Ilfracombe Harbour & Verity

You're on the quayside at Ilfracombe, in a sheltered old harbour ringed by hills, and towering over the pier is a twenty-metre bronze woman with a sword raised to the sky. Half her body is stripped back to reveal the anatomy beneath, and she is unmistakably pregnant. This is Verity, and she makes Ilfracombe one of the most startling stops on the whole Coast Path.

Let's set the scene, because there's far more here than the statue. Ilfracombe is North Devon's principal harbour town, a Victorian resort wrapped around a haven that has sheltered ships since at least the fourteenth century. Back then, sailors climbed the rocky headland called Lantern Hill to a small chapel dedicated to Saint Nicholas, the patron of seafarers, and set a light burning to guide vessels safely in. That chapel is still there, and it counts among the oldest working lighthouses in Britain. In the Victorian age the town boomed as paddle-steamers and the railway brought holidaymakers, and in the 1820s labourers cut the remarkable Tunnels Beaches by hand, boring through the rock to reach tidal bathing pools. As for Verity, she is the work of the artist Damien Hirst, one of the most famous and most provocative artists of our age, who has a restaurant in the town and placed her on the pier in 2012 on a twenty-year loan, so she has become, for now, as much a part of Ilfracombe's skyline as the chapel that has stood here for six hundred years.

As you walk the harbour, look for a few things. First, Verity herself. Stand back on the quayside and take her in against the sky, sword aloft, scales of justice held behind her back, one side smooth bronze and the other flayed open to bone and unborn child, a deliberately unsettling image of truth laid bare. Second, lift your eyes to Lantern Hill above the harbour mouth and find the little grey chapel of Saint Nicholas on its summit, nearly seven centuries of watching over these waters. Third, look down into the harbour water, where at high tide the brightly painted fishing boats sit doubled in their own reflections. Fourth, scan the water and the pier itself for wildlife, for the grey seals that haul and swim off the harbour, and the fulmars and shags along the headlands. And fifth, if you have time, seek out the Tunnels Beaches, those hand-cut Georgian passages driven straight through the solid rock by hand in the 1820s, leading through to the old tidal bathing pools where Victorian ladies and gentlemen once bathed apart from one another.

Now, a word about that statue, because Verity divides people, and she is meant to. When Hirst unveiled her in 2012, some in the town were delighted and some were appalled by this colossal, half-dissected pregnant figure looming over their gentle Victorian harbour. She stands on a heap of legal books with the scales of justice hidden behind her, and her flayed side, showing the muscle, the skull, the curled shape of the child within, is a modern echo of old anatomical sculpture. Her name, Verity, simply means truth. Whatever you make of her, standing beneath twenty metres of raised bronze at the harbour's edge is not something you forget, and she has drawn visitors to Ilfracombe from all over the world.

From the harbour the Coast Path climbs away west toward Woolacombe on this stretch of the North Devon coast, past headlands and hidden coves. Before you leave, it's worth the short climb up Lantern Hill to the chapel, for the view back over the whole harbour with Verity standing guard and the roofs of the town spilling down to the water. Take care on the pier and the cliff paths if the weather turns. Then shoulder your pack and walk on. Walk safe.