West Somerset Railway: Part 1
For reasons unclear, I agreed to walk the West Somerset Railway. I blame my brother, he runs marathons and likes a challenge. So I said yes. It did mean a happy evening plotting the route onto an OS map from the West Somerset Railway website. Such fun. We put aside a weekend in August to do the walk, it's around 24 miles, so we were going to do it in two halves. The first part, Minehead to Williton, is just around the halfway mark. Getting there early was going to be a hassle as the trains and buses don't start running early enough. So we enlisted Mother, to keep it in the family, to drop us off. On a bright and breezy August morning we were dropped off on the seafront at Minehead. To our left was the start of the South West Coast Path and right was the Somerset Coast Path. The beaches of Minehead are quite lovely, very sandy. Although the sand there now only dates from 1999. Most of it was washed away in a bad storm in 1990 and 320,000 tonnes of sand had to b...