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About the Author

From bicycle touring to backpacking, watercolour painting to clay modelling, the exploration journal captures my journey through many different interests and travel adventures.

I love to find those out of the way places that whisk you away from the concerns of everyday life. Whether this is by wading through an overgrown river or trying new paint techniques is up to you!

Category: South West England

Waterfalls of Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor

If you’ve followed the Exploration Journal for some time, you will know by now that I love waterfalls. They make frequent appearances in many of my posts and a lot of my time involves scrambling down muddy ravines or long walks just to reach them. I find the prospect of locating waterfalls just as exciting as arriving at it and…

Golitha Falls and Cheesewring

I recently started a project to visit all the waterfalls on Bodmin Moor and Dartmoor, which is quite the undertaking! Fortunately Bodmin Moor is easy as there are only two – the main one at Golitha Falls that everybody knows about, and then there is the complete opposite at Cascade Woods, a secret spot that isn’t talked about much and…

The Tamar Valley: Bere Peninsula Loop

The weather in Cornwall can be atrocious, especially in winter when the storms roll across the Atlantic Ocean to batter the coastline and cover the county in torrential downpours. Which is why it is valuable local knowledge to know where you can go for a sunny walk when the weather looks bad everywhere else. The Tamar Valley is known to…

The Strangles, Cornwall

The stretch of Cornish coastline named High Cliff (aptly named due to being the highest cliff in Cornwall) is also home to my favourite local beach – the Strangles. Regardless of where you park, the route to the beach involves winding down for over 200 metres and then using a rope and rickety steps to drop the last couple onto…

Off the beaten track at Cascade Woods, North Hill

The walk from North Hill through Cascade Woods and up onto Bodmin Moor is one of my favourites in North Cornwall. You can park at the village hall in North Hill (providing there is nothing going on) and have easy access to the valley. The parish is full of history, so much so that they have a website dedicated to…

The route to Venford Falls, Devon

I spent Saturday clambering on top of Dartmoor to reach Sandy Hole Pass and the beautiful East Dart Waterfall, and on Sunday the weather caused me to drop down off the high moor and after a quick review of the map I decided to pursue my second Dartmoor waterfall of the weekend – Venford Falls. This walk is recommended in…

East Dart Waterfall

The first waterfall in my new blog series ‘Waterfalls of Cornwall and Devon’ is East Dart Waterfall, or as I prefer to call it, Sandy Hole Waterfall. It’s less than half a mile downriver from Sandy Hole Pass and I’ve always visited both at the same time and so grouped them together. Last weekend I decided to undertake my first…

Twelve Men’s Moor

It’s easy to assume that the name ‘Twelve Men’s Moor’ refers to the line of craggy tors that stretch down the middle of this part of Bodmin Moor. I’ve counted them many times and always end up at way over twelve but figured that they probably counted each tor differently back when it was named. I couldn’t have been more…

Walking the cobbled streets in Clovelly, North Devon

Clovelly is similar to many of the other fishing villages scattered around the Cornish coastline, with it’s small harbour and quaint cottages. But unlike the rest of them, the village perches on the side of a steep 400 foot cliff down to the sea. It doesn’t have any vehicles on the cobbled streets, instead the residents use sledges and donkeys…

The Tamar Valley: Arsenic mines of the Tamar Valley

When someone happens across an arsenic mine on their land they probably don’t react with “oh that sounds like a great place to visit! Lets build a series of public walking and trails through it!”. Nevertheless, that is what Tamar Trails have done, turning the once poisonous arsenic mines of the Tamar Valley into a walking, mountain biking and general…