There’s a mythology where I live (writes Jim Alexander): the Secret Spot, a place where waves and perfect isolation combine. The Secret Spot is the original dream of freedom, on which all the advertising, the movies and the crowds of shepherded tourists are based. It’s the dream that motivates a person to get up in the dark, crawl down country lanes, scramble over barbed wire and rocks at considerable danger to person and board, in order to get to the water for sunrise.

The same dream, in fact, that motivates the traveller to seek routes that waver from the “beaten track”, where the omnipresent spectre of tourism has haunted reality into a caricatured nutshell: get out of the way, leave the tourists behind, find something real and beautiful.  

The thing is: when a place becomes well known, it changes. Cafés appear. Surf shacks. There’s a place I know that used to be like surfing in Mordor: you slipped and slid down a treacherous thread of path between deep black rocky knees until you pretty much fell onto a beach that looked like the end of the world. Collapsed WWII bunkers; great slabs of broken cliff lying in grey sand, as though some giant baby had discarded them in the aftermath of a destructive tantrum. Now, there’s a surf shop overlooking the lot. You can get nice coffee there. 

Just around the corner from my home in North Devon, there’s a secluded cove wrapped around by stunning cliffs, wild grasses, shale and quartz. Its waves were discovered by Californian GIs shipped to Devon to practise for the D-Day landings: for years afterwards, the only access to it, a corridor of water stretching from one of the loveliest shingle beaches on earth, was tracked only by the few mad locals who’d seen the Yanks in action and adopted their sport.

Now however, thousands of tourists turn the place into a neoprene-riddled bunfight for six months out of every year. Screaming children run riot in a hail of chip wrappers and suncream whilst their parents clog the water to the point where there’s more rubber in there than sea. Hardly the dream advertised by all those sunny Animal t-shirts that sell for fifty quid a go in the million shops that line every street. You know, there’s a McDonalds next to the Great Pyramids....

Wherever you go, and whatever you’re looking for - someone’s been there first. Chances are, if you’re going anywhere because you’ve seen something about it, or read about it, a lot of people have been there first and the thing that made you want to go in the first place is long gone, buried under yet another mountain of fast food wrappers. Freedom, the ultimate goal of the traveller, has become equivalent to school trips - you get herded in and herded out and everyone stops off for lunch at an industrialised feeding-trough that sells plastic food in coloured wrappers.

And so you turn away and look for your own secret spot. Mine has an ocean in it: there’s a track, and a farmyard, and an old guy whose permission you have to ask before you can drive over his land. When he nods his head, and smiles, and you roll over the incline into the light of another morning, perfect rollers wrinkling the tin face of the Atlantic behind two flat rocks, their smooth backs glowing pink in the new sun: you know you’ve come home. The landscape unreels its hazy edges to you in Polaroid colours, as though you’re driving down a lane that stopped existing 40 years ago.

How did I find it? I took my time. I asked. You move slowly; you talk to people. You give them your time and your smile, not just your camera. They open up to you. Because secret spots have to be earned, in the journey, in the reasons for wanting to find them. If you’re ever in Devon, at the junction of a long T-shaped road where a signpost points the wrong way down a little trail, reading... No. That’s my secret spot. You have to find your own. 

About the author

Jim Alexander is a writer and roadie who has been travelling Europe and the rest of the world for the last ten years. He currently calls a little village in Devon (UK) his home – for now, at least...