LEJOG Day 12: Golberdon to Tavistock

Weather: Sunny and very hot

Distance covered today: 21.5km (13.4 mi)

Last night's B&B: Swallows' Rest (£40 incl supper)

% Complete: 11.4%

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 12 (click!)

Fortunately my good friend, Chris reminded me that this would be the day I crossed from Cornwall to Devon, the second county of my journey!  It is a good thing he warned me, because I might well have missed it.  And this leads directly to my “rant of the day”.

It seems to me that all Englishmen have the counties of England hard-wired into their DNA. There can be no other explanation for the fact that all Englishmen always know what county they are in, when there is almost no information to indicate where they are. You would think that the world-famous and incredibly detailed Ordnance Survey maps would clarify this information, but they do not. If you look very carefully, you may be able to detect a dotted and dashed line in a kind of secret Morse code that indicates a county boundary, but these are easily lost amongst the overhead powerlines and rights-of-way, and anyway, even if you do find the boundary, the maps do not indicate which county you are leaving and which you are entering! Even Google is silent on the subject, presumably because they don’t know either!

Yes, on major roads, there are sometimes welcome signs, but these are almost insignificantly small and far from pervasive on my favoured “B” roads.  And then, just when you think you may be getting somewhere, you come up against the Metropolitan and non-Metropolitan Authorities which seem to replace the counties in some of the urban areas, though, again this is just to confuse the foreigner.

I defy you tounderstand this definition "Metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties are one of the four levels of subdivisions of England used for the purposes of local government outside Greater London. As originally constituted, the metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties each consisted of multiple districts, had a county council and were also the counties for the purposes of Lieutenancies. Later changes in legislation during the 1980s and 1990s have allowed counties without county councils and 'unitary authority' counties of a single district. Counties for the purposes of Lieutenancies are now defined separately, based on the metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties."

Enough!! These definitions are for foreigners! Every Englishman knows the county these Authorities replaced and he isn't fooled for an instant!  Chris even bought me a special County Map to dispel my concerns, but the problem with this map is that it has hardly any towns on it, so unless you have knowledge in your head of exactly where every town is located geographically, you still can’t locate it in its county!

My conclusion is that all this is a cunning plot to repel the next set of invaders. It certainly would have confused the Romans, who did things in straight lines, but they got here before the system was set up. So, if the Russians, Indians and the Chinese think that after they have bought all the real estate in England, they will be able to find their bit of it, they will have their work cut out! Fiendishly clever, really!

That said, I am in Devon!  It was an interesting day. For a start, I was motoring along almost at a jog at 5.2 km/h, even though I knew this was to be a long stint.  That came to a juddering halt when I crossed the Tamar River and after a precipitous descent through a series of little villages, all with Dimson in their name, it was followed by a murderous ascent into Devon on the other side of the river. As I emerged, panting, at the top of the hill, I found a pub, which was just in time, as I had exhausted my plentiful water supply, I was blowing like a steam engine, and I was beginning to wander all over the “A” road. I bought myself a giant coke and met Alfred, who came into the pub with a small back-pack, good walking boots and a raucous laugh. Sensibly, he bought himself a pint of the local best bitter and in minutes we were involved in rapt conversation. It turned out he was intending to take the exact route into Tavistock that I had previously decided upon, which would take us along the Tavistock Canal and past the Shillamill Viaduct.

Walking is an interesting activity. It may be the exertion, or the fact that you are not looking each other in the eye, but it doesn’t take long to get down to brass tacks. Alfred, it turned out, was an ex-Marine. He passed some interesting, though standard, comments on the current wars in Afghanistan and Libya to the effect that someone had to fight them, but as we delved a little deeper, it turned out that he was a long-term sufferer of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) from action in Aden and Afghanistan. He described his symptoms in a way that any number of TV programmes has failed to make clear to me. He described the terror of meeting people in his dreams that he had killed in reality.

His wife died of a brain tumour a year or two ago, and he is currently resisting treatment for Leukaemia. He told me he was having difficulty explaining to the local NHS medical staff that he no longer wanted to continue living, certainly if anything they did to him interfered with his walking on his beloved Dartmoor. He also explained that his lifeline was a rather “posh” psychiatrist in Tavistock who treated him as his officers had in the army, by demanding his attention and focussing on the things he needed to do.

Alfred was very dismissive of my technology. He was highly amused when I said I couldn’t remember the name of my B&B in Tavistock but that my satnav would take me precisely to the OS grid reference. In fact, from my rough description of it, he took me directly to it, himself. He said it was the sort of place he imagined I would book. We went our separate ways on the street outside, faintly embarrassed that we had shared so much.

I went inside and met Paul, who took me down to the river where we watched fish jumping for insects and I tried to get back to my own reality.

Young family with donkeys. "Mummy, why is that man taking a picture?"

If I had a farm in Cornwall, this is what it'd have to look like, though a bit more isolated.

Suddenly there was a loud hoot, a big smile and a wave! And there was Helena, my land lady in Golberdon. She also works for the Tamar Health Authority and we met by pure chance in Gunnislake.

And if you go in the other direction, you will find Higher Dimson, which isn't that far from North Dimson.  All in the space of half a mile!

Finally after twelve days, I saw the very first active quarry site in Cornwall. They may only be making road chippings, not recovering something exciting like copper or tin, but at least it was something!

The River Tamar

And at last an acknowledgement of the new county. Though you could easily miss it!

The defunct southern railway line from Tavistock to Bere Alston runs over this bridge, known as the Shillamill Viaduct. Such a tragedy that such a magnificent example of railway engineering has no current use. Incidentally, Sir Francis Drake was born right here!

Me, next to the Tavistock Canal.

A lazy Tuesday afternoon in the Meadows, the central Tavistock Park, in the heat

Alfred, my very first walking companion on LEJOG!!