You're standing on Minehead's seafront, and rising in front of you are two giant steel hands cupped around an unrolling map. This is mile zero. From here, the longest National Trail in England begins, and the whole of the Coast Path lies ahead of you.
Take a moment, because this is a beginning worth marking. The map held in those steel hands traces a route that runs an extraordinary six hundred and thirty miles, all the way around the toe of England to South Haven Point at Poole Harbour in Dorset. The sculpture, called Mapping the Way, was designed by Owen Cunningham and unveiled in 2001 to mark the official start.
Behind you, the town gathers beneath the wooded green bulk of North Hill, on the very edge of Exmoor. Minehead is an old place, a medieval port that once traded with Ireland and Wales, its harbour pier built in the seventeenth century. The Victorians turned it into a seaside resort, helped along by the railway that arrived in 1874.
And the Coast Path itself was stitched together from far older ways, the paths once trodden by coastguards and customs men who patrolled these cliffs on foot, day and night, watching for smugglers running contraband ashore in the coves below. That is why the trail hugs the very edge of the land the whole way round, because its makers needed to see every inlet and every landing place. When you walk it, you are following in the footsteps of those watchers.
Now, before you set off, look for a few things. First, the sculpture itself. Walk right up to it and notice how the map is unfurling, as though the route is only now being revealed, mile by mile, the way it will be for you. Second, turn and look inland at North Hill, that steep wall of heather and oak rising over the rooftops.
That green climb is your first stage, the path lifting you almost at once onto open Exmoor moor, where red deer and hardy Exmoor ponies range across the heather. Third, follow the seafront round toward the harbour and the old fishing quarter, where the working town remembers its seagoing past among the beach huts and the quay. Fourth, listen and look for steam.
Minehead is the terminus of the West Somerset Railway, England's longest heritage line, and a departing steam train makes a fine send-off. And fifth, look out across the water. This is the Bristol Channel, one of the greatest tidal ranges anywhere on Earth, and on a calm day porpoises are sometimes seen breaking the surface out toward the far Welsh shore.
There's a small ritual many walkers keep here, and you might like it. They dip a boot in the sea at Minehead and pocket a single pebble from the beach. Then they carry that pebble the whole six hundred and thirty miles, over every cliff and combe and estuary crossing, all the way to the far end at Poole.
Weeks later, footsore and salt-weathered, they set it down on the sand at journey's end, a small stone that has travelled the length of the whole south-west coast in a pocket. It's a lovely thing to do, a thread of continuity from your first step to your last, and it costs you nothing but the carrying.
From here the Coast Path climbs almost immediately, leaving the promenade behind and swinging up onto North Hill's oak woods and heather, then out along the wild cliffs toward Porlock Weir on the first stage. The weather up there can change fast on exposed Exmoor, so set out steady and keep an eye on the sky. Take your photograph at the steel hands, breathe in the Bristol Channel air, and begin. Walk safe.
