Why does it always feel like the clock is ticking faster on New Year’s Eve?

Despite an early start to deposit a car in Torquay, we end up wasting time walking to the ferry port and gazing across the estuary to the ferries on Shaldon Beach. After half an hours wait we decide the ferry is not moving today and walk up river to the Teignmouth and Shaldon Bridge. When built in 1827 this bridge was the longest wooden bridge in England, since then it has been through many changes and today we are certainly thankful for its existence.

Shaldon is a pretty little village with an exceptional coffee shop (Strand Cafe), where we enjoy fresh leaf tea and scones before embarking on the coastal path to Torquay. It’s gone midday already, what did I say? We only have four hours of daylight left of 2019!

The Ness pub looks very inviting but onwards and upwards for us now – the path goes round the wooded headland and what we think must be the zoo before running between the cliff top and a golf course with a caravan site in the distance. The next climb up a grassy hillside affords us a wonderful view looking back to Ness Cove beach and Teignmouth.

The path detours up to the road for a short stretch and around a couple of properties – one house owner has recently massacred a row of trees on the edge of the property, as a tree hugger I am very disheartened, but I guess they had their reasons? More steep, but very well-made steps, up to a field where we stop briefly to enjoy the view and try and make out which headland we are heading for… the terrain is very up and down, sometimes single track, sometimes open fields. We stop at the top of a field marked Commons Plantation on the OS map for a snack. There are horses in this field – a conservation trust brings them on holiday here from Dartmoor to graze these fields. They hilariously chase my sister out of their field – don’t think she has run so fast since cross country lessons at school, many years ago! But they appear to being just very friendly.

There are various interpretation boards welcoming us to Maidencombe, an area farmed organically by a local trust and home to a rare little farmland bird called a Cirl Bunting, which sadly we don’t see. It is also home to the Thatched Inn, had we more daylight hours and had it not been recently gutted by a fire, we may have stopped. The pathway skirts around some pretty dwellings, a car park, a closed toilet block before many more up and down steps through The Valley of Rocks, around Torquay golf club and detouring up to the main road close to the village of Babbacombe and its model village. Our discussion goes into the realms of “why build a model village?”

A gentle slope through a grass and scrubland area takes us to just above Oddicombe beach with its own cliff railway. The sun is rapidly going down on 2019, and the near on 100-year-old funicular railway is not running. Our heart sinks as we take the path inland beside the track, but thankfully there is a short cut under the track and back down towards the sea and the meandering road.

The OS map says there is a theatre in this little community, but we only see a few houses and a pub before we enter the woodlands. The sun is well and truly going down now as the path pops out onto a grassy headland, in the dusk we are unsure of the route over but are soon back amongst trees before arriving on the road below the Palace Hotel and our car in the little car park.

Time to nurse our weary legs and celebrate the end of 2019 and start of 2020.