rousseau experienced it, day after day, for weeks. And the longer it continued, the more captivating it became, until eventually he came to regard it as ‘the height of happiness’.
As we walked along Perran Beach, that autumn day, with our End to End adventure fast drawing to a close, a thought struck me with such sudden force that I had to stop for a moment to let it sink in. JoGLE was my Saint-Pierre!
All of those slow miles through towns, villages, farmland, and forests, all of those slow miles over moors, mountains, and hills, all of those slow miles across beaches, ploughed fields, and pastures, all of those slow miles beside lakes, rivers, and streams, all of those slow miles had brought me, little by little, to a very special state of mind.
It was the same state of mind that Rousseau experienced at St Pierre, and which he describes so lyrically and so beautifully as:
a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts[.]
Wendy and I arrived at Perranporth at around four o’clock. It’s a resort town, and popular with surfers, but, unlike its bigger, brasher neighbour, Newquay, it’s neat, tidy, and unspoiled.
We treated ourselves to ice-creams and sat on a rock on the beach to eat them. It was a perfect afternoon. We were surrounded on every side by the freshest, cleanest shades of blue, green, and turquoise. The wide expanse of sea, the even wider expanse of sky, and the grassy headlands complemented one another so perfectly, and evoked such a sense of peace, freedom, and contentment, that they might have been put together for that very purpose by some Cosmic Designer.
Perranporth YHA is situated south of the town, perched upon a grassy cliff-top overlooking Perran Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. It’s compact, basic, and perhaps even a little shabby, but it’s also comfortable and welcoming.
We spent a deliciously long evening there, sitting in cosy chairs by the window, looking back upon the long and happy journey that had brought us to Perranporth from John o’Groats, and looking ahead to the short journey that would bring us, all too quickly, to Land’s End.
Our thirteen-mile hike from Perranporth to the YHA at Portreath began in dramatic fashion with a winding cliff-top walk, through gorse and heather, and past chimneys, disused mineshafts, and other relics of the Cornish tin-mining industry. After that, the path continued to twist and turn along the contour of the cliff, so that the view constantly shifted between sea and land and shoreline.
By this time, with the end of our three-month journey fast approaching, each walk was something to be savoured. We were conscious that these glorious Indian-summer days, these days of fresh air and freedom, these days of dolce far niente (literally, ‘sweet doing nothing’), would soon be over.
As we were now very fit and well adapted to the rigours of the walk, we found ourselves eating up the trail on the SWCP at immense speed.
In the early days of JoGLE, on the road to Inverness, we had naturally ad
opted a slow, plodding style of walking. But, as the weeks and months had progressed, our walking style had evolved into something so fast and efficient that it bordered on a jog.
This is a very pleasant way to move. It gets the lungs working and the heart beating, and it makes you feel full of energy and full of life. But it can also make a modest-distance walk feel disappointingly short.
So, to make the final stages of JoGLE last as long as possible, we included plenty of stops. On this day, we stopped for beers at Trevaunance Cove, stopped for ice-creams at Chapel Porth, and stopped to enjoy the sunshine on numerous benches, beaches, and boulders en route. Even so, the miles flew by.
Before we knew it, we had left behind the flowering heather and gorse, the narrow paths winding prettily across undulating moorland, the granite cliffs and grassy slopes, the steep-sided rocky inlets, and the gentle breakers scudding across the surface of sandy beaches.
We arrived, late in the afternoon, at the fishing village of Portreath, and from there took a mile-and-a-half detour off the SWCP to Portreath YHA, a converted barn in the grounds of a working farm.
As it was midweek and late in the season, we had the hostel to ourselves. During the long evening, our thoughts and conversation returned, again and again, to the same theme: the nearness of our journey’s end.
It was strange, now, for me to think back to the first stage of JoGLE, when each day’s walk had seemed too long and too hard, and when Land’s End couldn’t come soon enough for my liking.
I never imagined, back then, that the time would come when the days’ walks would seem too short and almost too easy, and when Land’s End would seem to be approaching all too fast.
Back then, I had regarded JoGLE as a challenge to be completed, an obstacle to be overcome. I little thought that the time would come when I would think of it not as a means to an end but as an end in itself, not as an obstacle to be overcome but as an experience to be savoured.
I never dreamed that I would come to regard it – to use Rousseau’s phrase – as ‘the height of happiness’.
The following day, we enjoyed another unseasonably warm and sunny hike along another magnificent stretch of the South West Coast Path. This time, our route ran seventeen miles from Portreath to the popular holiday resort of St Ives.
For the first five or six miles, the path wove in and out of small headlands, and past coves, stacks, and islands with splendid names such as Ralph’s Cupboard, Deadman’s Cove, and Hell’s Mouth.
This cliff-top-hugging section ended at Godrevy Head, a large square promontory overlooking Godrevy Island with its lighthouse, which is said to have been the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse.
From there, the path headed southwest across sand dunes to the mouth of the River Hayle, and then took a long, almost circular, detour around the muddy flats of the Hayle estuary before heading northwest into St Ives.
The detour around the estuary contributed about four miles to our day’s tally. These were welcome extra miles, since by now we were keen to prolong each walk and hold on, for as long as we reasonably could, to our JoGLE experience.
But, despite the detours and the tea-stops and the view-stops, I was acutely conscious that our journey was drawing swiftly and inexorably to a close, that only two days’ walking remained.
It was a sad thought. But it was a sadness tinged with sweetness.
I remember once, at that period of my life when I was slowly but systematically dismantling my Christian faith, falling asleep on my bed while listening to a Sting CD.
It just so happened – quite by chance, no doubt – that the song ‘Fragile’ was playing as I entered that strange region of consciousness halfway between waking and sleeping. And in that altered state of perception something peculiar and wonderful happened.
When the song entered the musical interlude, Sting’s classical guitar, which carries the solo, spoke to me. It didn’t speak to me in words. There could be no translation. But it spoke to me as clearly as words ever could about the fragility of life.
It told me – as far as words can express it – that life is brief, that it is over almost as soon as it is begun, that it fades away as swiftly and surely as the bloom of a rose, but that it is all the more beautiful for all of that.
The experience was remarkable in itself. But even more so because the insight it contained went so much against the grain of my conscious thinking at that time.
I had just, very reluctantly, begun to abandon my belief in everlasting life, and, with it, my belief in there being anything of lasting meaning in life.
I found this terribly depressing. If life had no lasting meaning, then what was the point of it? What was the point of anything? Of what use was it to experience beauty or pleasure or love, knowing that none of these things would endure?
I felt disappointed and angry with life, with the universe, with everything.
But somehow, the notes and phrases from Sting’s guitar solo opened my mind to a new idea: to the idea that life and beauty and pleasure and love are all the more precious precisely because they cannot last.
This was an idea that my conscious, analytical mind, in its hurt and bruised state, would have rejected angrily. But in that semi-conscious state, it sneaked in under the radar, lodged itself inside me, and made its presence felt.
The Japanese have a phrase, mono no aware, that captures this idea beautifully. Literally, it translates as ‘the pathos of things’, and it refers to the awareness of the impermanence of things – an awareness that, though sad, is tinged with beauty.
This state of awareness arises when you are confronted with something beautiful, and at the same time confronted with its transience. The feelings of joy and sadness that are evoked by this double consciousness merge together into a new and profound emotion.
The Japanese tradition of hanami, cherry blossom viewing, provides a perfect illustration of mono no aware.
There are lots of varieties of cherry tree in Japan, many of which bloom for just a few days, each spring. Every year, the Japanese hold hanami parties beneath the flowering trees to enjoy the beauty of the blossoms, and the intensity of the experience is heightened by the knowledge that this beauty is short-lived.
Intrinsically, there is perhaps no more beauty in cherry blossom than there is in apple or pear blossom. But the transience of cherry blossom evokes a feeling that goes beyond the ordinary appreciation of beauty. It evokes – or can evoke in a sensitive observer – the inexpressibly sad, sweet, and tender feeling of mono no aware.
At St Ives, we were just twenty-five miles – a single day’s walk, at a push – from Land’s End. Our plan, though, was to do the journey in two stages: first, fifteen miles from St Ives to the village of Pendeen, and then ten miles from Pendeen to Land’s End. But before that, we took an unprecedented two days’ rest in St Ives.
Not that two lean, mean walking-machines like Wendy and I needed that amount of rest. But we had previously arranged to meet a friend in Pendeen, and were running ahead of schedule. Plus, we were not at all averse to delaying, for a couple of days, our arrival at Land’s End.
St Ives was a splendid place to kick back and contemplate the end of JoGLE.
It’s a pretty little seaside resort with four beautiful sandy beaches. The older part of town, near to the shoreline, is a pleasing mishmash of narrow, uneven streets lined with old-fashioned houses and shops. And just as importantly, for cash-strapped, calorie-deprived, long-distance walkers, the newer part of town has a Wetherspoon’s.
We stayed at the Trelhoyan Manor Hotel, a nineteenth-century mansion set in lovely gardens overlooking St Ives Bay. This is run by the Christian Guild, a Christian holiday and hotel company that provides ‘Christian-based holidays for everyone who is a Christian, who is seeking to find Christ, or who is in sympathy with the Christian faith’. And, although neither Wendy nor I fulfil any of those criteria, we had a pleasant stay nonetheless.
Although it was past the middle of
October, the Indian summer continued unabated. It wasn’t quite the same as a regular summer though. It was just as warm and pleasant, but the colours were different. Less vibrant.
This meant that the wide expanse of sand at St Ives Bay was straw-coloured rather than golden, the sea was viridian rather than turquoise, and the sky was powder blue rather than azure. But these more subdued colours complemented our wistful End-of-JoGLE mood perfectly.
By this time, both Wendy and I felt that we could happily have carried on walking indefinitely, that we could have continued along the South West Coast Path, past Land’s End, all the way to Poole Harbour – and then on to who-knows-where.
But that wasn’t possible. JoGLE, like all good things, had to come to an end. We had livings to earn.
For me, the thought that JoGLE would soon end wasn’t entirely negative. In fact, it had a very positive aspect. It heightened the experience of those final few days, made me feel as though every minute counted, and made End to End as a whole seem all the more precious.
In Essays in Idleness, one of the great works of medieval Japanese literature, the Buddhist monk Yoshida Kenkō says:
If man were never to fade away like the dews of Adashino, never to vanish like the smoke over Toribeyama, how things would lose their power to move us! The most precious thing in life is its uncertainty.
This is pretty much the message that Sting’s classical guitar had tried to teach me all those years ago. And it was a message that JoGLE was now reinforcing.
JoGLE was soon to end. And that was sad. But the knowledge that it must end soon was precisely what gave it much of its ‘power to move us’.
