the fourth-last book I read

Gabriel's Moon by William Boyd.

Gabriel Dax has his life pretty well-worked-out: a reasonably lucrative career as a writer of travel-related books which allows him to just swan off to places that interest him, as long as he can persuade his publisher that there's a book in it, a nice easy-going relationship with his girlfriend Lorraine based mainly around vigorous and mutually-fulfilling sex with refreshingly few demands for commitment being made, and a cordial but arm's-length relationship with his older brother Sefton involving occasional visits to Sefton's family home for Sunday lunch and equally occasional errands run by Gabriel on Sefton's behalf, often coinciding with one of Gabriel's research trips, and usually involving the delivery and handover of some seemingly innocuous package to some seemingly random individual. 

The only cloud on Gabriel's horizon is his troublesome insomnia, something that seems to be related to a traumatic event in his early childhood: the death of his mother in a house fire, a fire which Gabriel himself - six years old at the time - barely escaped (Sefton was safely off at boarding school at the time). 

As part of one of his research trips Gabriel finds himself in Léopoldville, the Belgian colonial capital of Congo (nowadays Kinshasa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo respectively). While he is there (in mid-1960) he reconnects with an old university friend who is now working in the newly-established post-colonial government and who offers him an intriguing opportunity: interview the new Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba. Gabriel does this and comes away with some tapes featuring some exclusive material including some intriguing speculation from Lumumba himself about shady foreign influences who want him dead, even to the extent of naming names - none of which mean anything much to Gabriel. 

On his return to England, Gabriel delivers a draft article to a newspaper, expecting to be in possession of a lucrative scoop, but finds that the piece gets spiked for ill-defined reasons. Something to do with sensitive material in the article, something to do also with the coup that's happened since and controversially removed Lumumba from office. Whatever, the article isn't getting published and Gabriel isn't getting paid. 

Perhaps, as a result of this, Gabriel is slightly more receptive to an offer of alternative earnings than he might otherwise be, or perhaps it's just something about Faith Green, who approaches him a few days later with a revelation - she was on the flight back from Léopoldville with him and seems very well-informed about Congolese politics - and an offer: go to Spain, buy a pencil sketch from a Spanish artist and deliver it to an agreed contact, get paid, job done. Faith makes no secret of knowing Sefton, nor of them both working for some murky outpost of the Foreign Office, and of this "errand" being of the same variety that Gabriel has already been doing without giving it much thought.

Gabriel, after some token resistance, agrees and carries out the mission, which he finds interesting and stimulating and seems to have gone well. He decides to stay on in Spain for a few days and meets a young American girl, strikes up a tentative romance and agrees to transport a parcel for her to an address in Cambridge, and it's only when he's at the airport that an instinct makes him look inside the parcel and find a couple of packets of heroin. 

Having dodged - possibly literally - a bullet there Gabriel decides the old espionage game is too dangerous and attempts to settle back into his old life, while also trying to exorcise some of the ghosts of his past (and cure his insomnia) by doing some digging into the circumstances of the fire that killed his mother. But his new life won't be shrugged off that easily. Firstly it becomes apparent that the CIA have taken an interest in him and may have been responsible for the attempt to frame him with the heroin; this interest seems to be linked to the Lumumba tapes and what they may reveal about US involvement with the coup that removed Lumumba and installed Joseph Mobutu in his place. Secondly, Faith Green would like another drawing acquired from the Spanish artist and delivered, and Gabriel seems oddly unable to say no to her. Is it because he wants to get her into bed? Well, partly, yes. Anyway, Gabriel carries out the mission with similar results to the last one - the drawing is acquired and delivered to its recipient, Kit Caldwell, in Cádiz. But this time the drawing comes with information: Caldwell is a Russian spy and planning to defect, taking all he knows with him. Gabriel is preparing to return home, his mission complete, when he happens to call at Faith's hotel and see her in conversation with his brother Sefton. Realising he's been manipulated, he decides in a fit of pique to tip off Caldwell and facilitate his defection before returning home. 

His fascination with Faith Green having by this time curdled into mild obsession, he employs an acquaintance to tail her and find out where she lives. Not only does he do this but he finds out that she is currently taking a holiday in Southwold, so Gabriel, having nothing better to do, decides to make his way there for some light stalking. Tracking her down by spotting her distinctive Mercedes, he stakes out the house where she is staying, apparently with another man, and spies on her for a few days before she corners him in a pub and demands to know what he's up to. Taking a commendably forgiving view of his antics, she then brings him back to the house and allows him to stay the night - no funny business, just full sex. The gentleman friend is away for a few days, fortunately. 

Once everyone has returned to London, Faith is back in touch with another mission, this time a bit more dangerous, over behind the Iron Curtain, in Warsaw, and once again involving Caldwell, who, it turns out, is at least a double agent, and possibly a triple or even quintuple one. Gabriel demands that this time if he's going to be doing proper grown-up spying that he be issued with a gun and the means to conceal it while travelling, which Faith and her organisation (some murky offshoot of MI6, but - hey - aren't they all) agree to surprisingly readily. And just as well, it turns out, because after Gabriel decides to spurn the standard plane home and cover his tracks by getting a ferry from Hamburg instead, he is confronted by the CIA guy who's been on his tail since Gabriel's first trip to Spain and is keen to tidy up a few, hem hem, loose ends. Gabriel is obliged to pop a cap in his ass and tip his body overboard into the North Sea, thus completing his journey from Just Some Guy to International Superspy And Unstoppable Killing Machine. 

I glossed over a few bits of plot there, but as you can see there's still a lot of it, especially in a book of only (in my Penguin paperback edition) 263 pages. The main trunk of the plot is obviously the spying stuff and some of the peripheral stuff like Gabriel's childhood trauma (i.e. the house fire), his investigation of it and his visits to a psychoanalyst to explore it seem a bit inconsequential in comparison. Some of this can be accounted for when you realise that this is the first book of a trilogy featuring the same central character (The Predicament and Cold Sunset are the other two) - maybe some of these themes are being developed in order to be resolved in later books. 

This is (it hardly needs to be said) a book in Boyd's espionage thriller genre which also includes Restless and Waiting For Sunrise, and actually Gabriel's character arc isn't that different from Lysander Rief's in Waiting For Sunrise - young man with odd psychological affliction (insomnia here, anorgasmia there) drawn into murky activities which he gradually realises he has a natural aptitude for. As all of Boyd's books, regardless of theme, are it's relentlessly readable, Gabriel is an engaging central character and Faith is an intriguing and enigmatic foil for him who we want to know more about. There's so much going on in a relatively short space of time that some of it feels a bit breathless, though with this sort of book that's not a bad thing as it scoots the reader past some of the more glaring plot implausibilities without having too much time to dwell on them. 

Oddly, the other book it put me in mind of was Dick Francis' For Kicks, the first book of his I ever read back when I was a teenager and also featuring a young man thrown into undercover activity (to expose a horse-related crime ring in this case - pretty much the plot of every Dick Francis book, to be fair), discovering a natural talent for it and transitioning into it as a full-time job. Gabriel's Moon is also the second book on this list to feature Patrice Lumumba and the early days of Congolese independence as a sub-plot, the first being The Poisonwood Bible. There is also a more tenuous link with Brazzaville Beach, still my favourite Boyd of all, in that Brazzaville, capital of the smaller neighbouring state of Republic of the Congo, sits just a couple of miles across the Congo river from Léopoldville/Kinshasa. 

dropping a satisfying backlog

The sharp-eyed among you will have noticed the slightly non-standard title of the last post and wondered: what's going on there then? Well, it's a combination of things: firstly I've just been on holiday for a week and had a really good stint of book-reading, helped by all three kids now being at an age where they're keen to do the same (and by my keen coaching of all of them over the years to be voracious readers, one of my proudest achievements as a parent), secondly all the books I read on holiday were fairly short (in the 200-ish-pages range), and thirdly I finished Under The Banner Of Heaven a day or two before we left and didn't have time to blog it at the time. 

If you're wondering, yes, this is - thanks to the combination of factors described above - the first time that modified title has ever included the word "fifth". A quick scan suggests quite a few occurrences of "second", probably also mostly holiday reading but plausibly occasionally just laxness at getting round to writing a review. I think I've got as far as "third" three times, all associated with holidays significant enough that I can remember them without having to check: 

• our Austrian holiday in September 2008 (relevant title was Norwegian Wood, other two were The Promise Of Happiness and A Small Death In Lisbon)
• our Turkish holiday in October 2010 (relevant title was Falling Man, other two were The Girl Who Played With Fire and Chatterton)
• our honeymoon in Canada in July 2011, here we scaled the (until now) unique heights of "fourth" as well (relevant title was The Little Friend, other three were Hotel Du Lac, The Tortilla Curtain and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest)

the fifth-last book I read

Under The Banner Of Heaven by Jon Krakauer.

Imagine, if you will, the set of circumstances that would have led you, yourself a husband and father, to enter the house of a family personally known to you and to brutally murder a young woman (your sister-in-law) and her one-year-old daughter by cutting their throats with a razor-sharp kitchen knife. And not in an uncontrollable crime-of-passion kind of way, either - slowly, even apologetically, just doing what must be done. 

I would hope, unless you are literally some sort of professional assassin or psychopath, that you would find it difficult to imagine what set of circumstances would motivate you to such a course of action, and you might throw your hands up and say, well, I would literally have to have LOST MY FREAKIN' MIND in some way. 

Ron and Dan Lafferty had a slightly different explanation for carrying out the crime described above, and the background underlying that motivation, and a more detailed description of the crime and its aftermath, are the primary subjects of this book.

At this point we need, as the book does at about the same point in its narrative, to do a deep dive into the origins of the Mormon religion or, more properly, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. No disrespect but you can see why people use the shorter form, which derives from the name of a key prophet and supposed author of some of the religion's early sacred texts which were later dictated to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. 

As I've said elsewhere, Mormonism provides a fascinating insight into how religions develop, occupying as it does a sort of sweet spot between the two-thousand-years-ago respectability of mainstream Christianity and the fairly-obviously-loony (to most, anyway) ultra-modern stuff like Scientology. One of the obvious things that Mormonism and Scientology have in common is a foundational figure (Joseph Smith and L Ron Hubbard respectively) claiming a series of personal revelations via a sort of hotline to God, and in possession of enough personal magnetism and charisma to persuade an early group of adherents of the truth of his revelations.

I'm very conscious of not wanting to re-mount an old hobby-horse here in regard to religion (though my views on it have changed very little from when I used to post about it more frequently), but I think the quote generally attributed to physicist Steven Weinberg is relevant here: 

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

One of the things it also takes, or, to put it another way, one of the things a religion requires to really take hold, is a foundational figure with enough charisma and persuasiveness to tip people past their normal self-imposed moral limits and do stuff like the Mountain Meadows Massacre and, subsequently, use it as a means of cementing a tribal them-against-us mentality among the converted. 

The other thing Joseph Smith brought to the table in the early days of Mormonism was an intense desire for young women and a general inability to keep it in his britches. In an entirely coincidental and unrelated development, around this time Smith received some further divine revelations including an unequivocal thumbs-up for the practice of polygamy; Smith himself selflessly volunteered to set an example in this regard and is generally reckoned to have had between 30 and 40 wives by the time of his death in 1844. 

The polygamy business, which the mainstream Mormon church keeps trying to disavow and distance itself from, and various fundamentalist Mormon sects (including the one the Lafferty brothers were adherents of) keep reviving, is probably the main thing that keeps Mormonism a fringe concern except in certain hot-spots in the USA, the other being the inherent ludicrousness of the foundational texts and their method of being brought into being. Now as a non-judgmental utilitarian liberal type you'd have to say well, look there's nothing actually wrong with polyamory or polygamy per se if that's what everyone involved wants, everyone involved has a clear picture of what's going on and no-one's getting hurt, unless of course that's specifically what they want. The trouble with the Mormon version is that it's tied up with a bunch of other much less palatable stuff, firstly a fairly grim set of attitudes to women in general and secondly a disturbing penchant for older men marrying extremely young girls. 

A case in point - Warren Jeffs features as a fairly peripheral character in Under The Banner Of Heaven, having only recently (on the book's publication in 2003) become the head of the FLDS, the largest of the fundamentalist polygamy-endorsing splinter groups. Only a year or so later, in 2004, a series of lurid allegations started to emerge and (and I'm skipping quite a lot of detail here) Jeffs is currently in prison in Texas serving a life sentence for a series of sex abuse charges against underage girls.

Back to the Lafferty case, though - once the law caught up with the Lafferty brothers a key consideration in the ensuing trial was this: could they plead insanity? Devoid of any other context you would think there'd be a strong argument: hearing voices in your head telling you to go and off and murder your sister-in-law (Brenda Lafferty was married to Ron & Dan's younger brother Allen) for no actual real-life crime other than being a bit more feisty and outspoken than your religious upbringing would have liked her to be, and her daughter for no real-life reason whatsoever (what possible reason could there be, after all). 

Once you yoke that imaginary friend telling you to KILL stuff to an actual religion, it all gets a bit more tricky, though; after all, while most people don't slit anyone's throat as a result many religions claim some or all of their adherents have a personal hotline to God down which messages may occasionally be transmitted, and we don't say all religious adherents are by definition insane, do we? Hahahahaha my goodness no. 

The slightly paradoxical effect of this special pleading for religion is that as a result Ron & Dan Lafferty received harsher sentences than they would have if their lawyers had been able to make an insanity plea stick, something neither brother seemed especially bothered about, both taking the view that they'd done their appointed task and that some misguided real-world punishment by Godless heathens was an inconsequential price to pay in comparison with an eternity at God's right hand with Joseph Smith beaming down approvingly while they marry as many twelve-year-olds as they liked.

Jon Krakauer is probably best known for his book Into Thin Air (mentioned here), which recounts his involvement in the 1996 Mount Everest disaster. Under The Banner Of Heaven can't hope to be anywhere near as viscerally thrilling as that, and some of the deep dive into the early days of Mormonism, as essential as it is, meanders a bit when what the reader really wants is to know what made the Laffertys tick and why they did the unthinkable things they did. Of course none of that is really forthcoming, their motivations being bafflingly opaque right to the end; none of that is the author's fault of course. 

Speaking of bafflingly opaque motivations, Krakauer's earlier book Into The Wild was filmed in 2007 and tells the true story of the last days of Chris McCandless. Despite being much less obvious material Under The Banner Of Heaven was also adapted into a loosely-fictionalised TV mini-series in 2022.

oh for fox sake

I'd started writing the previous post a few days before I eventually hit the "publish" button, but if I'd been paying more attention when I eventually did so I'd have noticed that there were goings-on at the Open Championship on that day that warranted my attention, in particular the rounds of Lucas Herbert and Sam Burns, completed within about half an hour of each other on Friday afternoon.

There is something to be said for a pause for reflection before steaming in with the old size nines and whacking out a blog post, though, because if I'd done one there and then, or tacked that stuff onto the end of the other post, I'd have found myself having to do another one only a day or so later when eventual champion Ryan Fox posted his own round of 62 on Saturday. 

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele
Lucas Herbert	Open	2026	second	tied 6th	Ryan Fox
Sam Burns	Open	2026	second	3rd	Ryan Fox
Ryan Fox	Open	2026	third	WON	Ryan Fox

A few supplementary notes: the three 62s were achieved in three different ways: Herbert had a five-footer for a par and a 61 which he missed, Burns holed out from a bunker for a birdie, and Fox had a putt from 50 feet or so for a birdie and a 61 which he missed but knocked in the subsequent one for a par. Fox's last-hole birdie for victory the following day means that two of the eight 62s have resulted in a victory (the other being Xander Schauffele at the USPGA in 2024); that win ratio of 25% is very slightly higher than the equivalent number for the old table of 63s, as that yielded 7 wins out of 31, i.e. 22.58%.

ryu having a laugh?

I notice that I'm a bit behind on keeping track of major golf tournament scoring records, so let's tidy that up. I was prompted to check back on previous blog entries by the recent Evian Championship, this being the newest of the women's majors, having had major status since 2013. It turns out the round that I had listed as the single lowest in history - Hyo-Joo Kim's 61 - occurred at the second Evian Championship to be classed as a major, in 2014. What I had failed to keep track of was that there had been two further rounds of 61, both at the same major, oddly also the Evian Championship, in 2021. These should have prompted a revision to the table as below:

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Hyo-Joo Kim	Evian Championship	2014	first	WON	Hyo-Joo Kim
Jeongeun Lee	Evian Championship	2021	second	2nd	Minjee Lee
Leona Maguire	Evian Championship	2021	final	tied 6th	Minjee Lee

However, somewhat ironically, the thing that brought all of that to my attention at the 2026 Evian Championship was a thing that rendered all of it completely irrelevant - Haeran Ryu's round of 60, the lowest ever shot in a major by a human of either sex.

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Haeran Ryu	Evian Championship	2026	third	WON	Haeran Ryu

So the major scoring records for the five women's majors look a bit lopsided, with all the super-low scoring being done at the Evian; that's now three shots ahead of the LPGA and Women's US Open whose records still stand at 63, and two ahead of the Women's British Open and the Chevron Championship which stand at 62. If there's ever been a three-shot difference between low scores in different men's majors it must have been a very long time ago; the best I can do within what you might hand-wavingly call living memory is the two-shot difference between Johnny Miller's 63 at the 1973 US Open (and Bruce Crampton's 63 at the 1975 PGA Championship) and Henry Cotton's 65 at the 1934 Open Championship which stood as the record for that tournament until Mark Hayes lowered it to 63 in 1977.

incidental music spot of the day

We're still doing, when we're at home and not away doing other things, the Saturday pizza-and-movie nights we instigated as a desperate effort to stay sane during the dark days of the early COVID-19 lockdowns in spring and summer 2020. You can do your own maths here: six-and-a bit years times 52 weeks minus a few weeks when (more frequently outside of lockdown periods obviously) we were away doing exciting holidaying or something equals quite a lot of movies to get through. We have certainly repeated ourselves a few times as well, but I imagine there'd still be somewhere between a hundred and two hundred movies. 

A lot of other things have happened during those six years, of course, the most obvious one being that the kids are now fourteen, eleven and nine respectively, compared with eight, five and three when we started. So Nia and Alys are now old enough to want to watch things like The Hunger Games, something that they wouldn't have wanted to do (and nor would they have been allowed to) during 2020. 

Anyway, the loosely-related point of that lengthy preamble is: a couple of weeks ago we (or rather the kids; I don't get a say in this, my goodness no) decided to watch The Adam Project, a time-travel science-fiction thing that looked at least mostly kid-friendly. I will confess to being slightly resistant to the acting charms of Ryan Reynolds with his ultra-21st-century ironic knowingness and fourth-wall-breaking, but it was fine, all the usual annoyances about time-travel movies notwithstanding - the impossible looping causality paradoxes, the awkwardness of meeting your future self and discovering you'd turned into some cartoonish supervillain, accidentally becoming your own grandfather, as well as some, erm, other, more gnarly stuff.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of interesting uses of classic rock tunes during the course of the movie: firstly Led Zeppelin's Good Times Bad Times, the canonical track one, side one, album one as mentioned here (also featuring a movie link), and secondly Boston's Long Time, usually played with its lengthy intro Foreplay attached. As an aside, I've never been entirely sure whether the title of that section is a pun given that it features a long and extended bout of organ-twiddling. Anyway, you'll have noticed that both songs feature the word "time" in their titles; I would imagine that this is not a coincidence. Just to ruin (or at least partly undermine) that theory, the film also featured Pete Townshend's 1980 solo hit Let My Love Open The Door over the closing credits.

they malverned me

It was our fifteenth wedding anniversary last week (crystal, since you ask); various family commitments meant that we could only get away for a night and most of a day but that did afford an opportunity to do some walking in the Malvern Hills, somewhere I'd never been. 

Any walk in the Malverns will be constrained by the shape of the terrain, a distinctive north-south spine of rock poking out of the otherwise pretty flat ground. In particular, that topography makes it difficult to construct a satisfactory circular walk without either following an essentially out-and-back route (i.e. traversing the ridge twice) or incurring a lot of low-level walking at one end of the walk or the other. Conversely, organising a one-way end-to-end traverse of the ridge involves either two cars, or a reliance on public transport of some sort.

In addition to all that, if the aim of your walk is to walk the full length of the ridge, staying on top of it as much as possible, you have to decide how much of a purist/completist attitude you're going to take (this will additionally be constrained by what the people with you are prepared to put up with). So we could have done what this guy did and walk the entire ridge from its low-level start down at the southern end at Chase End Hill, but that would have involved some logistical shenanigans that we couldn't really be arsed with, plus an early start that we equally couldn't be arsed with, considering part of the point of the trip was to have a nice night away, dinner, a few drinks and not have to get up at some absurd hour.

A brief interlude for some accommodation details, then: we stayed in Colwall, largely for reasons of navigational and logistical convenience, but it happens also to be a nice little village with, crucially, a railway station (we'll come back to this later) and also the Colwall Park Hotel, a nice little country pub/hotel with pretty decent food and excellent Butty Bach which I took the opportunity of having a few of with dinner.

So we got up the following morning, moved the car fifty yards down the road to the railway station car park, and then headed off over the station footbridge and in a generally southerly direction. Basically the choice of Colwall as start point meant that there was a bit of a walk in to get to our chosen access point to the ridge - as you can see from the route map below this results in the walk being shaped like a wobbly letter J with Colwall at the bent end. 

So we cracked on up to the summit of Herefordshire Beacon at 338 metres (1109 feet), which seemed like a satisfying southerly point, all the minor hills to the south of it being lower. This is also known as British Camp, that technically being the name of the Iron Age earthwork that occupies its upper slopes. This first bit is an up-and-back trip from the British Camp car park, which is less satisfactory than a nice neat loop but did provide an opportunity on coming back down to pop into the imaginatively-named Malvern Hills Hotel for a refreshing beverage and a toilet stop before tackling the main ridge. 

Once on the main ridge there is, as with all ridge walks, a bit more up and down than you might expect, but it is in general a delight with (thanks to the flatness of most of the surrounding terrain) spectacular views all the way over to the Black Mountains, the Brecon Beacons and beyond. Named summits that we passed over during this section of the walk were Black Hill, Pinnacle Hill, Jubilee Hill and Perseverance Hill, all really just the tops of gentle undulations in the ridge rather than magnificent craggy peaks in their own right. 

There's another pronounced dip known as Wyche Cutting (at least partly man-made, I think) before the last and highest section of the walk; this handily contains another pub where we repeated the pint-and-a-piss routine from earlier. And then it was off up Worcestershire Beacon, the highest point of the day at 425 metres (1394 feet), and a few more subsidiary hills (Summer Hill, North Hill, End Hill), before dropping down into the northern end of Great Malvern and making our way to the railway station at Malvern Link, but not before a celebratory pint at the Bakery Inn. Refreshed, we then caught a train from Malvern Link to Colwall (two stops, less than ten minutes), picked up the car and headed back home. 

These are definitely hills rather than mountains, but (if you're lucky enough to have a glorious clear sunny day as we did) the magnificence of the views compares favourably with much higher summits, and it's a satisfying walk of almost exactly ten miles which you'll notice conforms to a couple of my informal rules: the low-level walk just to get to where you need to be is at the start rather than the end, and the main focus of the day (the highest point, invariably) is somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the way round. 

the moor the merrier

First of the outstanding walking posts is the follow-up to the Cotswold trip in the autumn of 2025 featuring the same group of people; this time we opted to rent this property for a couple of nights as it afforded reasonably easy access to the north-eastern part of Dartmoor. And as we know, no trip to Dartmoor can ever go spectacularly tits-up. Before we did any walking we did have a pleasant evening trip to the local(ish) pub and micro-brewery, the Beer Engine in Newton St. Cyres. 

One thing that you might not unreasonably expect to be a bit different between a jaunt onto Dartmoor in January and one in June is the weather. That, it turns out, is an expectation that can turn out to be wrong, although barring some absolutely apocalyptic turn of events you are at least guaranteed more hours of daylight to work with.

Anyway, the plan was to drive from the house to the village of South Zeal, park up there and head up onto the top of Cosdon Hill (or Cosdon Beacon, take your pick). This is a respectable 550 metres in height (1804 feet), not quite as high as Yes Tor and High Willhays a bit further west. We took a route that turned to the south just after leaving South Zeal, principally in order to take in the Bronze Age stone row that occupies the eastern flank of the hill, and which some people are calling "the most impressive triple stone row in Great Britain". Those people, I would guess, visited it in somewhat better weather than we did; although it was quite impressive we were disinclined to linger. Anyway, from there we turned to the west, smashed straight up to the summit trig point and then took a route roughly south over Little Hound Tor and then north-west. The original plan here had been to then ford the River Taw and head up and over Belstone Tor and into Belstone village, have a cheeky pint at the pub and then bimble back along the footpath that hugs the banks of the River Taw into South Zeal. A pretty good plan, I think, but a group decision was reached that a more direct return might be prudent given the unrelenting shittiness of the weather. So we skirted round the northern flanks of Cosdon Hill and arrived back in South Zeal, whereupon we took ourselves to the Oxenham Arms, a pub where I had stayed with my then-girlfriend Anne in the summer of 2000, a trip where we went up Yes Tor and High Willhays in absolutely glorious weather, setting an entirely unreasonable expectation for future trips. Anyway, the pub's proprietors were very accommodating about us dripping several gallons of water onto their seats while we carried out some vital rehydration activities. Anyone reading the website blurb and wondering where the standing stone is that's been incorporated into the pub's walls, it's in the back bar, second door on the left after you come in. 

Total walk distance was 13.7km, or about eight and a half miles. Route map and altitude profile are below, below that are a Cosdon Hill summit photo, and, for comparison purposes, photos of me at the top of Yes Tor in 2007 (rain, wind, darkness) and 2000 (glorious sunshine).

We had originally planned a lower-level walk on the Sunday around the woodland area reachable on foot from Newton St. Cyres, but since everyone's kit was completely waterlogged from the previous day we decided instead to head into Exeter, a short drive away, and do a dry walk around the harbourside there. Not very much to say about that other than it was a pleasant and leisurely six kilometres (just under four miles) and started and ended at the very pleasantly-situated Double Locks pub. Getting to the pub car park did require traversing the narrowest bridge I have ever driven a car over, though, and I am clearly not the only one who approached it with a bit of trepidation judging by the encouraging signage they've deemed it necessary to put on the approach (pics from Google Maps):

That's all very helpful, but to be honest the main thing that convinced me that the Mini would be OK was the sight of my friend Martyn's giant Range Rover squeezing across just ahead of me. Anyway, if you're ever in Exeter and fancy something similar the map is below; I haven't bothered with the altitude profile for reasons which I assume are obvious.