A Laxey walk today. And if I'm absolutely honest, the rationale was to give us the chance to eat pulled pork baps (with stuffing and apple sauce) at the Laxey Beach Cafe... These, you see, taste even better if you arrive at them hungry from a walk.

So we parked up by Ham and Egg Terrace, all ready to set out on what the book describes as the Fairy Cottage walk. (Fairy Cottage is a hamlet with a few houses and a tram halt. I'm not sure where the name comes from.)


We thought we'd better nip to the toilet first. And the toilet is way down the road in the wrong direction. So, comfort stop over, we thought we'd cut off the initial corner by taking a footpath that headed straight uphill, rather than retracing our steps back to the official beginning.

BAD idea... We got hopelessly lost in the Axnfell Plantation. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Look at the name. "X" is clearly short for hex, and then you've got "fell" in the same word.

Maybe I've just been reading too much Shirley Jackson.

But we seriously couldn't get out of this thing... The tracks on the ground were nothing like the tracks on the map; there were no signposts; and the ground was steep or boggy or blocked with fallen trees, or all three.




So the Terns flail around lengthily (and somewhat crabbily) in this bewildering piece of land. Sample dialogue:

PT: We're lost.
OT: We're not lost, because I know where we are.
PT: We ARE lost, because we can't get out...

But eventually, we crack it. We find the right combo of impenetrable tracks to lead us to a recognizable bit of the original circuit. You emerge on the level of the rough moorland that coats all the Island's higher land, and then you head down towards Lonan church, Laxey village, and the beach. It's all very picturesque:





There was still something tricksy about this walk, though. The map and the description somehow didn't marry up... Not sure why.

Anyway, by this time, your objective is in sight:







Another good outing, magical forests notwithstanding.