Sidmouth to Beer 14km
Ascension 704m  Accumulated ascension 2634

When you look at the route map in the morning and you see a lot of names ending in combe you know you are in for a strenuous day. A combe is a narrow valley usually without a water course, on the south coast running from an inland plateau down to the sea and often with steep sides. What this means for the coast path is climbing to the top of a cliff going down to the bottom of a combe and climbing up the other side to the next cliff top. Repeat for each combe. Our route today included Salcombe, Dunscombe, Lincombe, Branscombe and just for fun finished off with West Cliff and East Cliff. It was a magnificent coastal landscape but a testing one to walk. The most climbing we have done in a day so far, 704m, but the legs are strong and we handled the steep paths and steps okay. What we struggle with is the heat. Another mid- twenties day, a bit hazy again, no wind and we are sweaty blobs at the top of each climb.

When we started at Sidmouth the cliffs were characteristically red but this changes abruptly during today’s walk. The colour of the cliffs with the pastel reds and dirty oranges of the Triassic era topped occasionally with the lighter-hued Cretaceous Upper Greensand – the Jurassic era rock having been eroded away entirely. A process geologists call an “unconformity”. Near the end of the day at Beer Head we came to the most westerly white chalk (limestone) cliffs  in England and a collection of chalk pinnacles. All appropriately bright white .By the end of this walk we will be amateur geologists boring you all to tears.

At Branscombe Mouth we stopped for our third swim this trip. Once again hugely refreshing and the water here was quite warm. Again this was a pebbly beach but had a narrow strip of sand just at the water edge. Where a combe comes down to the sea there is often a beach and if there is no road down the combe these beaches are deserted and pristine.  This morning we met two guys on the path who look after maintenance. The first had a line trimmer and was cutting back the grass and the nettles along the edge of the path. I hope it wasn’t his job to mow all 1003 kilometres. The second was a guy with a tablet who was inspecting all the kissing gates, stiles, steps, signs etc and reporting back to the National Trust on any thing that needed repair. We talked to this guy a couple of times and at Branscombe Mouth he was helpful in showing us which of several paths was the correct Coast Path route by the chalk pinnacles which a lot of people miss.

Tonight we are at The Dolphin Hotel in Beer. When we arrived the bar was full and we were told there was a wake in progress. We hope it doesn’t go all night. Devon fishing villages don’t come much more quintessential than cute and cosy Beer. It has a busy working fishing fleet although it doesn’t actually have a harbour just a very safe pebbly beach protected from the prevailing westerly weather by Beer Head. The boats are hauled up onto the beach by motor driven capstans and cables.

Beer is like The River Otter in that just as the Otter is not named after the animals, Beer is not named after the alcoholic beverage. Beer comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word Bearu, meaning Grove, referring to the woodlands that used to surround the village.