I left him there to resume his circles, and walked into Morvah in search of water. Already, my two litres were gone. The owner of a local tea shop let me fill my bottle from her tap. I gulped down half the bottle, refilled it again, and then stepped outside to lie back on a bank of grass to rest. My feet ached and I was still miles from Gwithian, where I had hoped to spend the night. I considered catching a bus there, I could afford it, but that would be 'against the rules', as arbitrary as they were. Didn't tramps ever catch buses?
What I could do, I contemplated, was hitch-hike. It would likely be a fruitless enterprise – a recent study had been published which revealed that less people than ever before were willing to stop for hitch-hikers – but I could at least try. Hobbling over to the main road, a thin and twisting snake of concrete, I sat at the edge and raised my thumb each time a car passed.
Half an hour later, a rented Mini Cooper stopped, and the passenger door swung open. I climbed in and turned to smile at the driver. It was the German. He grimaced when he recognised me.
'They lied to me,' he said. 'It was the beach you referred to. This has made me very angry.'
He was driving to St Ives, and agreed to drop me off at the far end of town. His temper flashed and snarled each time we were forced to stop upon the narrow road while another car passed, and the open-top tourist bus which forced him to reverse a few metres really sent him over the edge. He shouted at it in German as it squeezed past us. I was glad to bid him farewell in St Ives.
My feet now rested and recovered, I walked the long route around the Hayle estuary – following the road, bored – to Mexico Towans and then Gwithian. I knew this beach well. It had miles of labyrinthine sand dunes which I could disappear into for the night, and I walked into them to cook my dinner: beans and sausages in a mess tin. It tasted sensational.
There was a campsite nearby and I stole on to it to fill my water bottle and wash out my mess tin. Back in the dunes I made camp: my sleeping bag tucked into the corner of a sandy caldera. I swapped my cap for my woolly hat with earflaps and sat on the lip of my little volcano to watch a cloudless sunset over the Atlantic. Rabbits scattered into their dune-warrens as I stepped up and then reappeared a few moments later as I sat still. Tonight, I thought, I will sleep with the bunnies.
3
I stayed atop the dune long after the sun had set, waiting for the few people who dotted the sandy peaks to leave, for the camper vans in the nearby car park to either drive away or close their curtains. I wished I had my camper van. The temperature dropped sharply and I began to shiver, but the harmless-looking couple sat two dunes in front of me would likely pass back this way, and I wanted no one to see me in my sleeping bag.
Of all the circumstances and situations I had anticipated for my journey, this – my first night sleeping rough – was the one I had feared the most. Not that this was by any homeless standards 'rough': the beach at my feet, the dune-walls for shelter, my sleeping bag for warmth and coat for pillow, this was bloody luxury. Regardless, I was afraid. The night would be a defining one. If it passed without hindrance, I knew I could do this. But if it did not – if it was too cold to bear, if a rat crawled over my face or an adder wormed its way into my sleeping bag – I would likely catch the next bus home.
What worried me most was discovery. An irate landowner perhaps (someone had to own these dunes, all land in England was owned) or, worse, piss-heads: here for an after-dark session of tinned lager, who would happen upon me asleep, surround me, kick me, and laugh.
As the couple finally left, walking slowly towards the campsite, I climbed into my sleeping bag, fully clothed, torch and penknife to hand's reach in my pocket. Sealing the fabric so tightly around me that only my eyes, nose and mouth remained uncovered, I lay flat on my back and closed my eyes. The fatigue of a day's walking pressed in, but sleep was difficult. I was cold and uncomfortable, and as the hours passed I grew colder and more uncomfortable, twisting inside my sleeping bag to cover my chilled face or relieve a limb numbed from the hard ground – contrary to my beliefs, sand was not nature's divan – then twisting back again because the disproportionate shifts of the sleeping bag had somehow secured my arm in an unnatural position behind my back.
The temperature continued to plummet in inverse relation to my lassitude, so that when the night was coolest I was at my most awake. It was August, I was in Cornwall in a sleeping bag, and I was cold. If I could not sleep through this, how did the homeless ever manage at the height of winter in the northern cities with only a few sheets of cardboard for insulation? The answer was, of course, that many did not – hypothermia is one of the most common killers amongst the homeless, alongside drug overdoses and suicide. It is little surprise that the life expectancy of the average rough sleeper is forty-two years.
I slept little, perhaps two hours at the most, stolen in brief snatches when my mind finally, blissfully wandered, interrupted minutes later by twitches and starts which brought me back to full consciousness. Rough sleeping would, I understood, take some getting used to. In fact, I achieved very few full good nights' sleep while I was tramping, not in the usual sense of the phrase. Few do. It is perhaps why many homeless drink so much and take so many drugs: to get through the night, the tramp's natural enemy. One can get used to almost anything, but I never learned to get past that, and my sleeping patterns remained fragmented, patchy and sporadic for as long as I stayed outside.
At least early starts on the coast were easy: the dawn chorus of seagulls which erupted soon after five o'clock became my seaside alarm. Packing my sleeping bag into its small sack, I climbed down the dunes and walked across Gwithian beach, over the river, and then back up on to the coast path. After a cereal bar for breakfast, I cleaned my teeth looking out over Godrevy Point lighthouse, Virginia Woolf's favourite, the rising sun glinting off St Ives windows across the bay. The throbbing headache of sleep deprivation melted away, replaced by a surge of exhilaration. Why, I thought, doesn't everyone tramp?
4
I drew closer to the Cornwall I knew, not Penwith but Carrick. Vast panoramas appeared in the way that they can in Cornwall, so that all at once I could see the houses of Camborne spilling into their valley, the proud Carn Brea Monument, St Agnes Beacon and the far headland of Perranporth. As I walked, I deliberated over whether I should conceive a 'backstory'. Every homeless person has their origin myth, the trauma or mistake or addiction which first put them on the streets.
I'm Richard Dawson. My wife left me and took the house. I turned to drink and lost my job. With no money and no family, I ended up on the streets. At least I could drink there.
But I was reluctant to lie. My last journey through England had in its own way involved subterfuge, and this had left a taste of guilt. Why not just be honest this time? I'm Charlie Carroll. I'm happily married, and I'm walking to London. I'm writing a book about tramping.
The problem with telling someone you were writing a book was that it had a similar effect to pointing a camera in their face. They froze, or acted weird, or bombarded you with irrelevant stories or, worse, jokes, which they insisted would be 'great material for your book'. In short, they stopped acting themselves: anathema to the non-fiction writer.
In Portreath, I stopped at a bench to boil some noodles for lunch. An old gentleman walking his friendly collie sat next to me.
'Glorious morning,' he said. 'Not the best I've seen, but always a treat. Especially these last few years, when summer's been such a washout. You a rambler?' He pointed at my knapsack.
'Kind of,' I replied.
'I used to walk a lot when I was younger. And cycle. Once cycled from Plymouth to Birmingham. No particular reason. Now I like boats. I had one in Falmouth for a while. Bloody beauty, she was. But couldn't afford to keep her when I retired. What do you do?'
'I'm a writer. It's what I'm doing now. Writing a book about walking.'
'All the best, then!' he said, suddenly rising to his feet, whistling to his dog, and striding away.
&nbs
p; My favourite stretch of the Cornish northern coast begins at Portreath and finishes at Perranporth. I was pleased I had left so early that morning, for my digital watch revealed that there were still enough hours left in the day to complete the 10 miles between the two beaches. This single portion is like a Cornwall in miniature, filled with the sheer cliffs, golden beaches, engine houses, sky, wind and waves which one imagines when Cornwall is cited. It is the land of wheals (Cornish for 'workplace') and porths (Cornish for 'port' or 'beach'). Semantic anglicisation dissipates around these parts, and ancient Kernewek rejoices in its stead.
By Tre, Ros, Pol, Lan, Car and Pen,
Shall ye know most Cornishmen.
These are the Cornish prefixes, rooted in the indigenous, but now obsolete, Gaelic language of Kernewek. Like the Welsh, Scottish and Irish languages alongside it, Kernewek was a distinct – though not dissimilar – Celtic derivative. As England's kingdom expanded and sought to empower itself through the generalisation of language, no small redemptions were left for Kernewek (or Cornish, if we are to continue the philological subjugation) as they were for the Welsh language, which was allowed its own translations of the Bible and the Prayer Book. Likewise, no renaissance took place in Cornwall as it did in other areas such as the gaeltacht of western Ireland. The old kingdom of Kernow, it seems, was just too insignificant for such movements.
The language died with an alarming rapidity. Most authorities celebrate the last official speaker of Kernewek as one Dolly Pentreath from Mousehole (pronounced 'Mauz-all'), who took the language with her when she died at the age of 102 in 1777, though in Zennor one can find a church-wall plaque in memory of John Davey of Boswednack, died 1891, who many claim to have been the last true Cornish speaker.
Though Cornish nationalism has heightened somewhat over the last few decades, any renaissance of Kernewek still seems a long way off, destined to end perhaps right at its taking-off point, within the subservient a'gas dynergh ('Welcome to…') of a town sign. Kernewek has indubitably fallen to (and, perhaps, will never rise from) its own proverb: Mez den heb davas a-gollas y-dir. The man who loses his tongue loses his land.
The wind mounted as I climbed the shaley paths up from each porth so that my lips cracked and my cheeks stung while I scree-walked down again to the next. There are three or four interlocking paths on this section of the coast, but I, according with my childhood preferences, chose the ones which ran along the edge, the ones which spilled over on to fifty-foot vertical drops, devoid of fences or protective barriers, there being no point for such objects, as they would only fall down the cliffs themselves after a few years. I remembered stories my parents used to tell when we came up here for family walks, parables perhaps, cautionary warnings of dogs who had blithely chased thrown stones out over the edge to plummet down to the rocks below. There were further stories of the same bent, ones which kept us away from the conical metal tips which presided over the obsolete mineshafts. 'Only three years ago, a girl fell down that one there. They say she landed in a pile of skeletons and died of fright.'
I came to Wheal Coates, the magnificently preserved engine house which stands as the archetype for all the mine works dotted up and down the coast. Wheal Coates is not especially old, but it looks as ancient as the cliffs themselves. Only a few generations ago, people worked here, but we are so distanced from them that they might as well have been the same folk who erected the Men-an-Tol.
I suppose in many ways they were. The mining tradition in Cornwall can be dated back as far as 1800 BC, when Bronze Age tinners worked above ground, locating exposed veins of ore and streaming the tin from the rock face. By 400 BC, the quality of Cornish tin was famed across Europe: it was shipped across the English Channel to Gaul, where it was then carried on horseback to the Carthaginians and the Greeks who used it to make bronze, the war metal. By the fifteenth century, work moved below the surface, and the tinners evolved into miners. Cornish mining became a booming industry, its success owed to the skill of the workers and the abundance of the tin. At one point, almost a third of the world's tin came from Cornwall.
It was not until the nineteenth century that the last great age of mining came, and then died. Copper was discovered. Work soared to meet international demands: almost fifty thousand Cornish worked full-time down the mines; and Cornwall became the largest area for copper production in the world, producing two-thirds of the global supply. But then tragedy hit in the 1860s. Heady amounts of copper were discovered in Africa, tin in South-East Asia, and, within just a few decades, the annual production of copper in Cornwall fell from 160,000 tonnes to less than five hundred. One by one, the mines were systematically shut down. The miners responded with exodus, fleeing to distant corners of the globe to continue doing the only thing they knew, the only thing their families had known for 3,000 years. Today, the few people you will see around the old, disused engine houses and chimneys are tourists, or, like me, locals who are little more than tourists of history. For it is all history now. Today, not one mine in Cornwall remains open.
Seagulls circled and screeched angrily overhead as I continued on towards Trevaunance Cove and then Perranporth. It was as far as I planned to go for the day, and I was glad, for I could walk no further. My feet had raged for miles, but far worse was the pain from my chafing thighs which was fast growing indescribable. I allowed myself the luxury purchase of a small tub of moisturiser.
It was not yet evening in Perranporth, and I had a few hours to kill before wandering off into the dunes to sleep, so I walked through the village to knock on the door of my old friend Ben, who kindly cooked me a dinner so large I wolfed it down and then immediately regretted my haste. Ben owned a restaurant in St Agnes. I had passed it two hours before and noticed it was busy.
'Been a good season,' Ben confirmed. 'I've reduced evening turnover and maximised on lunches instead. Profits are up.'
Such was the sociolect of many modern Cornish: talk of seasons and profits, covers and turnover was the new Kernewek, for tourism was the new mining.
Another favourite conversation piece was second homes. Many of Cornwall's houses, especially those along the coast, have been bought up for astonishing prices by people who live in them for less than six weeks a year. This has pushed property prices in the county up to one of the highest averages in England, so that today fewer Cornish people own their own homes than ever before. As house prices have risen with the second-home culture, so too has rent, though average salaries have not. As a result, there has been a marked increase in Cornwall's homeless population over the past decade.
'Have you heard of mundic?' Ben asked.
'No,' I admitted.
'One of my favourite anecdotes is about second homes and mundic. You know that row of houses looking over Trevaunance Cove from the cliffs at the west end?'
I nodded. I had walked past them a few hours earlier.
'Over the last ten years they've all been bought up as second homes. Some of them are prone to mundic. Mundic is a phenomenon you only get in a few pockets of the West Country. It's a property that can be found in building materials, and it acts like a kind of rust for stone. Mundic's untreatable, too, and in most cases it'll end up reducing a house to rubble. All houses diagnosed with mundic have been given terminal sentences, and they're not eligible for a mortgage. The last of those houses on the cliffs above Trevaunance Cove, it was riddled with mundic, and it just got sold for £1.2 million.'
I whistled in astonishment.
'No mortgage there,' Ben reminded me. 'It was sold for cash.'
5
I bedded down within Perranporth's dunes at ten o'clock at night, and then rose with the sun the following morning. I had spent the night, again, chasing sleep, but only managing perhaps an hour or two. The lack of true rest left me irritable and profoundly bad-tempered. I had walked here from Sennen! I was exhausted! Why the fuck was I not sleeping better? I could even doze right now, if it weren't for those bastard seagulls and their constant fucking bleating. I angrily unw
rapped a cereal bar, daring one of the hovering birds to come closer so that I could punch it in the beak.
Within minutes of walking, I was fine again. It was a template I was to grow used to as I tramped: little sleep, rude awakening, 'temper, temper', all calm. As I rounded Holywell Bay, a short bank of rain hit. The mossy grass skirting the footpath which had before seemed so soft and warm now appeared spiky and stiff; the six-foot surf rumbled through the caves and sounded a crashing tattoo against the cliff walls below me. I donned my cheap, plastic poncho – the kind sold at tourist attractions and festivals from mobile stalls – and wrapped my knapsack in the bin bag I kept it in at night to keep it dry from dew, and I strode on to Newquay. Though the weather kept the tourists and the walkers indoors, it replaced them with wildlife. A seal bobbed in the calm recesses of an inaccessible cove, head above the water, eyes blinking, and three rare Cornish choughs – identifiable by their red bills and red legs, but mostly by the tags stapled above their little feet – barked furiously at me as I passed.
At the far end of Crantock beach, the River Gannel barred my route to Newquay. It had taken me hours to walk around the Hayle estuary two days before when a neat bridge would have shortened the journey to fifteen minutes, and I was reluctant to repeat the experience here. A man in a hoodie, shorts and a moustache ran people across in his small outrigger dinghy for £1.20, his large dog at the bow like a formidable bust, paws on the rim. I broke my rules, paid the man, and climbed in. The dog eyed me with distrust, settled down for a nap as we set off across the water, and then bolted back to the bow a minute later as we reached the far side to make sure I got off.
No Fixed Abode Page 3
