Six days on the salt road

The salt workers of Saline d’Arda start before the light does. By the time I found the path along the first dike, a little after five, three of them were already out on the pans with wooden rakes, drawing the crust into ridges that would be white by noon. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the scrape of the rakes and, somewhere behind the low hills, a dog that had not yet decided whether to bark.

The coast road that gives this walk its name was built for salt, not for people. For four centuries carts carried it north along the cliffs to the market towns, and the old route still survives in pieces: a stretch of cobbles here, a stone marker there, a bridge that now crosses nothing at all. The plan was simple. Walk it end to end, sleep wherever the evening found us, and let the tide set the pace.

On the second morning the fog came in off the sea and did not leave. It erased the headlands one by one, first the far ones, then the near, until the path was a pale thread running into white. Walking inside a cloud does strange things to distance. A cliff that looked an hour away was suddenly under our feet; a farmhouse we had been aiming at for half the morning never came any closer.

Morra Alta appears all at once, the way hill towns do: a scatter of white walls on a bare slope, a bell tower at the top, and then nothing else for miles. We arrived as the sun was going down behind us and every house on the hill turned the colour of apricots. The woman who rented us a room above the bakery said the light did that every evening in October, and that we would get used to it. We did not.

Breakfast in Morra Alta is a short affair. Coffee, thick and sweet, a slice of yesterday’s bread, and whatever fruit is on the tree outside the window. The bus to the coast leaves at eight, or at nine, or not at all; the timetable pinned by the door has been corrected so many times in pencil that it has become a kind of argument. We walked.

The last stretch of the salt road runs along a ridge so narrow you can see the sea on both sides. The lighthouse at Capo Lume has worked by itself for decades, but the keeper’s house is still lived in, by a retired fisherman who paints the tower every spring and switches the lantern on by hand when the storms are bad, just to be sure. He showed us the logbook, kept in pencil for more than a century. The last entry read, simply: calm.

Out here, the tide is still the only timetable anyone trusts.

We walked out of the trip the way we had walked into it, across sand. Below the cape the dunes of Sesta run for kilometres, shifting a little every winter, with marram grass holding the crests in place. In the late afternoon the wind drops and the sand goes quiet and warm, and it is very hard to believe that anything is waiting for you at the other end.

There is no train back from Sesta. There is a bus, eventually, and a café by the stop where they will tell you it is coming soon. Order something. Watch the light. It is the most honest timetable on the coast.

Ines Marlow writes about walking and the places it leads to. The salt road is waymarked from Saline d’Arda to Capo Lume in six stages; the best months are May and October.