The stagecoach bus drops us where we jumped on yesterday and we make our way down the side street to the seafront.  We now have a good look at the huge, and I mean huge, part completed apartment block between the road and the beach, in varying degrees of completion.  A local man walking his dog stops to give us all the gossip of the developer who took deposits then did a runner with the money before anyone could set up home in their luxury seafront apartments. How sad, for the town and for the potential residents.

The promenade is delightful, backed by colourful beach huts, rock pools galore around a formal sea pool and an inscription made out of cobble stones.  It turns out that Rudyard Kipling attended the United Services College in Westward Ho! at the tender age of 13, where they “fostered his literary ability”. I wander along the writing to read –

“If you can keep you head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for the doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

 

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Pondering on those words we turn around at the end of the promenade and wander into town for breakfast.  Opting for fruit, yogurt, honey and pastries, we sit on the rocky beach and watch the brave surfers. A man is teaching a very young child to surf who comes back to dry off with a massive grin on his face.

The coast path takes us onto Northan Burrows Country Park. It’s difficult to tell from the OS map what to expect but it’s a delightful flat, grassy plain, protected from the sea by a pebble ridge with huge large cobbles.  It seems a somewhat curious combination of golf course and grazing land with no delimiters?

We wander across the park to the delightful visitor centre, stopping for a while to read up on the area and buy gifts for our grandchildren. If we had known, maybe we should have breakfasted in the café? The path circuits the edge of the golf course then we wander over the dunes to the beach.  Oh my, there are a lot of very flat, transparent, jelly fish nestling and wobbling in the sand – yuck!  I keep my shoes on. Everything feels so much flatter this side of Westward Ho! the sea gliding in over the sand.  At the tip of the plains, we struggle back over the massive boulders onto the dunes and round Grey Sand Hill where we stop for a while on a bench overlooking the Skern – a swampy water inlet, the waters calm, cormorants resting on rocks.

Crossing Appledore Bridge we stop to read up about the towers of RAF Northam, part of a World War II radar station, then squidge our way through the sand on the “low tide” route to the grass path to Appledore.  Common mallow, with almost tree like stems line the path into the village.

Fisherman are setting up on the ramp from Appledore Lifeboat station and young families are searching rock pools, the bright orange of one of the lifeboats bobbing in the waters between here and Instow.

The delightful narrow Irsha Street, parallel to the water’s edge with its colourfully painted terraced houses either side takes us passed the Royal George then the Beaver Inn with its own mini golf course.  We are tempted but continue our way into the “little white fishing village” (as described by the author Charles Kinglsey.

We’d popped here for pizza last night and already fallen in love with Appledore’s charm.  We lunch at the newly opened “Johns of Appledore”, sitting on the street beside a red post-box with a knitted (or crocheted?) topper of a 70’s rock band.  I have to say that the homity pie and salad is one of my best lunches ever! Thank you, John.

We finish todays walk here and head over the hill to Marshford Campsite, to chill by our tent in the evening sunshine.  I really don’t want to go home tomorrow.