Walk: Jersey Coast Path |
Distance: 48 miles |
Ah, Jersey Jersey Jersey. If you don’t know it, this lovely Channel Island nestled just off the coast of France is a green and pleasant land: craggy coastline, wide white beaches, cottagey, villagey types, all holiday postcard pretty. Oh, and it’s got potatoes! And cows! And a thriving financial industry! (Good to have a mix).
Plus there’s 48 miles of Premium Jersey Coast Path, so perfect for us to cram in some more hilly training for the Via Francigena, and pull together for you our 3 best Jersey walks!
But maybe we should talk a bit more about what Jersey is first. It’s the biggest of a whole bunch of islands in the English Channel, and I say ‘near the coast of France’ (about 14 miles), but it’s most certainly not France, and not really part of the UK either. But rather (and I quote): ‘a Crown dependency of the United Kingdom, ruled by the Crown in right of Jersey’. OKAY. Weeeeell, let’s maybe just not go into it.
To islanders, the Jersey Coast Path itself is the focus of one major event every year: the Island Walk. It’s a charity challenge to drag yourself around all 48 miles over one crippling day of walking. Bacon baps and blisters all the way.
Now as it happens, Luke completed this particular feverish challenge in 2011. He came home waxing romantic about the island’s amazing coast path: its old and winding beauty, its secret rocky harbours and caves, its exciting teeter along sheer cliff and aqua blue ocean.
So we have returned! And have got for you our 3 favourite walks all along the Jersey Coast Path, which you could call ‘the best bits’. With maps and everything!
Big hugs and thanks too for our very own locals Chris and Ellie for all their help and hosting!
Jersey Walk 1 | For beaches and frothy coffees
From: St Aubin’s Bay and back again
Includes: St Aubin’s Port, Noirmont Point and the bays of Portelet, Ouaisne and St Brelade’s
Distance: 11 miles
Click here to view map of this walk…
Although a bit long, we found there’s plenty of places to stop and have coffees (or just stop all together). And you can kick along a whole array of beautiful smooth white beaches too.
Starting at First Tower (a pretty large actual tower) in the centre of St Aubin’s Bay, the Jersey Coast Path heads west along the beach to St Aubin’s Port. You climb up through the pretty maritime village, and the coffee claxon can sound already, with cheery café fronts along the harbour to sit out in.
Continuing through St Aubin, the path takes you up past the yacht club to the headland of Noirmont Point. It’s an interesting route, over path, road, woodland and heath. There are Jersey green lizards living in the gorse, which are APPARENTLY quite rare but we actually saw, well, loads, so good luck to you.
Up on Noirmont Point you pass a number of Second World War bunkers, built when the Germans occupied the island. They sit narrow-eyed and forbidding on the side of the cliffs, and some are open to look around if you’re interested.
Portelet Bay is the next natural stopping point (coffee claxon) and another beautiful beach. Here too there are pretty roadside stalls, selling Jersey potatoes, jams, flapjacks, flowers, with money left in little honesty boxes.
A steep track down brings you out on to the rocky shore of the next bay, Ouaisne. There are often paddleboarders and kayakers out on the water around the headland, making their own leisurely way around the headland, bright yellow specks on the sparkling water. Ouaisne is a long inhabited bay, Neanderthal man hunting there by driving mammoths off the surrounding cliffs. Their fossilised bones have been recovered from the rocks below…
And the next and final bay, St Brelade’s, is one of the best beaches in the UK by actual vote. It has a long drag of beachfront restaurants to stop in, and watch the sea, sun and sky (also, claxon!).
The route back cuts through the leafy and upmarket Green Lanes before joining the old railway track which eventually comes out to St Aubin once more. Then a stretch back to the Tower along the bay promenade – point with the twinkling bay lights leading you back.
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Jersey Walk 2 | On clifftops and dunes
From: St Brelade and back again
Includes: La Corbiere Lighthouse and St Ouen’s Beach
Distance: 8 miles
Click here to view map of this walk…
A quiet and shorter walk with cliff edge paths and the sea far below. Starting in St Brelade this time, this walk heads first down through the Winston Churchill Memorial Garden, a steep and shady glade that runs down to the beach. Gambolling a bit around on the sand, you carry on up to the ninth century Church of the St Brelade’s Parish. It has a stout adjoining Fisherman’s Chapel where 6.30am sunrise services are still held. Behind it is a still usable back track straight down to the beach and sea called on the island ‘Le Perquage’, made, crazily, for criminals to escape the island. And there’s a disturbing story of its graveyard being transformed into a Nazi cemetery during the War.
The Jersey Coast Path then heads fairly steadily uphill with a towering stairway up the cliff for real panoramas: all rocky outcrops and wide, wide ocean.
La Corbiere Lighthouse appears ahead as a distant headland with ups and downs via caves and the old salt works. Little crumbling stone salt work towers still squat among the rocks by the ocean. The Lighthouse itself has a café and a Jersey Ice Cream van all parked up ready, selling fat creamy scoops.
The west coast truly begins here, and after the cute cove of Petit Port the wild five-mile beach of St Ouen’s beckons. With strong whipping winds, surfers of all kinds flock to this avenue of coast. It was on this stretch too FYI, about 30 miles in on the Island Walk of Pain back in 2011, that Luke suffered that well-known symptom of walker’s fatigue: one gigantic, ferocious nosebleed. 48 miles in a day for you.
St Ouen’s Bay also has places to eat dotted along the beachfront. We stepped up into the dunes to Le Braye for tea, cake and chips. Windswept, hungry and happy.
Then to get back to where you began, it’s up across the sand dunes. If you are Luke, you will run up to the top of the tallest sand dunes and then hell-for-leather-it down. If you are Nell you will not do this.
Teetering along sand dunes is a bit disorientating but eventually you come out to walk the local playing fields and up along another peaceful Green Lane (accompanied by some Jersey red squirrels perhaps) to burst back into St Brelade’s, victorious.
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Jersey Walk 3 | The wild coast and Green Lanes
From Devil’s Hole to St Helier
Includes: the north coast and the inland lanes through St John and Trinity
Distance: 12.5 miles
Click here to view map of this walk…
What could be more intriguing than starting at a point like this? And the bus goes right there too (‘next stop: Devil’s Hole’.) This section of the Jersey Coast Path takes in the faraway-feeling North coast, where we saw no other humans until we dipped down into Bonne Nuit Bay (sweetness ITSELF). It also is a meandering tour inland along more of Jersey’s parishes and Green Lanes.
Starting at the bus stop near The Priory Inn, there’s a 10 minute out and back to see ‘the Devil’s Hole’. It’s a hole in the rock basically, made dramatic in a stormy sea. Once the figurehead from a wrecked ship was washed through, locals fancying it looked like a demon. Bit of a tradition to keep a statue there now and you walk past the current ‘demon’ on your way down to the hole. Looked to us like a mossy, angry David.
Once on the cliff path proper, it’s completely open to the sea and sky. It has that beautiful, all-enveloping serenity that only walking right by the enormity of the sea really gives you.
The path leads eventually down to the Bonne Nuit harbour where we stopped in the friendly bay café that sold good, filling food from an inexplicable Thai/greasy spoon fusion menu.
Climbing out of Bonne Nuit, you leave the coast to walk on deserted roads through fields of Jersey cows, and little villages where hens peck by the side of the road.
The cycle route that we joined took us into the heart of St Helier which is all bustle and shops. It soon gives way to the seafront and the view of Elizabeth Castle sitting across from the bay on a tidal causeway (complete with amazing amphibious bus!). And the giant loop is complete.
