Midlifing on the South West Coast Path

Zoe Langley-Wathen walked 630 miles around the coastline of Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset – and then she wrote a book about it. 

Music: © Barney & Izzi Hardy 

Transcript

 Peter This week, with the sun shining across Britain and some holidaymakers heading for the seaside, we're exploring the blistering world of long distance walking. To be precise, the 630 miles of the South West Coast Path that winds around Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and Dorset. Schoolteacher, Zoe Langley-Wathen completed it as her first big pedestrian adventure. We caught up with her while she was training for the next one. All 730 miles of it. But that's another story. Let's begin at the beginning of all this. Zoe, welcome to the show.

Zoe Thank you. It's lovely to be here.

Felice You've written several books, but the book we're talking about today and you've written most recently, is 630 Miles Braver: Midlifing on the South West Coast Path.

Peter Now, of course, that's a very topical subject at the moment because of the film The Salt Path, which is in on general release everywhere. And I think they did that after way after you.

Zoe I walked in 2011 to mark my fortieth birthday, and I believe Raynor and Moth walked the Salt Path, the South West Coast Path in either 2014 or 2016. I forget which year it was, but it was a little bit after. I think it might have been 2016, but really it was a way of marking my rite of passage into middle age. I didn't plan for it to be that.

I knew I wanted to do a challenge, an adventure that would kind of mark that special coming into turning forty. And I looked at lots of things. I looked at walking the Inca Trail, I looked at climbing Kilimanjaro and various other things. And although there are things that I would like to do one day, it just didn't seem to connect with me. For my fortieth, I wanted something that somehow resonated with me who I am and where I've grown up. And I just needed that connection.

I had a very strange moment. I'd call it a moment of divine intervention, and I write about it in the book where I walk into a store. It was a branch of Waterstones in Wells in Somerset, and it was like a shaft of light coming down onto a shelf, and there it was in all its glory. The South West Coast Path Handbook and it's like, 'Oh my gosh, yes.' I had wanted to walk that path for over fifteen years and never thought I was capable of doing it. So for some reason, I told myself that I wasn't athletic enough, I wasn't strong enough, I wasn't somehow as gritty and manly as the guys that can go along and walk it and carry these big rucksacks. I just didn't think I was enough in any capacity and had just squished the idea before it even had a chance to blossom.

Peter As you say on the title, it is 630 miles. I suppose that you take in every bend of the path. That's a very long way, isn't it?

Zoe It is a very long way. But do you know, it's interesting because I think before you've walked a long distance path, you tend to look at these mileages. The Wales Coast Path is 870 miles. If you walk Land's End to John O'Groats, it's also 870 miles, funnily enough, depending on which way you go. But it seems like such a grand number that is out of reach. But actually I feel that walking a long distance path like that, a multi-day hike day-in, day-out, is somehow easier in terms of endurance than running a marathon, because running 26 miles within a time period and sometimes you have a cut-off on that time period. Sometimes you've only got five or six hours to do it, and some people are super-fast and can do it in two and a half. But the strain that puts on your body and the mind games. The mental challenge of actually getting through that is really tough.

I'm not saying that walking 630 miles is easy, because it wasn't by any means. I had my own set of challenges sore feet, blisters, facing the fears that I carried with me that I didn't realise I had. You know, when you walk something like this, it doesn't just expose blisters, but it exposes all of these. I don't want to say lies, but all these things that you tell yourself.

Peter Well, of course you had one quite serious worry there. You're afraid of heights.

Zoe Yes, that is quite a big one. Funnily enough, I was walking down near Corfe Castle yesterday. I went out with my sister-in-law. She's nearly seventy and she'd lost her confidence a little bit. So we went off on a six-mile walk and she was facing her fear of heights too, and it brought it all back for me. I admitted to her during this walk that there were a couple of occasions where I actually scaled barbed-wire fences to avoid having to walk close to the cliff top, because it was such a narrow path.

I don't want to put anybody off who's thinking about walking the South West Coast Path, because it's not like this all the way along, but there were a couple of very narrow stretches, and I thought for me personally, I didn't like that. Or it might have been that the path reaches the brow of the hill and then it looks like it falls away, but actually it doesn't really. You know what it's like when you're walking in mountains or you're going up, up, up, and then it looks like it just shelves away. If I had carried on and walked up that path, I would have probably seen it contour round into a much more manageable path.

So I've had two occasions where I've climbed over barbed wire fences. One of those actually was to escape cows, a very large herd of rare breed cattle. This was at Clovelly and they had all decided to shelter from a storm underneath the trees, which was right on the path. So I took a very wide berth around them and ended up going over some barbed wire. But there's all sorts of little stories like that.

Felice Where did your walk begin?

Zoe I began at Minehead. So for those people who aren't aware of where the South West Coast Path is, Minehead is in Somerset. It's on the northern coastline of the south west of England, and then it follows the coastline down into Devon. So North Devon, which is very rugged, very beautiful and then into Cornwall. So you go down through Bude and way on down to Padstow and Zennor and into Land's End, and then you turn and you go around the toe of Cornwall and follow along the south coast of the south west of England. So that takes you through to where Cornwall meets Devon, which is the River Tamar and Plymouth. Then you walk South Devon, which is very, very different to North Devon. South Devon has a much more commercial feel to it and they call it the Riviera, sort of all around Torquay, in that area. And then it comes into Dorset. Dorset has the heritage coastline, the Jurassic Coast, which I think is 90 miles from Exmouth to Poole and it finishes in Poole. Poole, is the second largest natural harbour in the world.

Peter Which is where you were living at the time?

Zoe It was like I was walking home and it really that does change the way you think about things. So at the moment I turned from Land's End and started walking back eastwards again. That had an incredible impact on the way I felt about the walk. Not only was the sun on a different side of me during the day, which was quite odd, it just it felt like a completely different walk, but it also gave me a renewed sense of purpose and confidence because I suddenly felt like this was possible. I'd managed that first couple of hundred miles and I was feeling into it by them.

Felice How long did the whole walk take you?

Zoe 48 days. I think probably now I probably could do it in a shorter time. But then you have to ask the question, why do you want to walk something quicker? Are you doing it to say I've walked it in the quickest speed? Or are you doing it because you're aiming to get onto another walk afterwards, or are you walking it to enjoy it? So it was my first walk. I was a novice long-distance walker. I had some help from various people saying, ‘Oh, come and stay with me.’ I had an offer of nine days in Redruth, and it was the parents of a couple of old school friends of mine, and they put me up. It was only supposed to be for one night, and then when I got up the next morning, they said to me, ‘Zoe, we would like to offer you a way of sponsoring you, but by picking you up and taking you out to where you left off the night before will feed you. You can have a bed for the night and baths.’

I got foot massages, it was that was really lovely. And there's always a part of me that thinks perhaps it would have been better to have stayed out and experienced the sunrises and sunsets, but at the same time that it was absolutely fabulous. It was what I needed at that moment. And yes, lead really does give the best foot massages when you've got sore feet. So, the kindness of strangers, I think when you're on a long distance challenge like that, the kindness of strangers never ever ceases to amaze me and humble me. It's really quite special.

Peter And of course, your boyfriend at the time got you on the road...on the path, so to speak.

Zoe Yes, yes. So we had a camper van and he met me. He would just let me carry on. I'd walk and do my nine miles, ten miles, fifteen miles. It gradually increased each day, but I didn't feel like it was increasing enough. I think again, it was because I was still quite new at it. So for the first two weeks he met me at the end and then we would drive off somewhere, park the camper van and stay. And that then became a whole new walk, a whole new challenge and a whole new headspace to get myself into, to adjust to when he left and he had to go back home to get back to work. That was quite tricky.

Peter Suddenly on your own...

Zoe. Yes, that was one of one of the fears was what, not just camping on my own, but actually as a woman it might sound ridiculous to some people, but walking on my own, because I think growing up I'd always had people to walk with. And then as a mum, I'd always had children to walk with. Then as a partner, you have your partner to walk with, and I don't think I'd ever had a situation where I had actually been out and walked any length of time on my own, maybe around the park. But even then, I know a lot of people, a lot of women that say they feel uncomfortable about doing that and they feel like they should have a dog or a child or a friend in tow. So that was something to get my head around. And there were numerous other hang-ups that I discovered that I was carrying in my rucksack.

Felice Give us an idea of those.

Zoe Okay.

Peter So your first wild camping days thinking about it, but couldn't quite pluck up the courage to just park your tent somewhere.

Zoe Yes, maybe there's a whole childhood here of the dark going on there. Although I'm not frightened of the dark. But there's something about the bogeyman. Fairytale stories. I'm a storyteller anyway, so maybe I've got an overactive imagination and that just creeps in. So certainly the camping wild, having to drop my tent somewhere where I wasn't surrounded by the security and the safety of other campers or a boundary, was tricky and it took me thirty-five days to pluck up the courage to do that.

It was not far from the Gribbin de Mark tower, and I had just reached a point where I knew I couldn't carry on, I didn't know where I was going to pitch and I just had to think to myself, it's getting towards dusk. I need to find somewhere that's suitable that I'm happy with. I ended up dropping between a five-bar gate and a kissing gate, with just not even a metre to spare between me and the footpath. I was just squished in, sandwiched, but deep down, subconsciously I felt secure because I was surrounded by the gates. It made me feel just a bit more comfortable.

But do you know, there was a feeling that I had in the middle of the night that a lot of people will recognise that telltale tingle in my bladder that told me about 3:00 in the morning I needed to get out, to go to the toilet, and I put it off and put it off because I didn't want to go out and face the blackness.

I didn't know what I was going to see. It just felt scary. When I realised I couldn't put it off any longer, I unzipped the tent and just remember gasping the beauty of that sky. It was an inky black sky that was decorated with more stars than I'd ever seen in my life. And I was just open-mouthed. And I promised myself in that moment that I would never pass up the opportunity to walk and wild camp ever again, because I felt like I'd got to forty and never experienced that, and I felt like I'd missed out. So yes, that was a very special moment. I think I would like to say that was probably a turning point for me in terms of my own resilience and confidence, you know, that had built up so much more strength inside me from that moment onwards.

Felice Did anything go wrong?

Zoe I don't think I've ever been asked that one before. That's an interesting one. I'm sure lots of things went wrong. I certainly left my walking poles behind numerous times. That's just me all over. I've had other trips since where I've actually ended up losing my walking poles. Not only did I leave my walking poles in various places and have to go back for them.

Peter Now, sadly, your grandmother died while you were on the walk.

Zoe It was incredibly sad and I had hoped I would be able to get back to see her, but I didn't want to go and see her before I left because I was poorly. I was carrying a chesty cough and I didn't think it would do her any good. So I had to go back to Bristol for her funeral. And then I left Poole five days later to come back to Boscastle, which is where I had left off.

I was on the train coming out of Poole and I realised I had left my walking poles back at the house and I really did give myself a good talking-to about that, that I was so cross because that had a knock-on effect. I was hoping to walk from Boscastle to Port Isaac the following day in time to go and hear the fisherman's friends sing, because they used to sing down in the harbour every Friday evening. I knew I timed it right for that, but I had somebody send me my walking poles by special delivery to Boscastle post office, and I had to wait until midday or 1:00 for them to arrive. And so there was no way I was going to make it to Port Isaac then. So that that was a bit of a downer, obviously – as well as losing Nan, which was incredibly sad, but she was 94, so she'd done well. I can't think of anything else other than blisters, nothing. I'm sure there probably were other things.

Peter You realise that you got a lot of the wrong kit on too much kit?

Zoe Oh, gosh...yes I think…and again, that's the delights of being a novice long-distance walker. You go into an outdoor shop and they're rubbing their hands with glee, ‘Let's get you kitted out with every possible thing that they can squeeze into your bag.’

So I had every gadget and gizmo possible, right down to a frying pan. I had a little travel frying pan with a folding handle, titanium. It was lightweight, but it was bulky, and a plastic box that held two eggs. It was a purpose-made egg box to hold two eggs. I had this idyllic dream that I was going to walk along the coast path. I was going to stumble across a farmhouse, and I was going to knock on the door, and the farmer's wife would answer and I'd say, ‘Can I buy two eggs, please?’

I just had this whole picture that it was going to be so romantic. And I don't know, it's like something out of storybooks, isn't it? And of course, that didn't happen, and it was one of the first things that got sent home.

I did have a contraption that was quite small, but it turned my inflatable mattress into a seat, which is quite a clever contraption. But again, that ended up getting sent home because it was a bit of a faff trying to blow up your mattress just enough that you could then fold it into this thing. And to be honest, I was always so tired. I just wanted to get into my tent, eat, write my logbook, and then sleep. As much as I would have loved to have sat outside the tent and enjoyed the sunset, watching the scenery, the stark reality of it is there is housekeeping to attend to, and one of those is make sure your journal is written. The other one is make sure your tent is up and secure and everything's tidy, and looking after blisters that can take a while, and then just getting the sleep in. Because when you have walked twelve, fifteen, eighteen miles, you are tired. There's no doubt about that. So yes, there were quite a few things that I ended up sending home and it was a good learning curve.

Felice What about the weather? How was that?

Zoe Across forty-eight days, you can pretty much guarantee you're going to get all sorts. I walked in July and August, so the majority of the weather was pretty good, but my raincoat did get a testing on a few days. But I would say I didn't get as much in the way of torrential weather torrential rain that year as I did the year after it got to testing, but nothing too bad. There were no sort of four-seasons-in-one day days, thankfully.

Peter I think you had the odd day when it was so windy that it was dangerous?

Zoe You're right. Yes. There was one of those windy days. In fact, there were a couple of windy days that happened together, and that was right before the funeral, and I was really quite fearful for my safety. Having ignored again the foolhardiness of a novice walker. I had people, local people kept saying to me, be careful, we've got weather warnings. There's 50/60-mile-an-hour winds coming in, and this was in July. I just I guess I just thought, ‘Oh, how bad can it be? It's England. It'll be fine.’

I don't know what I was thinking, but anyway, I did carry on and oh my goodness, this the wind buffeted me on top of Highcliffe, which is the highest point of the South West Coast Path. It was at that point where I started realising that, okay, I feel like I may have bitten off more than I can chew. I don't know how I'm going to manage the rest of the path if I can't cope with this.

I met a couple of walkers, I was hunkered down on the top of the hill, holding on to my poles, digging my poles in, and the wind was beating me from every side. Then this couple just walked up with a couple of, I think they were vizslas the dogs, but I just thought, how were they standing upright? Not just the dogs, but the people.

You know, it was like they were just walking normally anyway, so I asked them if I could walk down with them. They said, ‘Yes, come on.’ That was fine. So that was good.

But it was at that point that I started thinking, ‘I really need to consider how I'm going to get back from the funeral.’ And I wasn't sure at that point whether I was going to be able to. But I think the weather actually, that gave me the impetus that I needed because there was no way I could carry on walking in that safely unless I walked inland. And I just thought, ‘Zoe, this is just ridiculous. You have got to go back to say goodbye.’

And there shouldn't have been any question, but I guess again, I was scared about how I was going to get back. But you navigate, it happens. It took me ten hours to get back from Boscastle to Poole on the train, a couple of buses and a train. But I did it and I'm so pleased I did it. You know, I have no regrets now from that.

Felice Did you decide to write your book before you went, or did you keep a journal? And then years later, obviously, you wrote the book?

Zoe Yes, it was more the latter. Although I have always wanted to write, I've always been a storyteller. I've always been somebody who enjoys writing. Numbers aren't my thing. Words are. And so I think I kept the diary just in case, knowing that I would do something with it.

I was writing a blog whilst I was walking, and unfortunately about three years later some things happened, some personal things happened and I allowed the subscription to my website slip and I lost the blog. So that was a really hard lesson learned, because there would have been a lot of real time thoughts and feelings that would have been imparted into that. But now I had the journal, which I was able to draw on.

I think what happened if you fast forward to 2019, I had a skiing accident, I was a novice skier. Fear of heights again, something I'd never done before. But before I left the school that I was working in as a teacher, I decided that it would be really, really good to see if I could get on to the ski trip, their annual ski trip, just to say that I had a go at skiing. I think you're skiers, aren't you? So this was a whole new thing for me. And on day four of ski school, I'd not been doing too badly, I'd been enjoying it bar a couple of hairy moments on icy slopes. But yes, it was all part of the learning.

Our student…we were all standing, waiting to go down a green slope. And I was standing in snowplough, and we're all lining up. And this last student came round next to me, and the front of her skis, knocked the back of my skis and sent me down. As I went down, my legs splayed out and I heard a pop and it was my left knee. I had torn my ACL and my MCL, and partly dislocated my kneecap. So I had ski bob rescue and down to the nearest medical centre, and that was my ski school done for the year.

I was flown home on a different flight because they had to find somewhere that had a big enough space for me, for my leg that was now in this big brace. And when I was at home, a friend of mine in the running club that I was in brought me a couple of books to read. She said, ‘I know you've got a few weeks off work now and you're probably going to be bored, but here's some books.’

One of those books was The Salt Path, and I'd heard about it the previous year because it was published in 2018. And I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I must read that.’ This was my opportunity to sit down and read it whilst I was feeling sorry for myself. I absolutely just embraced every word. In fact, I think I cried in the first chapter and then I just couldn't put it down. And I knew by the time I reached the end of Raynor’s book that I had a story to tell, too, and I kept seeing similarities.

Some of the descriptions that she was using I connected with, not because I'd necessarily experienced the same thing, but because I just understood where she was coming from and that feeling of being more connected to nature, and that feeling of being stared at like an alien, because you look scruffy and dirty. You may not have washed for nine days. Yes, they're all sorts of things that I connected with and I just thought, I need to tell my story.

Then the opportunity came in 2020 with a group that I'm involved with online on Facebook called The Yes Tribe. One of the members had put out a call. I forget if it was just before or just after lockdown. I think it was just after lockdown and he put out a request for people who wanted to tell their story to go into a book. So it was a 5,000 word chapter and I thought, ‘This is it, this is my opportunity.’ So that actually I haven't published any other books, but I had a part in this anthology of adventure stories. And then because it was being sold for charity, he then asked if there was anybody who wanted to illustrate a chapter. I'm an artist, so I was able to illustrate my own chapter, and then I held my hand up and said, ‘Yes, I would love to help market the book as well,’ because I just thought, this is a really good experience for me.

So that was my first foray into adventure writing. And I realised after 5,000 words that there needed to be an unabridged version. So 109,000 words later, 630 Miles Braver landed.

Felice And did you paint the cover? Is the cover your picture?

Zoe It is.

Felice And the little pictures of boots?

Zoe Yes. They're mine too.

Felice Oh that's great.

Peter You started the book, as I've already mentioned, with your boyfriend at the time, Ross, getting you on the path. And he was there to meet you at the end. But during the walk, you met some other people. Am I not right in thinking that?

Zoe Yes I did. They were quite the family, quite the trail family. I've walked a lot of paths since, and it's not often that you meet such a special group of people who then end up staying in touch with you. So Artie, I think, was probably the first chap that I met. And Artie's like a mountain goat. I mean, he just walks and walks and walks and talks and talks too. He's very good at that. And we love him to bits.

The first time I met him, I wasn't in a good headspace and I needed to actually pull back. I stopped to go to the toilet and we went our separate ways. I stayed back at Watergate Bay and I thought, ‘I hope I meet him again at some point,’ but I just couldn't do the chatter because I felt like I was missing what was around me as well. That sounds a bit mean, but no, that's sometimes what happens if you've had not had such a good night and you need just need some space. So yes, I met Artie. Artie is now coming up, I think seventy-seven or seventy-eight, and it might be this year that he actually ends up walking the South West Coast Path for the thirtieth time.

Felice Thirtieth. Wow.

Zoe Thirtieth, yes. There should be a whole book just about Artie. And it's funny because I've read somebody else's book and there's Artie mentioned in there in her book, and he's like, oh my goodness, this is my Artie or our Artie. So yes, it was special. Then I did meet with Artie again and walked with him for a day, and it was fabulous. And we stopped off for a drink at Zennor, and we bumped into Mike, and Mike became a close friend and walking buddy as well.

And then as time passed, things didn't….there's a bit of a spoiler alert here…but I don't mention it in the book because that's going to come in a later book. But Ross and I…things happen and we go our separate ways. And unbeknown to me, there's a new relationship on the horizon that that neither of us had seen coming. My walking buddy, Mike, who had who had given me so much gip and so much trouble about not being a real camper.

Peter When you were doing the walk, which the book is about, you had no idea the way that Mike was going to become your husband?

Zoe No, no. Absolutely not. Neither of us would have ever entertained that idea. There were times he irritated me, but there were also times where we would walk together and we would have incredible conversations. But that's all. They were just really deep and meaningful conversations. And that happens a lot with other people I walk with, too, because that whole nature of walking side by side with somebody in nature is almost like this open ticket to bare your soul. Share your past, your future, your fears, your joys with a complete stranger. It just happens. I've had it happen a lot with other people talking to me, too.

So no, it never even occurred to us. We walked the Wales Coast Path the following year. So that's what the second book will be about is the Wales Coast Path 870 miles. And it was me, Steve and Mike that walked that and again, just walking buddies there, never any inkling that we were anything other than more like that brother-sister relationship. You look out for one another, you care about one another, but no romantic inclinations at all.

Peter That came later.

Zoe It did come later. Yes. And it was definitely a bolt out of the blue and like, whoa, what's that all about? And we actually, we avoided one another when we both realised there was just a little something there that we weren't quite sure, but it was a bit scary. We avoided one another for about six months. It's like, no, no…arm's length. Not sure about that.

Felice What are your plans for the future? Have you got another walk in mind?

Zoe Oh yes we have, and it's a massive one. So in October, Mike and I are heading off to walk the coast of mainland Great Britain. It's something we've both wanted to do for a long time. And he came to me last year and he said, ‘Zoe, we want to walk the coastline. If we don't go soon, I might never get the chance to do it.’ So I should say now there's nineteen years’ difference between Mike and I. So that was another reason why we held each other at arm's reach for so long, because we were perhaps a bit concerned about the age gap. So he's seventy-three and I'm fifty-four. I can understand where he's coming from. I don't want to regret that. We've never done that walk that we always wanted to do when we had the opportunity.

He also said, ‘I don't it could be my body lets me down, or it could be my mind lets me down.’ I think Alzheimer's, dementia is a concern for him because it's in the family. And he said, ‘I just don't want to be sat in front of the fire. One day in my eighties, thinking I wished I'd done that.’

Felice How far is it?

Zoe So we've estimated it at 730 miles.

Felice How long will it take you to do it?

Zoe We're estimating two years. Other people can do it much quicker. But Mike has two new hips. And so we want to make sure we enjoy it, that we're safe, that we are doing it at a pace that suits us. So we're allowing twelve miles a day for England, eight miles a day for Scotland, and then eight miles a day for the South West Coast Path. Because that wraps it up comes full circle. We're doing the South West Coast Path last because it's where we met, because it's our favourite walk, because we're raising money for Dorset and Somerset Air Ambulance, and because there's a lot of family and friends that live here too. So it's a special walk. We're saving the best till last and hopefully we'll have lots of people come and walk with us.

Peter Thank you very much for talking to us, and we wish you the very best of luck with your enormous adventure to come.

Zoe Thank you so much, Peter, and thank you, Felice. This has been an honour to be on your podcast. I've really enjoyed it.

Felice How can people find out more? Where can they buy your book?

Zoe So you can find my book on Amazon: 630 Miles Braver. It's available in a few selected independent shops.

Peter If you want to give sponsorship money, how do we do that?

Zoe So if you go to Head Right Out, on all the socials and my website, you'll find more information there.