A millimetre of sea
'...and it was nearly done, this frail travelling coincidence; and what it held stood ready to be loosed with all the power that being changed can give'.
I rarely, if ever, travelled by train as a child. My Dad would take us on trips in the car to places nearby for picnics and days out, and we’d drive to go on holiday too. When I went to university, I used to get the National Express coach from Victoria Coach Station to Bristol Bus Station during reading weeks and for the holidays, sometimes loaded down with Christmas presents. Car and coach as methods of travel have their definite advantages, but nothing beats sitting on a train watching the landscape whizzing by, as I discovered in my twenties. My husband loves train travel too, and for many years we didn’t drive or own a car, so all our journeys were made by train or bus, including visits to see his family in Cornwall and a few holidays down there too.
The train journey down from London to Cornwall is one of the most scenic the UK has to offer. Departing from Paddington, the train to Penzance emerges from urban sprawl somewhere after Reading, and parts of the Kennet and Avon canal and the Wessex Downs come into view. There is more than one chalk hill figure visible through the windows as you pass, but the one which is closest to the train is the Westbury White Horse. After Westbury, the train passes on into Somerset and through the Somerset Levels. Some might find Somerset a little dull, but it has a special place in my heart (part of my family were from the Mendips and we had many family outings here when I was a child). You can just about see Glastonbury Tor from the Great Western mainline on a clear day, although the mound called Barrow Mump with a ruined church at the top is more easily spotted, and you can see the great channels carved into the landscape to draw off the water.
Not long after, you’re in Devon and the train travels through Exeter, where you can see the two towers of Exeter Cathedral in the distance above the city. The train runs partly in parallel with the estuary and the Exeter Ship Canal to Starcross, where the estuary meets the sea, and beyond that, to the coast. For me this is the best bit of the journey, as the mainline runs so close to the water here, and the view changes with the seasons, the weather and the tides. Skeletal wrecks, cockle-pickers, mudflats, wading birds, sailing boats, Exmouth in the distance, and then the wide blue sea with long breakwaters as you arrive in Dawlish. The train runs through tunnels and round the bends of the red cliffs which make up the coastline to Teignmouth, before turning to run alongside the Teign Estuary to Newton Abbot and Totnes. From here the views are not quite as exciting, although you can see parts of Dartmoor from Ivybridge and there are plenty of rolling hills. The train travels through Plymouth with its long rows of terraced houses to Saltash and the spectacular bridge over the Tamar, where you can look through the iron girdars of the bridge to the wide stretches of water below and see dozens of tiny boats at anchor in the broad river.
I always feel a special intake of breath as I cross the Tamar and arrive in Cornwall. Although the train now travels inland, there are still things worth looking at, such as the little town of St Germans. When the train reaches Truro, there’s a wonderful view of Truro Cathedral (this features in a recent GWR ad campaign). At last, if you’re travelling all the way, the train pulls into Penzance, but before it does so, there are views of St Michael’s Mount to your left and the sea. Penzance feels not just like the end of the line but the edge of the world (even though we all know that’s really Land’s End…).
I can remember the first few times I made this journey down to Cornwall and back again to London, which means I can remember the first time I was ‘in’ Dawlish. I remember on sunny days seeing people swimming not far fron the trainline. I remember a glowing full moon’s light reflected in a wide remarkably still summer sea. The first time I visited this little seaside town properly, however, was in 2019 when we were thinking of moving down to Devon and we caught a train down from Exeter. The proximity of the shingle beach to the train station is one of the town’s most notable features: what I call a really good train/beach ratio. The knowledge that if I moved to Exeter, I’d never be that far from the sea, was one of the things that made me want to move here.
Time passed (five years in fact). When we were looking at houses (and we looked at so many) we mostly looked in Exeter, but towards the end of the house searching, we looked at a couple of houses in Teignmouth and Dawlish. The main reason we ended up here is pragmatic if not prosaic - Exeter is quite expensive, so you get more for your money down here, and the local trains mean you’re not too reliant on a car, which seemed a good thing. But I remember going to see a place up a steep hill in Teignmouth, seeing this streak of shining blue in the distance visible from the upper rooms of the house and thinking - this. This.
As a matter of fact, we don’t have much of a sea view. You can just about see a millimetre of sea from our bedroom window, especially on a clear day. But we are just over ten minutes away from the sea, near enough to see the sea every day, and to walk on the beach most days. When the winter winds were blowing and the waves were crashing against the seawall, you could just about hear the sea in the distance, even from just outside our house. But I’m happy to say that we are far enough (and uphill enough) not to be worried about flooding. Dawlish is pretty famous for the flooded trainline, and it is worth saying that the beach disappears under the high tide. Somehow the ebb and flow of these tides become a very natural feature of life here in no time at all. (But I do have an app on my phone to check the times).
I am sure I will write a lot more about this landscape and the places we are exploring in the next while, but before I did that, I just wanted to mark this putting down of roots in this place. Ending up here is what Larkin would call ‘this frail travelling coincidence’. It is as though we had just happened to have stepped off a train one day and then decided to buy a house there. Perhaps we will move house again in no time at all, or maybe we will spend the rest of our lives here. I am not sure it actually matters. At the moment though, it seems to make sense in some deeper way I am struggling to articulate. It is not just this particular spot, but the wider landscape that now feels like home, the Exe Estuary in particular, the whole coast from Exmouth to Teignmouth and beyond. Even the moor, which can seem quite distant, is only about half an hour way by car. Between the coast and the moor are the Haldon Hills, a mix of scrubland and forest, which makes up this pocket of England.
On Sundays, usually as the light fades, I leave the house for some fresh air and a last stretch of the legs before the week is over. I walk up the very steep hill just behind our house. If you turn around here, you can see the Exe Estuary behind you, as far as Exmouth, and the red cliffs which mark the beginning of the Jurassic Coast. Sometimes the setting sun catches the distant headland just so, and as twilight descends you can see the glimmering lights of Exmouth. Sometimes you can see a lighthouse in the distance or ships. In those moments, instead of feeling like this is just one more trivial minute of a passing day, it feels like it means something to be alive.
P.S. with apologies to my subscribers for the long delay in writing. It has been a time.
Fab post, Elizabeth which really tugged at my nostalgia response. Many years spent in Cornwall!