Leg 3 - just a bit more than 5 miles, taking the cumulative total I've walked to more than 15 miles. Only another 170 to go.
It was blowing a gale in the sunshine this morning as I started off across Penally range. The spray from the sea a couple of hundred feet down was rising above the cliff tops and I felt it on my face. I felt a bit wimpish as the path occasionally meandered between two lots of gorse or bracken and I got some shelter from the blast.
The tide was up at Lydstep beach and I did my Canute thing for a short while before thinking better of it and retreating into the holiday park, clutching a lost buoy which I then stuffed into my back pack. The holiday park is vast and full of identical chalets, each with its decking and neat plant pot, with solar light. But the feeling there was distinctly like the Prisoner; a self-contained village with no sense of a world outside. Anyway, I wasn't Number 6 today and managed to escape up to Lydstep head, where once again Caldey Island seemed close enough to touch.
The walking now became more up and down, and I looked down on several small coves with near-vertical steps to reach them tempting me. But the weather looked as if it was closing in and my legs warned me against such diversion. At the top of Skrinkle bay I met a father and daughter who had just climbed up. Together we watched a seal swimming just outside the cove.
Just past here the path has to go inland to bypass the Manorbier army camp and I had to trudge round the perimeter of it. Near the end of the compound was a missile pointing towards the west. I don't suppose it was an Exocet - it looked very out of place. All morning I had been watching first a helicopter buzzing me and then various aircraft out to sea (actually it might have been the same plane going round in circles). At one stage a plane dropped a shower of bright flares into the sea.
From around here I had my first view of the refineries and industrial sites on the Milford Haven waterway, rather fuzzy in the distance. Then it was mostly down hill all the way round the Priest's Nose (and past the Parson's Piece) and a final drop down into Manorbier bay. Over in the distance was the castle I had passed first thing in the morning on my way to catch the bus and in the water were a few surfers, left over from the scores who had been there on the high tide.
I haven't quite got the hang of putting pictures on this blog yet and all these are in reverse order.
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