Exmouth is a pivotal passage in Ray and Moth’s South West Coast Path journey: a place where the search for a safe place to camp becomes increasingly difficult amid holiday developments, and where a night of imagined danger is followed by evidence of a genuine landslip. The town is not presented as a settled destination but as part of a route through south Devon, where the freedom of walking depends on finding somewhere to sleep and on deciding how much risk and uncertainty they can bear.

Setting on a narrowing route

As Ray and Moth walk from Budleigh Salterton towards Exmouth, the cliffs have turned red and caravan parks seem to appear around every corner. Their options for camping are shrinking. At dusk, the coast path leaves them between high hedges and an impassable wire fence around a golf course; the route offers no easy way to turn aside or find a suitable place. The contrast is stark: a landscape arranged for visitors and recreation, but difficult for two walkers who need a discreet place to pitch a tent.

From a hill, they can see Exmouth’s lights and a large holiday park laid out in a grid, with roads and stadium lighting. Its regimented appearance strikes Ray as closer to a prison camp than a place designed for a holiday. The comparison registers more than distaste for the development. For people whose home is a tent and whose next night’s shelter is uncertain, this abundant infrastructure does not translate into an available place to stay.

A night on the sixteenth hole

With darkness falling and no alternative in sight, Ray and Moth climb over the golf-course fence and choose the sixteenth hole. Its level, closely cut grass offers a practical pitch; a bench and a mound of undergrowth between them and the path below provide some cover from early dog walkers. They plan to leave before golfers arrive. The choice is both resourceful and precarious: a managed leisure space becomes a temporary refuge only so long as their presence goes unnoticed.

As they begin setting up, a rustle moves through the gorse beside the perimeter fence. They first consider animals, but then see a dark figure clinging to the fence and looking across the course. The person vanishes into the bushes, reappears close by, and runs off. Ray and Moth stay low and postpone pitching the tent, unsure whether he will return alone or with others. When they eventually settle in, they are cold and damp from the rising dew; too tired to cook, they eat a fudge bar. A deep rumbling through the ground later revives their fear that the man may be coming back. It proves to have another source, but at the time they lie still, waiting for voices that never come.

Before six the next morning, they pack away the tent and make tea on the bench. The disturbed dew is almost the only sign that they have slept there. They have removed loose earth from the places where the tent pegs went in, making their effort to leave no trace a practical necessity as well as a principle. A white-haired man walks across the course with two dogs, apparently checking the grass. Moth greets him warmly and Ray and Moth confirm that they will leave after breakfast. The man finds no damage and walks on; their relief is palpable, though the encounter does not make the night’s concealment seem secure in retrospect.

The cliff’s warning

As they head down towards the holiday camp, the source of the rumbling becomes clear. A substantial section of red earth and stone has slid into the water only a couple of hundred metres away, where the debris churns at the foot of the cliff. The ground between the golf course and Straight Point looks similarly vulnerable. The imagined threat of a returning stranger gives way to a physical instability close to their pitch: the same landscape that had seemed an obstacle to camping is actively changing beneath the built environment.

The landslip also unsettles the apparent order of the scene. The green, maintained golf course and the nearby holiday park sit beside cliffs that cannot be managed into safety. The slide threatens to leave the park with less land and its white-haired caretaker with more to worry about than marks on the grass. Exmouth’s coastline is therefore not simply scenery around Ray and Moth’s hardship; its hazards shape the choices they make and expose the limits of the security that developed spaces seem to offer.

Passing through and moving on

After negotiating rows of caravans and chalets, Ray and Moth walk into Exmouth and leave the Jurassic Coast behind. They buy rice, tuna and chocolate bars, then take the ferry across the River Exe to Starcross. The route continues through the built-up stretch between railway line, road and scrub before they reach Dawlish Warren and camp behind the visitor centre on the nature reserve as darkness falls. The crossing and onward walk make Exmouth a threshold between the open coastal sections and a more urban, difficult-to-camp passage.

That difficulty soon becomes a question of money as well as shelter. Looking at the next thirty miles of built-up areas, railway and seafront, Moth considers spending the last of their cash on a train and a bus to Brixham, where they hope to return to open country and find somewhere to camp. Ray’s reaction is shaped by the restless night on the golf course: the prospect of more nights among people and uncertain places feels increasingly hard to bear. In this way, Exmouth marks a practical and emotional pressure point in the walk. It offers no simple resolution, but makes visible the daily negotiations through which Ray and Moth try to preserve both their safety and their ability to keep choosing where to go.