Rame Head Chapel

You climb the last steep pull of turf and there it is, crowning the cone of the headland: a tiny stone chapel, roofless and weathered, standing alone against the sky. Below you the land plunges to the sea on every side, and ahead the whole of Plymouth Sound opens out, with the coasts of Cornwall and Devon curving away east and west. The wind never quite stops here. For more than six centuries, people have kept watch from this spot.

This is Rame Head, a hard conical knob of slate that stands out proud from the softer coast around it, its steep sides shrugging off the sea. The little building at its summit is the chapel of St Michael, and a hermitage and chapel were licensed here around the year thirteen ninety-seven, raised on a site that was already ancient as a lookout. For this was always a place of watching. A beacon was tended on Rame Head for hundreds of years, ready to be fired to spread the alarm of a seaborne attack, for the headland guards the western approach to Plymouth Sound and the great naval anchorage within. The chapel has stood roofless for a very long time now, but it endures as a landmark, a small dark shape that sailors and walkers alike have steered by. Pilgrims and hermits, watchmen and soldiers have all kept their own vigils here, drawn to a place where earth, sea and sky meet on such open terms.

Let me point you to what to look for. First, the chapel itself, simple and stripped to its stone walls, its doorway and empty windows framing the sky and the sea beyond. Step inside its shell and feel how exposed, and how deliberate, this high perch is. Second, the great panorama over Plymouth Sound, the Breakwater, the ships at anchor, and the two coasts reaching away, one of the finest wide views on the whole path. Third, the shape of the headland itself, that distinctive cone, so unlike its neighbours, a lesson in how hard rock outlasts soft. Fourth, the heathland that clothes the approach. Listen for the song of skylarks, watch for stonechats flitting among the gorse and a kestrel hanging on the wind. And fifth, look down and out to sea, where seals and dolphins are seen in the Sound and seabirds nest along the cliffs below.

Now the moment this headland is remembered for. In the summer of fifteen eighty-eight, as the Spanish Armada came up the Channel, a chain of beacons stood ready along the southern coast of England, each within sight of the next, so that fire could carry the warning inland faster than any rider. When the great fleet was sighted off the south-west, the beacons were lit one after another, and Rame Head's watchfire was reportedly among them, blazing out over the Sound to rouse the country. Stand here on a wild evening, with the light failing and the wind tugging at the old walls, and it takes little to picture that flame leaping up from this very cone, and the answering fires springing along the darkening coast, one flame calling to the next until the whole of England knew that the enemy was near.

From Rame Head the Coast Path drops away toward the sheltered twin villages of Kingsand and Cawsand, and then leads on through the parkland of Mount Edgcumbe to the Cremyll ferry, which will carry you across the water into Plymouth itself. Pause a while first, up here with the chapel and the whole Sound at your feet. This is a steep and exposed headland, so keep well back from the edges, and if you ever need help on this coast, dial nine-nine-nine or one-one-two and ask for the Coastguard. Walk safe.