From the hill above my campsite – well, actually, the campsite continues right up onto said hill – you can see two huge expanses of beach, Woolacombe Sands and Croyde Bay. I’m very impressed with them both and the beaches of North Devon were to continue to impress me.
I went to Woolacombe when I was tiny and befriended “Shop Dog”, who I’m sure the pictures show as being a Rottie but my mum assures me categorically it was not. Family legend tells of me being distressed by the sand but checking up on that legend also says that was a different beach entirely. We came here and stayed in a posh hotel; most unlike my parents, because we went with my dad’s parents who were quite into posh hotels. I don’t remember Woolacombe at all, which is a shame because it’s well worth remembering.
What I’ve rediscovered it a huge swathe of golden-brown sand, stretching almost to Croyde. I’m used to the expanses of Sandbanks and Bournemouth beaches in Dorset. Woolacombe puts them to shame. To be fair, ours are more golden-white than North Devon’s and possibly a little softer but Woolacombe is more than twice the… depth? Width? Distance from grass to sea, anyway. We’ll call it depth for now. The sea is fiercer too. You can’t surf in Bournemouth. Well… you can, but it’s not known for surfing. It’s known for newspaper headlines about being hotter than “insert hot place here” accompanied by photos taken straight down of a pretty girl in a bikini with an ice cream. You can’t even surf at Boscombe at the artificial surf reef because the thing has never ever worked.
I’ve never seen properly-lifeguarded beaches at home either. I know very well to only swim where there are lifeguards, only between the flags and not when a red flag is flying but I don’t go to the beach much in summer – too hot and too many grockles. But this weekend I’m a grockle. That’s a West Country derogatory word for tourists, the sort that keep our economies alive, our roads blocked and our car parks full. Counties like Dorset and Devon are dependent on tourist money but that doesn’t mean we have to like them. Besides, even if I did go to the beach, I don’t swim. The water is too cold and too fishy. So it’s a novelty to see flags on the beach and even more of a novelty to see RNLI 4x4s parked in the wet sand with lifeguards standing on the back watching everything.
I decided I’d walk the length of Woolacombe Sands. I did so paddling in the very shallowest of shallows at first until I spotted my first cluster of washed-up jellyfish and after that, they came thick and fast. You don’t really get jellyfish at Sandbanks. I retreated to the drier sands. It turns out the beach goes on for miles and after I started finding dried-out jellyfish carcasses in the drier higher sand, I looked up towards Putsborough and realised I’d still only covered about half the length of this unbelievable beach and the lifeguard trucks to the north were as distant as the rocks to the south. Maybe I wouldn’t walk the full length.
So I sat down in the sand back at the surfing end and tried not to get hit by three boys playing frisbee. I say boys. Young men in their twenties and let me be clear, I was sitting there before they turned up. One of them was pretty bad at throwing but to be fair, he was throwing in my direction and I think he was being careful not to hit me in the face. A different bit of beach might have worked out better for that game.
Croyde Bay was different again. This time it wasn’t anywhere near as long but it was deep – two or three times as much sand between land and sea as you get at Bournemouth. The lifeguards were watching the north end of the beach again, with their flags and 4x4s but this time there was a red flag nearer the southern end, pointing out a dangerous area where the leat flowed into the sea and there’s a strong current. The sand here was wet almost all the way back to the high dunes so I imagine a lot of it vanishes at high tide.
The sea was absolutely swarming here with wetsuited figures, although I could count the ones actually surfing or bodyboarding on the fingers of one hand and still have… well, all my fingers left over. Earlier in the week I’d thought maybe if the weather was good, I’d have a surfing lesson. No! I don’t like the sea. I’ve given it a fair chance, I possess two sailing qualifications but I’m not a sea person, I’m a rock person. I’m a dwarf, I’m one of the Khazâd, one of Durin’s Folk. I like the idea of surfing until I see it and then I remember that waves equal wind and sea. Wind means cold weather and choppy water and I don’t want to be in the sea when it’s cold and choppy. I don’t want to be in the sea ever. And also, I’ve watched surfing lessons. You lie on the board and paddle, then you crouch on the board and jump up when the wave comes along. I’m not doing any jumping. I have elderly person knees prematurely. I haul myself uncomfortably to my feet already.
And then on Sunday morning, on the way home, I stopped at Saunton Sands. This one really took my breath away as I saw it from the road over the hill. It’s huge, even bigger than Woolacombe, and the tide was out. I walked from the path to the sea and it was six hundred metres of sand. That’s over a third of a mile. I followed the edge of the water up for quite a long way, until the D Day festival and reenactment had faded into nothing and there was just me, an expanse of mirror-like black sand, the occasional enormous dead jellyfish and a lot of dog walkers. I walked more than 4.5km on that beach. Well, it was one and a half walking back from the sea to measure it plus back out to actually walk and then back in again at the end, to say nothing of the distance along.
And it was so shiny! There was a very thin layer of water on it that reflected everything and it made me think of the salt flats in Brazil. Are they in Brazil? Anyway, salt flats. Endless sand. The beach fading away into mist. I’d never heard of Saunton Sands. I knew of Woolacombe and Croyde but no one had ever mentioned the existence of this colossal beach.
I’m going back to North Devon later this summer. Where there’s huge beaches, there must be more huge beaches and the huge beaches impressed me… well, hugely.