Hartland Quay

Stop here and look at the cliffs. The rock is not flat, not orderly, not laid in the neat horizontal layers you might expect. It is crumpled, folded, torn into great zigzags and buckled seams, as if the very ground had been squeezed in a giant fist. Below it the Atlantic pounds against jagged reefs, and a ruined harbour clings to the shore. This is Hartland Quay, one of the wildest places on the entire South West Coast Path.

You are looking at one of the finest displays of folded rock in all of Britain. These are the Carboniferous sandstones and shales of the Culm Measures, laid down flat on an ancient seabed and then, over unimaginable spans of time, crushed and contorted by the slow collision of continents until the layers stood on end and zigzagged like folded cloth. The sea has since sawn straight through them, exposing the folds in cross-section and grinding the harder bands into the reefs that comb the surf offshore. Into this ferocious setting people once tried to build a harbour. Around 1566, under an Act of Parliament, a quay was raised here to ship out farm produce and bring in coal and lime. The Atlantic would not have it. Storm after storm battered the works, and though the quay was rebuilt again and again, it was finally abandoned in the late nineteenth century. The surviving buildings became a hotel. This same treacherous coast wrecked countless ships, whose stories are gathered in the small museum beside you.

Now look closer, and find the things that make this place unforgettable. First, the folds themselves. Trace a single band of rock with your eye and watch it climb, bend sharply back on itself, and plunge again, a frozen record of colossal force. Second, look for the reefs. At low tide the harder strata stand out from the softer as long parallel fingers of rock reaching into the sea, and the surf breaks white along every one of them. Third, find the ruined quay and harbour buildings, the old stones half-swallowed by the shore, a monument to human stubbornness against an unbeatable sea. Fourth, look north along the coast toward Hartland Point, where a lighthouse, built in 1874, guards the very corner of Devon where the Bristol Channel meets the open Atlantic. Fifth, if you have time and energy, walk a short way south to Speke's Mill Mouth, where a stream leaps off the cliff in a clean waterfall straight toward the sea. All around, watch for the birds of this wild edge, fulmars and shags on the ledges, ravens and peregrines patrolling the headlands, and grey seals hauled out on the rocks below.

Think for a moment about what it meant to sail this coast in the age of sail. There was no engine to claw a ship off a lee shore. When an Atlantic gale rose and drove a vessel toward these cliffs, the crumpled reefs you are watching became a wall of stone with the whole ocean pushing behind. The little museum here keeps the memory of the many ships this coast took, and standing above the surf you understand why sailors dreaded rounding Hartland. The land itself seems to have been thrown up in warning, buckled and raw, a place where the power that shaped the rock and the power that breaks the waves feel like one and the same.

From here the Coast Path pushes on across the toughest, loneliest cliffs of the whole route, a switchback of steep valleys and roaring headlands. But if you can, time your visit for the end of the day. Stand above the folded strata as the sun drops into the Atlantic, the zigzag rock glowing, the reefs black against the fire on the water. This is why walkers never forget Hartland Quay. Keep well back from the edge, respect the sea. Walk safe.