5th – 8th September and 18th – 22nd September 2022

I created this blog for my daughters, so that they could view the photos they requested I take as I tramped around. I wish with some melancholy that I’d taken a camera on previous walks – memory fades so quickly.
The start was lovely and gentle. The sun came out and the path ahead was kind to me, unused to anything other than a few miles now and then.
Within a few minutes all humankind had disappeared and would not return until I neared the end of my first day’s goal. Apart that is, from a nonagenarian who surprised me in a remote region of Marine Drive. He would shamble forward a couple of steps, wobble a bit for balance and repeat. I don’t know where he came from, but he still had a fair distance to go to any form of civilisation. My thought, calling ‘Hello. Lovely day,’ as we passed was, I hope that is the ghost of my Christmas future, still going strong at ninety – albeit slowly.
I was in the zone. That marvellous thing had happened earlier, and I was feeling good. There is a moment, usually a short time after you’ve just gotten your second wind, when you relax. The state of your body is irrelevant. Your consciousness changes and the drudgery, the day-to-day, habit and labour, falls away. It is a spiritual thing, provided that we are talking of our own spirit. An uplifting and a fitting-in is the best way I can describe it. If you are lucky enough to not have the pleasure of any other human contact during your walk you feel as in the wilderness, connected to the primordial experience of most of our ancestors, roaming the land gathering and hunting. Gathering memories and hunting the experience, being our way of it in the modern-day world.
A word of warning for those who might stumble on this before attempting this walk. The way of the gull is aptly named, there are places on the cliff tops with very narrow paths, bordered by no rails and a vertiginous drop to the sea.