In Padstow, 56 km, 2 metres of climbing

‘There is no wifi in the forest but I promise you will find a better connection’

After eight days of strenuous walking we had a rest day in Padstow – yeah right!

Bright and early we were down at the quay hiring bikes. £17 each for the day. Padstow has a wonderful traffic free cycling/walking/horse riding/dog walking trail called The Camel Trail. This is a former railway line that runs 18 miles from Padstow via Wadebridge and Bodmin to Wenfordbridge and is virtually flat. The first part of the railway was opened in 1834 to carry sand inland to be used on farms as fertiliser. It was later expanded to carry slate and china clay from inland quarries to ships at Padstow. The last passenger trains ran in 1967 and freight trains in 1983. The Cornwall Council bought it for £1 in 1983 and turned the railway line into The Camel Trail.

The first part of the trail is out in the open and hugs the edge of the Camel estuary, at low tide a vast area of golden sand. On this section you cross a side estuary on a worryingly named bridge called Weak Bridge. After 5½ miles, at the end of the estuary, you come to the village of Wadebridge and from here the trail follows the Camel River through the deeply incised and beautifully wooded Camel Valley in a delightful green tunnel of trees to Bodmin (at 11¼ miles) and Wenfordbridge (at 17½ miles). There are still signs and platforms for the old stations: Shooting Range, Grogley Halt, Nanstallion Halt and Boscarne Junction. The last is a working station and there is a heritage steam train that runs from there to Bodmin.

Just short of Bodmin we stopped at The Camel Trail Tea Garden for Cream Tea – actually we had coffee with the scones, jam and clotted cream. On the way out we bypassed Bodmin and went directly to the end of the line where there is a shed and garden cutely called the Snail’s Pace Café and Bike Hire. Also at the end are acres and acres of abandoned warehouses with huge chimneys called the Westford Dries. Clay slurry was piped to this former china clay factory.

On the way back we stopped in at Bodmin, best known for its jail. The jail was built in 1779 and was the first British prison to hold prisoners in individual cells. There were over 50 hangings at the jail and the executioner was paid £10 per hanging. During WWI some of Britain’s national treasures including The Dooms Day Book and the Crown Jewels were kept in the prison. The jail closed in 1927. It is now largely ruins but there is a small museum and tourist office and of course loads of ghost stories.

When we arrived in Padstow yesterday we walked up the very busy and noisy A389 for about a kilometre to our B & B. Betty our hostess showed us a much nicer path through some allotments and the churchyard of St Petroc’s Parish Church down to the quay. We were keen to have a look inside this church, built between 1425 and 1450, as the pulpit is decorated with carved scallop shells to honour pilgrims to the shrine of St James in Santiago, Spain. Another connection with our walking of the Camino Frances.

This church is the start of ‘The Saints Way’, a 27 mile route across Cornwall to Fowey on the south coast. It is the route taken by early Christians from Ireland and Wales to Brittany or Santiago de Compostella in Galicia, Spain. If we took this route we could take about 25 days off our coastal walk.

So we now need a rest day from our rest day, but we are refreshed, and it was great to get out cycling on what really is a magical trail.