A lighthouse trip, July 2013

I may be a little behind on my trip blogs. Well, just the one big trip unposted. While I get round to that, here's a quick update on a couple of day walks from a stay in this National Trust property, an old lighthouse-keeper's cottage. Walks which start from the cottage can be hard work, as it's a hefty climb just to get up to the coastal path (or indeed, the local pub). Day One, therefore, didn't start from the cottage, but from County Gate down to Lynton along the Brendon Valley. Mainly downhill, with a couple of pubs along the way. Day Two was a bit more hard-core as it started from the lighthouse and went east along the coastal path to the turn-off to Brendon Weir. The plan was always to stop there, but since it turned out to be Weirfest weekend, featuring a beer festival and a skiffle band complete with washboard and tea-chest bass, I think we'd have made a pit stop even if we hadn't done almost ten miles with a fair bit of climbing. Tennis stopped play on day 3, as nobody wanted to be away from the television for the Wimbledon men's final, but we had an entertaining morning watching porpoises breaching anyway (no pictures of those as they were too far out). Here's a route image with some contour lines:

Route image and elevation for the first day:

and the second day:

I have posted some photos on flickr. Here's a taster:

which is a little less exciting than it looks at first glance; to the right, you can see one of the lighthouse beams falling across the grass of the foreland. I thought what you could see to the left was another beam, but actually it's the lights that help you navigate 59 steps from the car park to the entrance. The beam is impressively narrow; the light source is a high-efficiency bulb of less than 10W power, but a Fresnel lens of a few meters in size focuses it so sharply that it's visible from Wales.