Walking The Line Today
The trackbed between Mortehoe Station and Ilfracombe has been restored as a cycleway and forms part of the Tarka Trail. It is possible to walk or cycle from the north road bridge parapet by Woolacombe & Mortehoe Station, down the long descent towards Ilfracombe, passing the Slade reservoirs and going through one of the twin-bore tunnels south of Ilfracombe station.
The former line is surrounded by The Cairn - heathland planted with trees during the 1960s and transformed into a Local Nature Reserve.
South of Woolacombe, it is easy to follow the course of the line by car, as the trackbed closely follows the A361 road for much of the route between Barnstaple and Mullacott Cross (just outside Woolacombe/Ilfracombe).
Ilfracombe Museum contains many photographs and relics from the line, including a gradient post and one of the concrete station name boards from Ilfracombe Station (both visible outside the building).
Read more about this topic: Ilfracombe Branch Line
Famous quotes containing the words walking, line and/or today:
“With monstrous head and sickening cry
And ears like errant wings,
The devil’s walking parody
On all four-footed things.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“The great majority of people in England and America are modest, decent and pure-minded and the amount of virgins in the world today is stupendous.”
—Barbara Cartland (b. 1901)