Stile guru

A challenging 3 mile walk around Lee and Borough Valley today which the boy loved. Got his new walking shoes satisfyingly muddy.

In previous Augusts since we moved to Devon, we've tended to hunker down and avoid going out much, to avoid the crush of tourists. Of course, we appreciate what tourism does for the local economy, and we understand why so many people want to come and visit this part of the world - but it's easy to feel a little overrun sometimes. With no house to hunker down in this summer, we ventured out today to Lee on the coast near Ilfracombe. It was my first sight of August Saturday traffic around Barnstaple. In a word: busy. Saturday is changeover day for the cottages and caravan parks, so lots of people were heading home after their week away.

Lee was an odd place. We parked in the car park by the bay, where the pay and display machine had been knocked over and was rusting among the nettles. The village is almost entirely holiday homes. The permanent resident population must be quite close to zero. Everything is overly prettified and perfect, for well-heeled visitors in their conspicuously clean Land Rovers. It has a nice pub (where we had lunch) and a 'traditional crafts' shop selling factory-made tat, mostly involving lighthouses or puffins, for those with maritime pretensions. Dominating the waterfront is a monstrously ugly hotel which looked like it was built in the 1980s in the Surrey suburban style - totally out of keeping with the local area. It was also built at the foot of a small inland cliff and successive landslips were clearly starting to push the building over. It was abandoned, fenced off, derelict and for sale. Sad.

Our walk involved a long steep climb, several stretches through thick brambles and undergrowth, a long steep descent and a final stage through mud. Apart from a Dutch family (parents and a daughter of about 8) we saw no one else. Everyone else was presumably on the beach, or in a traffic jam on their way home.