On my travels abroad I conducted straw polls of what other people thought of the English. I did not like what I heard. I thought it was possible to avoid being labelled but it seemed hard not to pick up the passport without picking up the flag. Everyone except the English it seemed had a clear idea about who the English were. Racist, rude, ridiculous has-beens were the results I got from my Indian associates who objected to British posturing in their domestic affairs. Other countries I travelled in produced similar replies.

Interestingly in many parts of the world they used Brit and English as interchangeable insults, that is until they came to singling out a positive aspects of being Welsh or Scottish - then non-British people recognise the distinction between the two. To be English is to be British without the benefits of the Welsh or the Scots. Across the world the English have inherited the stiff upper lip of the old Imperial past. Often the most ludicrous parodies of English life are put on by ex-pat communities clinging to their identity. The English have appropriated the baggage of the past, of "the White Man’s Burden". When the English are not wearing bowler hats and redcoats they are football thugs looking to start a fight. The symbols of being English have become tainted. Even the flag of St George is now most often seen fluttering forlornly over the heads of a column of Neo-nazis. Little Englander is now an insult for those that do not want to be part of Federal Europe.

Having realised that I was smitten by England I struggled to reconcile my love with what I thought England meant. This time I realised there was no chance of being Canadian for the week.

"Hi I’m Gavin. I guess you must be Robin!"
Just for a second it was Livingstone and Stanley. A civilised hand shake between explorers. English colonisers walking the wilds. Two men who had never met before but which circumstance had brought together.
Robin Moore was also walking around England.

Pauline had heard him on the radio. Talking about two thousand miles. Talking about England. Talking all the while with self-centred zeal. At first she thought she was listening to me before she realised that there was another walker out on the trail. Robin and I could have passed as strangers in one of the many towns or villages we crossed but I never doubted that we would meet on the wild bits of the path. It seemed so appropriate to meet on the cliffs, winding over stones past gorse and bracken.

I think, at first, that we were both non-plussed by the existence of the other. "I’m the round England walker."
"..eh...so am I!"
There was a brief temptation to brag. However, I think we both had been through too much at this point to worry about what any one else thought. Instead, after an awkward pause we exchanged mapping tips, and wide-eyed impressions. I told Robin about falling in the Tees and he told about having to go to casualty after damaging the tendons in his leg. Then Robin noticed I was holding my back and so he taught me a stretching exercise to cope with the strain of carrying a rucksack.
We parted company a couple of minutes later.

The sun was out as I walked away from Zennor and I moved into a different world. A place of light.

It had been getting crowded on the cliffs in the mist what with all the mythological figures. The Knights of the Round Table rubbing shoulders with the Tin Miner ghosts and the spirits of my past. It was bad enough possessing a vivid imagination but dotted amongst the mythological mob were all those experts that had whispered in my ear as well . All those Geology Guide authors, all those bird spotting brains, the historians, the genealogists, the novelists, the landscape lovers. It was getting hard to think with this crowd hanging around. I needed to get away from guide books, from books altogether. I needed clarity. What I got was light.

I recommend to everyone who lives in England that they walk the old cliffs from Zennor around to Land’s End some day. There’s nothing like the evidence of your own eyes for convincing you that you live on an island. From Zennor I walked west, then due south past St Just and Cape Cornwall before turning east, the dancing sea all the while dazzling me on my right.

This was the limit. Now I was turning back.

The weather had become Mediterranean and I am sure this helped me fall in love with the coast of Far West. I was happiest on the cliffs when I was far from a crowd.

I had expected Land’s End to be a most special moment on the walk. Instead I found it a grotty spot. A place of fag butts and sour smelling dog shit. Some of the cliffs had been fenced and someone has erected a sign warning that it was dangerous to proceed beyond the cliff top. I looked around me and wondered why I had come fourteen hundred miles to stand in a car park.

Land’s End has become a themeless theme park. The real importance of the place, of course, being absence, being the lack of more land. I walked on past the litter and forgot about celebrations.

Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland .

I found what I was looking for a little later that day. For the first time on the cliffs the evening sun was out of my eyes. It struck the warm rocks around me bringing them to life. I felt that I had walked out of ordinary England into a world of classical myth. These high cliffs and coves reminded me of ancient Greece. The sea was a deep resonating blue, sprinkled with the spangles of sun light. A sea on which Odyseuss could have wandered for ten years. This was the England that was undeniably most beautiful. I was forced to count up my coins and come up with some kind of reckoning.

English. Englishman. I tried the words outloud.
I completed the process that I had already started when I appropriated the M6 as a symbol of England and Scotland’s peaceful co-existence. I defined for myself what it meant to be English.

I sat on the cliffs and ceremoniously wrapped myself up in my beautiful country. I remembered all the different people and places I had been. I remembered all the good people I met. All the kindness I had received. The regional strength of character of the different parts of the country. My memory was sharp like the sunlight off the sea. Being English was a matter of the personal and the present.

I realised I was free to define being English any way I wanted. I was free to reject the baggage of the past, the football thugs, the colonialists, the racists. All I had to do was remember that everyone else has the same rights as me, to define Englishness the way that they want. This freedom and the freedom I would grant to others was my small revelation. To be English is to be an individual who delights in England.

"I am English!"
Like Odysseus I had wandered and now I had come home.

I ended that day at the Minack Theatre overlooking the sea and the small bay of Porth Curno. The open air amphitheatre had the sea for its backdrop which dwarfed all but the most exceptional actors. The action and drama of the sea behind the players kept taking my eyes off to the horizon. One day I told myself I want to stage The Tempest in this play house. The wild spirit of Ariel already haunts its stage (the picture opposite is with the kind permission of the Minack Theatre).

The sun, on cue, exited stage left and I found myself getting restless. The play wasn’t a great production. One of the effects of all my walking was that I was lost all my body’s padding. My buttocks had pretty much vanished so that I found the solid seats of the theatre excruciatingly uncomfortable. Despite the splendour of the sea in the back ground I had to leave before the production was over.

Porth Curno the next morning was a scintillating sight. The light wind had turned and I faced into a fierce easterly blast. The bay before me was striped with white water running into the cove.

Despite the wind’s attentions Porth Curno was one of the few places on the walk that I did not want to leave. I felt a sense of calm as I sat on the clifftop that morning and I felt free of the yammer of the modern world. This later struck me as being ironic as it is at Porth Curno that most of the noise of the world comes into England.

Porth Curno has been intimately tied up with the history of telecommunications because of its geographical position as the most westerly bay in England. Marconi came to Cornwall at the beginning of the century to carry out his first communication experiments across the Atlantic. Old telegraph wires still connect this coast to America. Even now with the advent of satellites Porth Curno is still important to Transatlantic chatter.

As I walked, crunching my way across the coarse sand, I passed over the top of the landfall of a new fibre optic cable. The waves I watched heaving up onto the beach a metaphor for the waves of data that pile in underneath.

The first few miles of this coast were some of the best walking that I had done all Summer. The path hugged the cliff top swinging up over headlands before swooping down again precipitously into coves. It was tempting to laud each new inlet as the best. Some had beaches, some rocks. The variety was remarkable in such a small area. At St Loys a lush woodland grew down to water’s edge. All the while the wind blew strongly. I felt like a sea bird soaring on the breeze.

The remoteness of West Cornwall is due in part to this coast’s rocky nature. Few of the coves I passed would be suitable for shipping and so few big towns have had a chance to grow up. However man’s ingenuity has added safe harbours to the crags. I walked on through Mousehole , Newlyn and then into Penzance. I found myself standing in a crush of tourists.

After Penzance the wind became a problem. I battled along the beach of St Michael’s Bay facing into a sand-laden blast. As a thong wearing wind surfer shot past me going west, I staggered east dressed like a Berber keeping the sand out. I was relieved when I got finally into a wind shadow.

By now my love affair with the light had become intoxicating and I looked forward each morning to getting back up onto the cliffs. I never tired of watching the light play on the rocks. It seemed to change with the hours. In the mornings it was cool like fresh crisp lettuce texturing everything with depth and detail. By evening it was a forge, full of flowing golden metal.

It was in the sea that the light was most extraordinary. It orchestrated a ballet of bubbles and spinning light. I find it amazing, looking back, that I managed to walk at all.

The walk from Praa Sands to Coverack was a walk for the cliff top connoisseur. It seemed like half the time I was walking on air. I found myself romanticising about this coast and its names which were obscured from my understanding by the misty veil of the Celtic twilight. I slipped back into a romantic fug. Trequean Zawn, Carrag-a-pilaz, Halzephron cliffs. Sometimes a translation is needed for understanding. Halzephron in Cornish means ‘Cliff of Hell’.

I think finally Mullion won the competition for best bay on the coast and it provided a fantastic foreground to the view I contemplated while eating my lunch. Up ahead of me was the Lizard - the most southerly point on my walk - and one of the most striking pieces of landscape I had yet seen.

To quote the books - the Lizard is unique. It is like a giant’s billiard table - a flattened piece of the deep ocean floor that has been thrust up into the air so that it now forms a fortress surrounded by cliffs. Ramparts of a castle that has century after century faced down the Atlantic Ocean.

As I walked, the flatness of this tabletop was immediately striking and the fierce easterly wind was free to do its worst. The flatness of the Lizard also had its advantages. I was rarely forced to descend into a valley or a cove. However when I dropped down to the sea the effort was rewarded. At Kynance Cove, the rocks themselves were beautiful, streaked with ripples of colour like expensive ice cream. I sat down and picked over my geology guide. The rocks of the area seemed to have been named by a snake. The sibilant types - gneiss and schist.

After walking around Lizard Point I came to Black Head that sticks out east from the Lizard. I settled down to look ahead to where I was going over the next few days. I could see Narehead, The Dodman and then The Gribbin, a distant blur on the horizon. Running east along the south coast of Cornwall was a series of south facing headlands. I was walking along a giant saw. I was looking along the blade of a serrated cutting edge.

The coast path next day became noticeably softer. I was now tucked in on the protected side of the Lizard, walking up the soft underbelly of Cornwall’s long coast. The grass was greener and the hedges more abundant. In the fields I saw rabbits running for their burrows. After the rigorous demands of the cliffs, the grass and field paths made me feel like I had wandered into a formal garden.

I had crossed a desert surrounded by the sea. I needed the feel of waves on my body. At Swanpool the urge became too great.

I dropped my rucksack and peeled off my clothes. I walked purposefully onto the beach and stepped out towards the waves. The cold of the water was not a barrier anymore. My legs needed to walk. My legs needed to stride. They wanted to keep going and walk right across the bottom of Falmouth Bay so that I would arise on the other side.

Only when a wave finally flipped me off my feet did my legs stop walking and begin to swim. After awhile I floated and lay still. The urge to swing my feet briefly suspended.

I took the next day off and enjoyed the beach at Falmouth.