Westward Ho!

Westward Ho! becomes a brief but revealing pause in Ray and Moth’s South West Coast Path journey: a town reached by an unplanned bus ride, initially at odds with its grandly emphatic name, and remembered for a small stroke of luck before the coast quickly turns harsh again. For the homeless couple, its pub, sea wall and nearby slope provide not a secure refuge but a momentary change of pace, followed by another night spent finding shelter wherever the terrain allows.

Arrival and first impressions

After taking a bus to Barnstaple and changing for Westward Ho!, the couple arrived disorientated by the break in their walk. Ray felt as though taking the bus amounted to cheating, though the journey had brought them to a place they had not expected to reach in quite that way. The town looked grey rather than spectacular. Its exclamation mark had suggested grandeur, but the view did not match the name. Their guidebook explained that the town took its name, punctuation included, from a novel by Charles Kingsley; Ray wondered whether the book itself might be more interesting.

The interruption to the trail left them feeling disconnected and slightly lost. Money was dwindling, and Moth was irritable and in need of a beer, so they sat in a dismal bar overlooking a concrete walkway. Children dodged waves breaking over the sea wall while Moth drank in silence. Ray held a glass of iced water to her head. The scene joined the ordinary discomforts of the town to the force of the coast: even beside a walkway and a bar, the sea kept breaking against the edge of the place.

A pub-quiz reprieve

A round man in a waistcoat recruited them for the pub quiz, charging fifty pence to enter and offering a ten-pound first prize. Ray had been grumpy about spending the coins, but recognized the answer to a question about what went up in 1961 and came down in 1990: the Berlin Wall. The quiz’s small stakes mattered because their money was already limited, and the prospect of winning turned an unwanted expense into a possibility.

The family at the bar won the ten pounds and immediately spent it on another round of drinks. Ray and Moth came second, receiving five pounds. They hurried to put on their packs and collect it. When asked whether they wanted another drink, they declined and said they had to leave. The prize offered a modest lift, but not a reason to linger: the couple needed to get back to the path, carrying their belongings and watching their remaining resources.

Leaving town and finding shelter

They skipped back towards the path, singing the Captain Pugwash theme tune. Waves broke over the sea wall both behind and ahead of them, yet somehow missed them. The quiz win buoyed them, along with the unfounded hope that events might finally be turning in their favour. That lift did not last. Unable to find anywhere to camp, they trampled a patch of bracken and thistles on a slope in the dark.

The ground made the night precarious. Gravity dragged their synthetic sleeping bags downhill, and they woke in a heap by the tent door. The sea was close, its booming presence felt through the ground as much as heard. They piled their rucksacks by the entrance and braced their feet against them, knees locked. In the grey morning they hobbled around the thistles, their knees refusing to straighten, and discovered that the tent had been pitched on an overhang of stone and clay. The sea was eating into the hollow below. The patch of land itself seemed close to giving way, making their improvised camp a sharp contrast to the security of a settled home.

The coast beyond Westward Ho!

The next day’s route took them towards Greencliff, where heat intensified the physical strain of the walk. The black rock there carried evidence of another kind of hardship: the seam known as Bideford Black had once been mined as fuel for lime kilns scattered along the coast, which turned Welsh limestone into fertilizer and building materials. It was now used as an artists’ pigment, sold through fashionable galleries. Beyond the town, the path thus moved through a landscape shaped by both natural erosion and past industry.

The couple’s water supply made the transition tangible. They had filled their bottles in the Westward Ho! bar, but used most of the water during the night. As the heat rose, Moth stumbled and fell, then stopped and asked Ray to get the water. He drank until only two inches remained, with no nearby tap and the prospect of having to divert inland to ask for water. Westward Ho! therefore marks more than a temporary rest: the bar was the last known place where they had filled their bottles before the exposed walk resumed.

Narrative significance

Westward Ho! brings together the journey’s competing forms of movement. The bus ride carried Ray and Moth forward but made Ray feel they had broken the discipline of walking; the quiz briefly made their tight finances feel less restrictive; leaving the bar restored the path as their chosen direction. Yet the freedom to continue did not mean that they could choose safe or comfortable places to stop. Their campsite was a slope above eroding ground, and the next day’s dwindling water made the consequences of that night immediate.

The town’s emphatic name and disappointing greyness echo the gap between expectation and experience, while the five-pound prize supplies a short-lived reversal rather than lasting security. Westward Ho! is memorable not as a destination of arrival but as a hinge in the walk: a pause in which strangers, coins, quiz answers and the sea wall offer a little relief before the couple return to exposure, fatigue and the practical demands of staying in motion.