Heather Elton via Newscom
The South West Coast Path near Lynmouth, England.
On Aug. 29, the English poet Simon Armitage will set off to walk England's South West Coast Path or, as he put it, "that long trailing leg of Britain into the Atlantic." From Minehead, he'll go by foot 260 miles to Land's End and then by boat to Isles of Scilly.
On his Web site, he announced that he will give poetry readings along the route "in return for bed, breakfast and a round of butties," as Britons affectionately call sandwiches. "I want to see if I can pay my way with poetry alone," he wrote.
Already Mr. Armitage has proved he can do just that. In 2010, he walked the Pennine Way, a moor-strewed path sometimes referred to as Britain's equivalent of the Appalachian Trail, and succeeded at finding a forum for his poetry and a bed to lay his head each night. The recollections of his journey are set down in "Walking Home," a book published earlier this year.
Below are edited excerpts from a conversation with Mr. Armitage about England's South West Coast Path, as he prepares to hike it.
Q. What kind of geography will you encounter along the coast?
A. The counties that make up the coastline, Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, are seen as holiday destinations. It's a popular path to walk because there are lots of places to stay: bed-and-breakfasts, hotels, pubs. Minehead, the start of my walk, is known for a very old-fashioned British holiday camp, Butlins, so you have quite comic associations: the British and their organized leisure time.
People associate the coast with sunshine, and it's certainly milder down there, but it's still very exposed. Whatever weather is being generated out on the Atlantic, that's where it makes landfall. If it's raining, you'll be the first to know. And the shoreline is bisected by all of the streams and estuaries, so you're continually making your way down a valley and back up on the other side. It's quite rugged. There are really beautiful stretches of beach, some of them unspoiled and, even in high season, very quiet.
Q. What will be in your bag?
A. As well as whatever you're wearing, you've got to have a waterproof jacket and leggings. I don't take guidebooks because they're bulky, so I razor out the pages that I'll need. Britain prides itself on having the greatest mapping service in the world, the Ordnance Survey, so I'll take some of those. Spare batteries. Various lotions and potions and balms for blisters. And a Leatherman, which is like a Swiss Army knife. It has about eight different blades, none of which I used for anything on the Pennine Way, but I quite liked the idea that it was in the bag.
Q. Any literary sites along the route?
A. Coleridge lived in Somerset, and D. H. Lawrence in Zennor for a bit, and Virginia Woolf in St. Ives. Her book "To the Lighthouse," even though it's set in Scotland, is said to be written about Godrevy Lighthouse, which you can see from St. Ives. The idea of walking from Coleridge to D. H. Lawrence is quite interesting to me.
Q. From Robert Byron to Rory Stewart, Britain has its fair share of walking memoirists. For you Britons, what is it about walking?
A. Part of it, I would argue, is political. In the '30s, there was an effort by regular working-class people to reclaim the common land as their own. It's what's known as the "right to roam" movement, and behind it is a political notion that most of the land cannot belong to somebody else; it has to belong to the people. So the network of footpaths and open access to land in this country, I think, is pretty much unprecedented.
And more practically, you really can walk to places in Britain. It's not like walking from New York to Cleveland. You can actually set off and get to places here.
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