Day 4: Petrockstow to home via Beer

It was time to head home and check up on the cats today, but not before having a final Devon adventure. We'd already ticked off the national parks of Exmoor and Dartmoor, but the Devon guidebook also strongly recommended visiting the East Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.  This wasn't a place that we were familiar with, but it was a nice sunny day and we decided to give us a try

The guidebook had specifically recommended walking along the coastline outside a small village called Beer, so that was where we were headed. It was around 60 miles from where we'd been staying, on the far side of Exeter, but we needed to drive as far as Exeter anyway to get home, so it wasn't too far out of our way. We arrived around 11am and parked in a clifftop car park.

Even from the car park itself, the views were wonderful.

The cliffs were really unusual - some of them were white, while others were a deep shade of red.

The guidebook had suggested a walk, but we didn't really need it in the end because there was a clear path to follow.

There were some beautiful views of the sea as we walked. It looked very calm today.

There were also some great views of the cliffs.

At various points we had the option of climbing down to beaches, but we decided not to. It looked a long way down (and a long way back up!). Plus although they probably look sandy in the photos, in reality it looked like they were mostly pebbles.

The path continued indefinitely - it was part of the South West Coast path, which goes all the way from Somerset, around Devon and Cornwall, to Dorset - so we had to be careful not to walk too far.

We decided to stop at this point, when the path started sloping quite firmly downhill.

Well, we just went a little bit further to get a better look at the view  

It was really lovely here (though quite sunny, so hard to keep my eyes open for a photo!)

We turned around and retraced our steps to the car.

There were lovely views walking back in this direction too  

When we got back to the car we drove a little way down the road into the village of Beer itself, where we found a nice pub to sit outside and have lunch. It was a lovely end to what has been a really fun trip to Devon