Bedruthan Steps

Stop here a moment and look down. Below you, a line of vast rock stacks marches across a wide golden beach, each one rising sheer from the sand like a stepping-stone left by something enormous. High cliffs curve away on either side. This is Bedruthan Steps, one of the most dramatic stretches of coast in all of north Cornwall.

The stacks are the survivors. Once, all of this was solid cliff. But the sea is patient and endlessly hungry, and over unimaginable spans of time it has gnawed away the softer rock, leaving only the hardest outcrops of slate and sandstone standing proud of the beach. The cliffs themselves are folded Devonian strata, laid down as layers of mud and sand on an ancient sea floor, then crumpled and buckled by the slow collision of continents long before any human eye admired them. Look closely at a cliff face and you can still trace those folds, bent like the pages of a warped book. What you are looking at is simply erosion, caught in the act — a work still in progress, and one that will one day, in the fullness of geological time, carry these stacks away too.

But rock alone was never enough for the Victorians. They gave these stacks a story. A giant, they said, named Bedruthan, once used them as stepping-stones to stride along the coast. It is a wonderful tale, and almost certainly a nineteenth-century invention, dreamed up to lure sightseers who had begun arriving in ever greater numbers. The very name, and the steep staircase cut into the cliff, belong to that age of tourism. Today the National Trust cares for these cliffs, and the coast path runs right along the top.

Now, let me point out some things to look for. First, the stacks themselves — count them as they step out across the beach. At low tide, with the full sweep of sand exposed, they are at their most theatrical, and at sunset they turn to gold and shadow. Second, look to the clifftop grassland around you. In early summer it is bright with sea thrift and yellow kidney vetch, and butterflies work the flowers on a warm day. Third, watch the cliff faces for seabirds. Fulmars nest on the ledges, stiff-winged and gliding, and gulls wheel and cry along the updrafts. Fourth, cast your eye down to the beach and rocks below, where grey seals are sometimes seen hauled out or bobbing in the swell. And fifth, if the season allows, notice the old stone staircase descending the cliff — a dramatic piece of engineering, though it is closed in winter and around high tide, and safe only near low water.

Here is something to picture as you stand here. Imagine a Victorian family, arriving perhaps by carriage, the ladies in long skirts, come all this way on the strength of a guidebook promise. They pay their respects to the view, exclaim at the giant's stepping-stones, and then, greatly daring, begin the descent of that freshly cut staircase to the beach far below. For them this was wild adventure, the edge of the known world, packaged and sold — and yet the awe was real. The same awe you feel now, looking down, is the very thing they came to find. The stacks have not moved. Only we have changed.

From here the South West Coast Path carries on along the clifftop, rising and falling with the land, heading south towards the wide beaches and the busy resort of Newquay. Take a last look at the giant's stepping-stones marching out to sea, hold the image, and keep to the path, back from the cliff edges and clear of the tide. Walk safe.