conservation-and-private-camps

It begins, as these journeys often do, with a wrong turn. The road we had marked on the map narrowed to a track, the track to a footpath, and by the time the rain came in off the hills there was nothing for it but to keep walking until something — a village, an inn, a stranger with a key — appeared on the far side.

This is the part of travelling we keep coming back to in the Journal: not the well-known places, but the half-hour after you have left them behind. The villages a valley over from the famous one. The harbour two coves down from the photographed one. The hour spent waiting for a bus that, you eventually realise, stopped running for the season three weeks ago.

"The destinations we remember best are almost never the ones we set out to find. They are the ones we arrived at, slightly damp, after the original plan failed."

There is a kind of travel that is best measured not in distance but in patience — in the willingness to sit for an afternoon in a square where nothing happens, to take the slow train when the fast one is available, to eat what the kitchen happens to be cooking rather than what the menu lists.

What follows is a short account of one such week, walked in early spring across a stretch of coast we will not name precisely (the innkeepers asked us not to, and we agreed). The route is rough; the inns are small; the season is short. None of that, we think, is a problem.

If you find yourself there — and a few of you will — please be kind to the village shop. It is also the post office, the bus stop, and, on Tuesdays, the bar.