One of England's longest National Trails, some 630 miles of clifftop path around the far south-west from Somerset to Poole Harbour
The South West Coast Path runs some 630 miles, or 1,014 kilometres, from Minehead in Somerset all the way round the coasts of Exmoor, North Devon, Cornwall and South Devon before finishing along the Dorset coast at Poole Harbour. It was the longest of Britain’s National Trails for decades, and remains among the toughest, thanks to how relentlessly the path climbs down into every cove and back up the other side.
The bit worth knowing more about is what’s under the boots on the Dorset end of things. The Devon and Dorset section of the path runs along what’s officially called the Jurassic Coast, a World Heritage Site because the cliffs there expose something like 185 million years of rock in continuous sequence, roughly Triassic through to Cretaceous, laid down in order like a stacked timeline you can actually walk along. Fossil hunters take it very seriously indeed, and it’s genuinely one of the best places in the country to see deep time written into a cliff face rather than just read about it.
Given the length, most people walk it in sections over several trips rather than in one go, and the path’s difficulty varies a lot: some stretches are gentle coastal strolling, others are steep, exposed and slow going, especially where cliff erosion has forced diversions inland. Coastal weather can turn quickly and cliff edges are unstable in places, so keeping back from crumbling edges and checking conditions first isn’t excess caution, whatever the photos promise.
Near one stretch of the Devon coast, inland detours like the East Dartmoor reserve and the village of Widecombe in the Moor are worth the short trip for anyone with a spare day.
