The late Laurence Coldwell in his experimental hovercraft at Doniford

There is no doubt that we folk who live deep in the countryside are more fortunate than most in these remarkable times. At the very least, we can get out of our houses and wander around in fresh air without meeting a soul.

I walked our lurcher Finn everyday last week as the lockdown began, and in six days saw just two people - and both of them were local neighbours and we were able to stay 30 feet apart.

Yesterday hordes of visitors came out in the spring sunshine to enjoy the hills and dales of the South West - and both on the news last night and this morning were roundly ticked off for doing so.

It’s a shame, but it is true. Mass excursions anywhere at this time are simply a very bad idea.

To which some people reading this in towns and cities might say: “It’s all very well for you, but you have the luxury of all that lovely empty countryside because of where you live. Why shouldn’t we grab a bit of it?”

One problem is that many of those visitors were calling at little village stores and the like - places which very bravely have been trying to continue running a limited service for the small local community. A community which, for the most part in the countryside, will have a higher age demographic than the average urban area.,

I see now that the Isles of Scilly have requested all boats and yachtsmen to avoid the archipelago. And when they are begging for isolation 28-miles west of Land’s End, you know things have got serious. Perhaps I will put up some stories about the Scillies later in this lockdown diary - for 20 years I have been a regular visitor reporting on events in the islands for the newspaper I worked for.

Anyway, talking about places across the waves - if I walk to the top of the hill opposite my house (again, I do so often and in one week haven’t seen a single human being up there) I can see another country. It’s called Wales, and it may as well be Mars in normal times, let alone now - so little traffic flows between the two shorelines.

I was thinking this the other day as I walked up on the ridge looking north to that distant place across the Bristol Channel - and I began remembering all the times as a journalist I wrote about cross-channel interaction between the two places.

People have been dreaming of linking the two divorced lands ever since St Decuman floated across on an inflated pig-bladder more than 1000 years ago.

My own journalistic notebooks are dotted with mentions of both the transmigration of local people, and with descriptions of cross-channel services. Some of the services actually plied the waves – most notably the paddle steamers that zig-zagged the Bristol Channel for the best part of 100 years - others were dreams that turned to dust.

On several occasions while working as a young cub reporter for a local West Somerset newspaper I came across golden wedding couples who’d met thanks to regular ferry services that used to sail between both coasts. One elderly Watchet couple described how they had met when he’d come across from Penarth on a day trip to Somerset and how they’d later carried out their courtship by flashing their bedroom lights at one another in a kind of simple Morse code across the 14 mile watery divide.

But it was almost exactly 30 years ago while working for a national newspaper that I wrote what will, without doubt, remain the strangest and most colourful cross-channel related story that will ever come to my attention. This is how I began a Guardian article back in November 1987…

Doniford Bay - which was to play host to a cross-channel hoverport

“Laurence Coldwell came out of prison clutching his cowboy books under his arm. A man, even 80 years old, has to do what a man has to do. ‘I have done just that,’ he said. ‘I am like the Tolpuddle Martyrs.”

Mr Coldwell’s crime? “It were all to do with the hover-port…” is what he told me in his northern brogue all those years ago.

Laurence Coldwell owned a scruffy, doomed, piece of land on the West Somerset coast near Watchet – “scruffy”, because it was the site of an old World War Two gun-emplacement where they’d practised shooting at a remote-controlled plane that bore the memorable name Queen Bee – and “doomed” because it was, and still is, falling into the sea.

The 80 year old – now long since departed to that Promised Land in the sky - was an indefatigable optimist prone to a perpetual onslaught of ideas. Which is exactly what you had to be to buy the otherwise useless and perilous Queen Bee site in the first place…

He had tried everything to generate some kind of use for the land - from inaugurating a mock Red Indian tepee village (full of hippies with nowhere else to live) to trying to talk the West Somerset Railway into to building a nearby “cowboy themed” halt on its famous line. The hippies hung on, and for many years afterwards the gateway bore the legend “Watchet Wild West Society”.

If I tell you that Mr Coldwell bought a wrecked tug with which he intended running services to the workers on the Severn Barrage, you will begin to understand the levels of optimism this man enjoyed. But then, Mr Coldwell was always a long, long way ahead of his time. Three decades ago he was worrying about global warming and so bought an electric milk-float as the ultimate in carbon neutral conveyances – a rattling old thing which he described as “a lovely little run about and very cheap to run.”

One day, while staring across the grey horizons covering the second highest tidefall in the world which would one day (but not yet) provide power for a mighty barrage, Mr Coldwell noticed Wales.

In that moment, a plan was born. Within days he’d bought an “experimental” hovercraft with the hopeful intention of eventually building up a full blown cross channel ferry service. Members of the Press we were invited around the see the great machine - which turned out to be one of the weirdest contraptions ever to carry an engine.

This catamaran-hulled vessel was a mere forerunner to the much bigger machines that would one day run from the Queen Bee to Barry. However, even at this early stage we could see that the plan was as doomed as the land it stood upon.

It sat, like a caged animal, in a large old dusty shed. Mr Coldwell beamed proudly as we stood there aghast, and then a cupboard door was opened in some dark nether region and we were introduced to the pilot – a man who, we were told, had “flown Sopwiths in’t First World War…”

This ancient individual, complete with leather flying cap and goggles, was led to the hovercraft and helped up the steps to the driver’s seat – and there he sat motionless dreaming, for all we knew, of the war torn fields of Ypres.

There was a roar as old Coldwell fired up the engine and then Bedlam was unleashed as the great hovering beast lurched around the shed like a huge bumper car. Every time the machine collided with a wall, the pilot’s head fell forward or backward depending on his wild and random course. The master of the Sopwith Camel seemed to have no mastery over the Coldwell hovercraft at all.

The photographer and I legged it through a small side door and ran for our lives. I am ashamed to say we didn’t return to help pick up the pieces, nor did we attend the public launch of the very first ever Bristol Channel hovercraft service and so did not witness how the machine sink just a few feet from the shore.

As if the madcap scheme wasn’t plagued with enough troubles, the local authorities decided to take umbrage over what Mr Coldwell described as “slight cosmetic adjustments” to the crumbling cliff. The old boy had gone out and bought a second hand bulldozer which he’d used to create a massive ramp down onto a beach that is actually a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Council officers didn’t like this much so they told him to fill it all in and reinstate the cliff.

A long and complicated court case ensued, sums of money were ordered to be paid, Mr Coldwell refused, and so on – until he was given the eventual choice: pay or go to gaol.

“I were a bit worried my wife would pay up at the last minute,” Mr Coldwell told me from his prison cell. “So I rang her from the police station and told her she wasn’t to…”

“With his unsubstantial pageant faded, Mr Coldwell is of such stuff as dreams are made on,” is what I wrote at the time, somewhat overly lyrical, in The Guardian newspaper. “He is an old man who owns some crumbling cliffs, but even that is an abstraction. Because the cliffs he once owned are now the beds on the beach where fossils sleep.”

It all seemed most elegiac to me at the time, but now I feel sad for the late Laurence Coldwell who was certainly one of the most romantic figures ever to have dreamed of running a cross channel ferry service. He had realised a need and had attempted to address it in his homemade, slightly eccentric way.

I can’t help but wonder what he’d be doing in the face of the present crisis?