Day 11 - Westward Ho! to Clovelly: 22.59 km 

I need to get this write up done fast because emotionally and physically I have already checked out and I am ready to dissolve into Family Guy reruns like a Victorian lady succumbing to consumption. I am absolutely cooked. At the end of each day all I crave is an ice cold shower and the sweet intimacy of horizontal silence until morning, interrupted only by the biological tyranny of needing a wee. This heat is obscene.  Mercifully, the weather gods appear to be ending their BDSM experiment with Britain. Temperatures are dropping back to a civilised 15 to 18 Celsius with intermittent rain. Perfect. If the universe insists on punishing me, I would rather be slapped around by rain than slowly rotisserie cooked in hiking tights. Last night we stayed in an Airbnb run by two lesbian firefighters.  Lovely couple. Great spaniel called Flynn. We barely saw them because they were out rescuing a horse that had fallen into a ravine searching for water and a couple of dogs that launched themselves off cliffs chasing rabbits with the blind confidence of drunk men in cargo shorts. I could have used a firewoman carrying me back uphill to Tesco  but it felt greedy to ask considering one of them had already rushed out to buy us a fan for the bedroom.  Evenings in Westward Ho! are gloriously chaotic. Teenagers drifting along the promenade drinking booze they absolutely should not have, swearing at each other with Shakespearean creativity, full of cheap perfume and sunburnt bad decisions. And somehow I adore it here. It reminds me so much of childhood summers in the Okanagan. Endless daylight. Heat rising off pavement. Water sparkling like temptation. Arcades humming with sticky carpets and hormones. Flirting at fourteen with the twenty five year old guy behind the counter who thankfully treated us like annoying gnats instead of prey.

Today was one of those proper South West Coast Path days where the cliffs stand dramatic and seductive like they know exactly how small and sweaty you are. 

Somewhere along the route we met a coven of senior crones also walking the SWCP and one absolute legend is doing the entire route solo at eighty years old. Eighty. Meanwhile I groan every time I stand up like an Ikea wardrobe settling into old floorboards. Here I was thinking this might be my last grand physical adventure and along comes Power Granny striding up hills with the energy of a retired Viking. I genuinely cannot decide whether to feel inspired or deeply humiliated. Probably both. Aging is weird. One minute you are buying anti chafe cream and the next you are being dominated by an octogenarian in zip off trousers.

The final five kilometres into Clovelly follow what they call a “donkey cart path,” which is basically a road and a trail getting drunk together and making poor decisions. Mercifully flat so I absolutely tore along because at this point I needed to pee with the intensity of a Victorian heroine trapped in a corset, and I also desperately wanted to pet the donkeys. Clovelly once used donkeys to haul goods up and down its brutally steep cobbled streets. Imagine my despair upon discovering the public toilets before entering the village had vanished into myth  and the donkeys themselves were fully booked out by tourists paying to walk them around for wholesome Instagram content. Absolute betrayal. I did not slog up and down these cliffs like a dehydrated witch for some family from Chelsea to monopolise all available donkey affection and parade them into the sea for a photoshoot. Criminal behaviour. Also, be warned. Once you start this stage there are  zero escape routes and food options are limited to overpriced pub meals with all the passion and seasoning of damp cardboard. Pack snacks. Pack water. Pack emotional resilience.

So about Clovelly: a salt-crusted vertigo-trip of a fishing village spilling down a brutal 400-foot Devon cliff like a tray of fine porcelain. Since 1738, the Hamlyn family has owned this impossibly steep fiefdom, keeping it aggressively  frozen in time. There are zero cars.  Just ancient cobblestones slick with sea mist and donkey shit. Everything—your luggage, the beer, the ghosts—moves by wooden sledge, gravity, and pure, leg-day masochism. It is gorgeous, punishing, and deeply beautifully. Look past the fuchsia-choked cottages and you find Crazy Kate’s place. Two centuries ago, Kate watched her fisherman husband drown right from her window. Grief is a hell of a drug; on their anniversary, she donned her wedding dress and walked off the 14th-century quay into the black Atlantic.  reunited in watery grave with her love. Today, we call that "unhinged main character energy," but back then, it was just the heavy, poetic cost of loving the sea. Now, the universe laughs: you sit outside the Red Lion Pub, crushing a pint of bitter, watching modern, feral British kids jump off that exact same pier completely unsupervised. Meanwhile, their sun-baked parents yell from the beer garden for the family terrier to "shut it now, Davy!" Clovelly has always been a sanctuary for heartbroken elites. Charles Kingsley hid out here after his devastating breakup with Captain George Molesworth. Charles Dickens frequented the village supposedly with a "cousin" who definitely was not his cousin.It is a glorious, vertical rehab where literary icons fled after completely torpedoing their personal lives.  I get it. You come for the raw, untamed romance of a bygone era, you stay because your knees are too shattered to hike back up the hill, and you drown your existential dread in the greasiest burger, chips and pizza this side of the century.