Planning the Walk

After coming up with the idea, having long held an ambition to walk the Cornish Coast, I sat down and worked out how many days I'd have to complete the walk. Sixty one days seemed ample and, likely to be long enough to get through the remainder of the UK lock-down.

I then used the wonderful Google maps to measure the coast path and look for those areas that were going to be problematic (eg. crossing wide river inlets, urban areas and places where it was possible to park the car at the start and the end of each day).

574 miles turned out to be the most I could realistically walk. The biggest problem was the distance between car parks in some areas, which meant the equation of 574 miles divided by 61 days (9.41 miles per day) didn't quite work. Add to that the need to continue with a 'normal' life (dentist appointments if lock-down eased further, family and maybe even some work) as well as the fact that I was unlikely to be be to walk every day for two months, meant the planning was not quite as straight forward as it at first seemed!

Eventually, I settled on a plan to walk 4 or 5 days a week (Monday to Friday) for 9 weeks, averaging 63.78 miles per week. I decided I would start at Welcombe Mouth in Devon (half a mile from the Cornish border, but closest car accessible point) and walk the coast path straight along the north coast and then back east along the south coast.

On 01st June, I set off.