Berry Head

Sketch map of Berry Head

Berry Head is a promontory forming the southern margin of Torbay. It's good for a nice walk round, the seawatching can be very good and the scrub and woodland provide a breathing space for passage migrants. It's also my top "You should have been here yesterday" site.

Buses to Brixham stop by the car park behind the main shopping road, five minutes' walk to the harbour. You can catch the 17 bus (an hourly service) up to Shoalstone Beach on Berry Head Road but you'd be missing out on a very picturesque harbour and the chance of a bit of seawatching. From the harbour you can carry on up King Street and thence up Berry Head Road but if you're doing that you might as well get the bus.

Walking along the South side of the harbour check out what's in the water: you might see a seal or a dolphin winding through the boats, possibly a shag or a red-breasted merganser. If you walk down to the end of the breakwater you can do a sweep of Torbay, in Winter you've a chance of great northern or black-throated diver.

Once you've got as far as the breakwater you can take the road or the steps up to Berry Head Road. There are a couple of places where you can stop and have a look over the bay.

Just after the Berry Head Hotel there's a gate to the footpath through the woodland and up to the head. This is a rough path which includes a long sequence of steps so you may prefer to go the long way along the road.

Once you get to the top of the path the landscape opens out. The first port of call is over a moat and into a Napoleonic War fortification for a cup of tea in the café. Sitting outside you get a view out over the headland and into the English Channel.

Berry Head from the fort

Shags and gulls are generally the most obvious birds around. At the right times of year you'll also see guillemots and razorbills, these nest on the cliffs. To get a better view of these there's a hide on the other side of the wall that gives a grandstand view of the most popular cliff face.

Coming back from the hide and wandering down to the lighthouse most of the area is grassed with a few patches of brambles and scrub. Meadow pipits, robins and wrens are the most obvious birds round here but you never know your luck. Looking out to see you'll usually see gannets, if the dolphins are hunting close to you can get very close view of the gannets as they follow the hunt. Depending on the time of year and conditions you could also strike lucky with skuas or shearwaters, particularly look out for Balearic shearwaters in late Summer.

Gannet

Leaving this fort and following the path round the headland you'll get to more abandoned guardhouses and the visitor centre. On a nice day this is a very pleasant wander.

The fort from Berry Head

Meadow pipit

Getting back you can retrace your steps along the path or you can take one of the paths into the scrubby woodland. Depending on which paths you follow you'll either get back to Berry Head Road or the path that takes you back down the steps to the road.

Berry Head and Dawlish

A trip out to Brixham and thence to Berry Head, hoping for seabirds and perhaps a passage migrant or two.

Torbay from Berry Head

I got the train from Dawlish Warren to Paignton, then the bus over to Brixham. The coast was a bit quiet of birds — odd ones and twos of gulls and shags and a few pigeons at Dawlish — the river Teign was a bit more lively, with large numbers of oystercatchers and black-headed gulls.

Brixham Harbour

On Brixham Harbour there were plenty of gulls but no rock pipits (these were more thin on the ground that usual at Dawlish Warren, too). A seal bobbed up just by the "Do not feed the seals" sign then swam off between the boats.

Great black-backed gull

Instead of following the road round to Berry Head fort I took the woodland shortcut that climbs straight up. My good knee is telling me in no uncertain terms that it didn't enjoy all those steps. My dodgy knee is being ominously quiet. There's a packet of Anadin with my name on it. A small mixed tit flock was working its way through the woods.

Berry Head

After a cup of tea at the café in the fort I went down into the hide overlooking the cliffs to see what was about. There were plenty of jackdaws, pigeons and herring gulls and there were shags on the little rocky islets but no guillemots aside from a few flying low over the open water away from the cliffs. According to the board in the hide a couple of hundred had been on the cliffs the previous day.

I left the hide after the other occupants' discussion of the number of carriages on the main road out of Newport got too exciting. So I sat on a bench in the sun on top of a cliff, half-wondering why there weren't any fulmars while watching a large flock of gannets taking advantage of a pod of dolphins' attacking a school of fish.

Gannet

Gannet (? second calendar year)

Gannets

Gannet

Gannet

The only passage migrants I managed to bump into were a small flock of swallows flying out into the English Channel and a few red admiral butterflies.

Walking back I wondered what an odd shape was in the trees by the path. It turned out to be a buzzard.

Buzzard

I walked off the worst of the aching knee by getting off the train back at Dawlish and walking along the seawall back to Dawlish Warren. The tide was coming in and one of the juvenile shags was fishing quite close to the seawall.

Juvenile shag

I wondered about the thin black line in the water about a mile out, it turned out to be a raft of over two hundred eiders and common scoters settling down for the night over the mussel beds.

Eiders