Walking and Wild Swimming: Woodcombe Sands and Ivy Cove Circular

In keeping with our plans to walk and wild swim more we decided to do one of the walks recommended in the Wild Swimming Walks: Dartmoor and South Devon book.  I won't go into a long description about the route as it's written in this book and, for once, we did actually keep to the recommended route instead of our usual getting distracted and wandering along different paths.  I will say though that this walk was really good and we will probably do it again, or at least a variation of it.  It has the perfect amount of walking (a good mix of easy and a little bit more challenging, which is exactly what you want for a Sunday walk) and swimming.

It definitely helped that we lucked out with the weather, which was clear skies, lots of dryish heat, and the right amount of cool breeze to make it bearable.  However, that is perfect weather for burning if you're not careful and one of us may have gotten a little red from it.

We were worried that as it was a Sunday during the summer holidays this route would be a little busy, but thankfully we were able to find a parking space in the village that you start and end at (East Prawle) without getting in anyone's way and the beaches we swam from were pretty quiet too with only a handful of other people.  As for these beaches (Woodcombe Sands and Ivy Cove), they were a great find as they are clearly not used very often, probably because you do have to go kind of far on foot to get to them, you can swim out quite far without having to worry about boats etc being a problem, and they had very clear waters.  Unfortunately we didn't see too much wildlife when we were snorkeling, but the visibility was still really good.

We wanted to travel quite light and so didn't take our heavy wetsuits with us instead, I just took my swimming top and went with the knowledge that I might not be able to spend too much time in the water.  It did feel very cold when we first started to walk in, but I actually got used to the temperature and was able to stay in much longer than before.  The distraction of snorkelling at Ivy Cove really helped and I floated around until I noticed the beds of my nails started to go a little blue - a pretty good indicator it's time to head back out.

Both of us have had Covid and we're both having to deal with a prolonged cough so we weren't sure how easy we would find this walk, but both of us were pleasantly surprised.  It did highlight some fitness issues we need to work on before we do any multi-day walks in the future, which is good information to know.  However, I do feel that the swimming did actually help with my cough, at least for a day, so more wild swimming can only be a good thing.  I would definitely recommend this walk if anyone is looking for a nice way to spend a few hours.  The book recommends that you take about 2 - 3 hours to do this walk, but once we had taken our time and done all the swimming and relaxing on the beach it actually took us about 4 hours.  We also followed it up with a relaxed drink at the cafe in East Prawle.  Definitely one of our favourite ways to spend our days off together so we'll definitely be doing more of it in the future.