Around Colliford Lake
How did the internet become so boring? Oh yeah, it’s written by people who never leave the car park. It’s hard finding anything interesting online about Colliford Lake, Cornwall’s largest (and already briefly visited the previous week), except for bland Tripadvisor nuggets such as ‘free car park’, ‘picnic recommended’. Come on.
What at first seemed a gentle walk around the shore of a lake soon turned into the land that time forgot, with post-apocalyptic beaches, bogs, quicksand, shit, feathers, carrion, abandoned cottages, a brutalist dam, sunken, dead forests and Cornwall’s very own Skeleton Coast. And what online we’d read as a walk taking 2-3 hours, actually took 6. A few miles became way over ten.
When we started early Sunday morning, there were other people loitering around the car park, of course, but they soon vanished as we walked on, and we’d only see one or two people in the next five hours.
We would see a lot of Canadian geese, sheep, cows and horses, also looking like they didn’t see many people. It almost felt like when travelling in a remote village in Asia or Africa, way off the tourist track, and the kids either point and laugh or run and hide. Here, though, the geese honked at us, the skittish sheep bleeted and the cows mooed at us, before stampeding away from us. The horses ignored us.
The ground changed often, from white, sandy beaches and large rocks to hard, black mud and lush, small plants, including wild mint, doing well in the marshes. All along were feathers, shit and driftwood. Tiny frogs reminded me of here.
The mudiest, boggiest section had branches and trees sticking out of the mud and water, as if the entire reservoir (only completed in 1986) was once a huge forest, which perhaps it was. In this section I made a wrong step, and sunk up to my knees in mud. I couldn’t move, then couldn’t stop laughing.
M would describe the whole lake as never-ending and eerie, going as far as to compare it with The Hunger Games – each hour we survived was the equivalent as surviving a day in the televised fight to the death.