Because I’m Doing A Badge, i stopped off at Roadford Lake on my way to my steamroller living van on the Cornwall/Devon border for a spot of paddleboarding. And because you never know what the traffic will be like, I left plenty of time. In fact, I reached the lakeside two and half hours before my booking.
That’s no bad thing. I lost at least fifteen minutes trying to pay for parking at the main car park – the machine only takes coins and it’s 2021 so I don’t have any. I haven’t spent coins in more than eighteen months! Normally I just phone the number on the side of the machine. My mobile number is registered with most of the parking companies so it recognises me and knows my car registration and debit card number so it all only takes about a minute. Not today! Today my account is suspended because something went wrong last time I used it (it didn’t). So I had to use my precious data to download the app and then shout at it because it kept demanding that I double check the location code – which I had, but there was no button to acknowledge that I’d done that. Anyway, long story short, I’m apparently less than five years from being totally befuddled by supermarket self-checkouts.
Once you get past the parking gremlin, it’s all delightful. It’s less than ten minutes off the A30 between Okehampton and Launceston but it feels like the middle of nowhere. It’s evidently a reservoir – to get to the watersports centre, you drive across the top of a pretty impressive dam, although that gave me horrible ideas about the possible depths of the lake – 40m, says the Visit Dartmoor website. I’m quite accustomed to paddling on the sea and a lake felt very tame and safe and comfortable, with the certain knowledge you can’t be swept off to France via a very busy shipping lane. On the other hand, my bit of sea is pretty shallow, easily shallow enough to stand up in if you fall out of your kayak. There are many things I’m scared of and unfathomable depths of water are among them. I hate swimming in a clean clear indoor pool with a lifeguard right there if it’s more than three metres deep. I’ll stick to the shallow end if it reaches five metres. Fortunately, the lake doesn’t have that crystal clear pool water in and you can’t see the bottom, so you can pretend it’s only five foot six inches down, just out of my reach.
But first a picnic lunch. I’d had a two and a half hour drive. I could have gone to the cafe – well, I did go to the cafe but all I bought was a book on Dartmoor’s ancient remains. I had two bags of food for the weekend in the car and while I couldn’t exactly make sandwiches there in the car park, I could snack. I planned to snack on the grass overlooking the lake but it was wet so I evicted my suitcase from the front passenger seat (it was even wearing a seatbelt to stop it from falling over) and ate there with the door open. I admit, I read the book more than I took in the views. You might hear more about prehistoric Dartmoor in a later blog….
Once I’d eaten, I packed up some essentials – you know, phone, wallet, camera etc – and went off for my daily walk. I knew from experience that I wouldn’t want to do it once I reached my wagon later in the day, and also that it would be awkward enough to find a route that I’d have to drive off somewhere. But here I was by a lake with walking and biking trails, and the best part of two hours to kill. It would have been plain stupidity not to have got it out of the way.
Honestly, you could spend hours here. The northern part of the lake is a nature reserve of some kind but I think you can walk most of the way round. You can definitely walk far enough to satisfy most people – for anyone else, Dartmoor’s right behind you. I only walked a little bit further than the Jubilee Sundial, a massive gleaming stainless steel monument which keeps pretty good time, although no one goes to the effort of adjusting it for British Summer time.
The walk is mostly through woodland, with breaks in I every now and then to give you a glimpse of the lake, or even to go right down to the waterline in places. Occasionally you see small boats – there were a couple of kayakers as I ambled and I saw some paddleboarders on my way back. Lots of dogs, of course. Great place for dogspotting. Had I not had that paddleboard booking waiting for me, I could have wandered a lot further and spent a lot longer over it.
Eventually I meandered back to the car – via a short trip on the link path to look at the dam from above. Unfortunately, there’s only pavement on the lake side so you can’t get a proper look at the sweeping expanse of outer wall. Probably for the best. I’m become more height-averse by the day and the more I look at the dry side, the more acutely aware I would be of precisely how deep the wet side is.
So off I went to the activity centre. I gather they do school and group trips here, probably lessons in the summer and they’re still doing equipment hire into October. My favourite canoeing river goes down to weekends only in October but evidently there’s just enough demand here to keep going for the moment. I changed into my wetsuit by my car and then walked down to the shore with a laminated card giving my name, time and equipment.
I’ve paddleboarded before but only on Poole Park Lake which is as shallow as it is small. And I haven’t been out on one since I started learning semi-seriously how to paddle so it was interesting to apply everything I’ve learned this summer to something so flimsy. A paddleboard is twenty times more responsive to a sweep stroke than a triple canoe is! On the other hand, I still can’t make a j-stroke work properly so I’m still swinging the paddle from one hand to the other and I have my mother’s knees so standing up just isn’t a thing. And you should try swinging a paddle designed for standing up from one side to the other while sitting down. It’s too long to be convenient and I spent a lot of time holding it by the middle instead of the end. But on the whole, I did feel like I had a vague idea of what I was trying to do, as long as it was something other than keep it going in a straight line.
When I’m kayaking or canoeing, I’m generally trying to get somewhere, and against the clock – Old Harry if I’m kayaking and the road bridge if I’m canoeing. It was quite the novelty to have an hour to float around a lake with no particular goal in mind. I spent a while just sitting. I tried floating meditation but as I know nothing about meditation the best I could do was to concentrate on each sense in turn – what could I hear, smell, see, taste and feel? Well, I could hear birds and splashing. I could smell rubber – not sure whether that was the paddle grip or my wetsuit or even my booties. I could see water and see and a fine rim of greenery around the edges of the lake. I could taste nothing in particular – on the sea, even though you don’t drink it, you can always taste salt. And I could feel water on my feet, dangling over the board. Not cold, not through neoprene booties. The sun on my face and arms. The gentle bobbing of the board on the water.
I took some photos of the view, although my GoPro has no zoom at all and literally just sees water and sky and a sliver of land in between, and plenty of selfies, of course. Not great photos – I was warned not to buy the 7 White and I did and all functionality failed after its first proper use except the two physical buttons. Other than its size and the fact that it’s waterproof, it’s not unlike having an old-fashioned 90s film camera, right down to getting my fingers in almost every shot because I can only take selfies by holding it at arm’s length and pressing the button.
I did try to stand up. I paddled myself to the jetty and used it and my paddle as supports to stand up but with no luck. I just don’t have the strength in my legs. Still, it’s no one else’s business if I paddle sitting down and since I spent so much time just enjoying my surroundings, it was probably for the best that I was sitting down anyway.
I don’t know how I’ve never been to Roadford Lake before. I’ve camped two and a half miles away twice this summer. I can’t even say I didn’t know it was there because 1) I can see the signs when I reach that junction of the main road 2) they went there for their activity on Oaktree Lane’s episode of Four in a Bed. But I think I’ll be going there again. It’s so accessible from Dartmoor that it’s the ideal place to go and relax on those days when I should be hiking on the moor and can’t be bothered, whether I go out on the water or just meander around in the trees.