Westward Ho! to Bucks Mills

 

Monday 17^th

 

On the trail again.  We pick up huge sandwiches at the baker on the quay and get the 21 bus to Westward Ho!  This is our last walking engagement with the good old 21.  It doesn’t go beyond Westward Ho!  From here on we are in the hands of the much more sporadic 319.  More about this bus later. We start climbing out of WWH.  We have been on the flat, up and down the estuaries since Saunton Sands.  We are certainly feeling the difference.  The path becomes difficult and very overgrown.  My theory is that it’s the result of the lockdown.  Probably no one walked the path in March and April, just when everything, especially brambles were bursting into growth.  It’s also muddy with all the rain.  We find a nice spot just before Peppercombe Bay to eat our mega-sandwiches.  Peppercombe is a bail-out option.  A 15-minute walk up to the A39 and the 319 bus.  But it’s early.  The weather looks fair, and I persuade Chris to press on four more miles to Bucks Mills.  Mistake.

By the time we get down to Bucks Mills it is raining.  A woman in the hamlet sells tea and ice cream from her kitchen window.  We gratefully get tea and water.  Unfortunately, Chris spills her tea and I give her half of mine.  It reminds me of a line in ‘Two Years Before the Mast’. A seaman loses his tot of rum in a storm and his shipmates each donate a sip.  The author comments that this is just sharing the loss among all hands.  The memory is strange.  I must have read that book 60 years ago.

There is nowhere to shelter in Bucks Mills  but the map shows a church on the way to the bus stop at Buck's Cross.  We schlep up the hill in the rain and sure enough, there is St Anne’s.  And the porch is open and available.  We gratefully slump down and wait.  The next (and last) 319 is still an hour away.

 

In case the bus is early (ha!) we get up to the bus stop in very good time for the 18.15 bus.  We are joined by a woman on her way home from working at the nearby holiday camp.  This is good.  With revised ‘virus’ timetables, there’s the nagging doubt that the bus doesn’t exist. But her presence suggests the bus actually exists.

“He was more than ten minutes late yesterday” she says.

 We wait and wait. Fortunately, there is a shelter from the rain. 

It’s half an hour past the appointed time.  Still no bus.  Our companion gives up and goes back to try and get a lift.  We decide to call a taxi.  We are so busy trying to find taxi numbers on our phones that we almost miss seeing the bus.  Once on board, we christen the 319 ‘bad bus’ and the reliable 21 ‘good bus’.