Gribbin Head is a headland where Ray and Moth camp during their homeless journey along the South West Coast Path. The couple spend the night on its flat grass beneath an open tent, surrounded by passing ships and stars. The scene sets their lack of a home against the long-established ownership of the land, while showing how, for a time, the natural world provides a place to remain when ordinary security has disappeared.

Setting and Approach

The narrative places Gribbin Head after the couple pass through Par and Polkerris, leaving behind a landscape whitened by dust from the clay-processing works and returning to the colour of mature trees on the hillside. Their next recorded stage is Fowey, reached by way of gentle hillsides and rocky shores. In this sequence, Gribbin Head is a pause within a continuing walk rather than a settled destination: a patch of grass on which to pitch the tent before setting off again.

The immediate shelter is modest. Ray and Moth lie in the tent with its flaps open, watching shipping and stars pass. The openness of the scene matters: they are exposed beneath the sky, yet have a place to lie and the rhythm of the sea against the rocks around them. The headland offers no return to a house or possessions, but it makes a temporary night possible.

A Night Between Land and Sea

At Gribbin Head, the couple reckon with how little remains to them. They have lost everything except their children and one another; what they can rely on here is wet grass and the sea’s repeated movement against the rocks. The question of whether that is enough hangs over the scene. They know the answer, but returning to the world they have left does not seem to provide a better one. The headland is therefore neither an easy refuge nor a cure for homelessness: it is a precarious place in which they can continue together without pretending that their losses have been repaired.

That precariousness belongs to a wider housing crisis in their story. After losing their home and income, long-term camping is beyond their means: the campsite offer is eighty pounds a week, with no housing benefit available for the fee. They have no dependable room or garden to use, while the council’s limited offer is a bed-and-breakfast room that they do not want to accept. Their night on the headland takes place against these constrained alternatives. The tent is not simply a chosen form of outdoor adventure; it is also the shelter they can afford and control.

Ownership and Homelessness

The land around Gribbin Head is described as belonging to the Rashleighs, a wealthy family who have owned the Menabilly estate since the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The passage recalls that Daphne du Maurier was a tenant there and dreamed of Manderley. Against this history of estate ownership and literary association, Ray and Moth lie homeless and penniless beneath the stars. The contrast is not an abstract opposition between nature and property: it is a pointed difference between inherited possession of land and the couple’s temporary use of a small stretch of grass for a night.

The juxtaposition also gives the scene its scale. The couple have no claim to the surrounding estate, and the campsite is not theirs to keep. Yet the grass and the sound of the sea are real comforts, however limited. The landscape cannot restore their former home or resolve what comes next, but it briefly makes life outside property and ownership feel bearable.

Place in the Journey

Gribbin Head’s importance lies in this interval between movement and stopping. The couple are still walking, still carrying their belongings, and still unsure whether they can make a life from what remains. Their camp turns the headland into a temporary home without disguising its fragility: the tent can be packed, and the next day will bring another stretch of coast. In the larger account of their homelessness, Gribbin Head holds both sides of that condition at once—the exposure of having nowhere permanent to go and the small, immediate freedom of finding a place to lie together for the night.