North Devon

North Devon is an early stage of the South West Coast Path in Ray and Moth’s journey, defined less by a single destination than by the work of crossing it on foot. Its steep paths, wooded cliffs, and combe-side streams register the bodily cost of the walk, while the passage onward into Cornwall gives the landscape a clear narrative function: it marks the first county-scale milestone in a future the walkers are trying to make one day at a time.

Setting and Route

The walk begins at Minehead, where Ray and Moth hesitate at the monument marking the path’s start before setting out on a 630-mile route. The first climb quickly makes the guidebook’s description of the way as drifting inland and uphill seem inadequate: halfway up an excruciatingly steep zigzag through the woods, they stop on a bench with only a glimpse of the sea through the branches. North Devon is reached after this difficult beginning, and its terrain continues to make distance something measured in effort rather than in the neat estimates of a guidebook.

Two days into the walk, Ray and Moth realize they have passed into North Devon without noticing. The recognition comes among rhododendrons on the wooded cliffs: a modest boundary crossing, but their first milestone. They are still moving, and that fact matters. The region is encountered not as a settled home base but as ground traversed under the pressure of fatigue, weather, and the need to keep going.

Cliffs, Combes, and the Walking Body

The North Devon passage moves between high cliff edges and sheltered valleys. Oak woods give way to rhododendrons, while the cliffs rise above and fall below a path with barely more than three feet of level ground in places. Even a brief pause for tea takes place on the path itself. The landscape allows little separation between walking and resting: the walkers have to stop where the narrow route permits, with the sea and the drop close at hand.

The route’s gradients repeatedly turn progress into a physical negotiation. Later coastal walking is recalled through burning faces, aching legs, hips, and shoulders, and the sensation of heat reflecting from a rock path. Against that strain, height and wind can bring a sudden feeling of release: the narrator describes the exhilaration of the cliffs and the pull of the sea air. The path is therefore neither simply arduous nor simply liberating. The same exposed ground that exhausts the walkers can briefly make movement feel like freedom.

A combe provides a different kind of pause near the transition westward. After passing under a sign welcoming them to Kernow, the local name for Cornwall, they reach another valley late in the day. The climb ahead is so steep that they pitch the tent on a small patch of grass beside running water and fall asleep for half an hour. The day ends after five miles and six pieces of fudge. Nearby, a stream drops over a two-metre fall toward the sea, giving Ray a chance to wash after eleven days without clean water. The small waterfall and improvised camp make the border crossing a lived encounter with terrain, not merely a line on a map.

Rhododendrons and Landscape History

The rhododendrons on the cliffs prompt an account of ecological belonging and the changing human treatment of plants. Ray’s narration notes that fossils show rhododendrons growing in Britain before the last ice age, although the category of native plant is reserved for species that flourished after the ice had receded. Reintroduced to Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, the plants spread rapidly, bringing glossy evergreen leaves and spring flowers to otherwise grey and leafless landscapes.

The account then contrasts North Devon’s growth with a much-loved valley in Wales, where the National Trust removed rhododendrons it considered non-indigenous. The clearance left scarred hillsides and persistent stumps that regenerated, while only sparse birch and heather appeared among them. That conflict is not presented as an event in North Devon; it gives the plants seen on its cliffs a wider history of classification, removal, and return. The landscape becomes a record of competing ideas about what belongs, and of how attempts to settle that question can leave damage on both sides.

A First Milestone on an Uncertain Journey

North Devon’s importance lies partly in the scale of the change it makes visible. In early August, Ray and Moth stand in Taunton with their packs and understand themselves as truly homeless: unlike travellers who can return to a door, they have nowhere to put their bags down. They choose to travel to Minehead and begin walking because the route gives them a reason to keep moving and a way to shape a future. Reaching North Devon after two days does not resolve that uncertainty, but it supplies an immediate achievement: they have crossed ground that had seemed daunting and are still on the move.

The walk also changes how the surrounding landscape is attended to. Rather than serving only as scenery, each climb and combe becomes a measure of survival; repeated steps give the day a structure when the walkers have no settled home or clear plan. The narrator later describes the walk as a meditation shaped by salt wind, dust, and light, with each combe climbed becoming a victory. North Devon is one of the first places where that practical rhythm takes hold, joining bodily effort to a fragile sense of purpose.

The county boundary is not the end of the ordeal. After a break in the trail, Ray and Moth travel by bus to Barnstaple and then on to Westward Ho!, a disruption that leaves them feeling disconnected and slightly lost. Set beside the earlier passage on foot, this detour clarifies what the path has come to mean: progress is not simply movement between places, but the continuity and agency they find in choosing to walk. North Devon remains an early, hard-won section of that continuity—a place crossed through exertion, and remembered as the first milestone of a longer journey.