I left in March with a bad map and a good pair of boots, and I came back a slower person.
I set out to walk the coast because I could not think of a reason not to. My work had ended, the flat was rented out, and the only thing I owned that still fitted me was a rucksack. The first week was miserable. The second week was worse. By the third I had stopped counting.
What I found was not clarity. It was weather, and villages, and people who fed me without asking who I was. The road gave me a rhythm I had not had since childhood: walk until tired, eat what there is, sleep where you land.
This book is what I wrote in the evenings, in a notebook that got wet more than once. It is not a guide. It is an account of a year spent going slowly along the edge of a country I thought I knew.