The sea will be there regardless of what happens with the marriage, which is either a comforting thought or a chilling one depending on how you’re approaching it. I tend toward comforting. The permanence of large things — water, stone, sky — doesn’t diminish the importance of the human things but puts them in a proportion that is useful when you’re sitting inside a human problem and can’t quite see around it.
I have been to coastlines at difficult times before. There’s something about standing at the edge of something that large that performs a useful function — it makes the ongoing situation feel less inevitable than it does inside the house where the situation lives. Out there, you can see that the world is very large and that the particular arrangement of your life, however it has become, is one specific arrangement among an infinite range of possibilities.
I’m not a person who believes in geographic solutions. You carry what you carry wherever you go. But I believe in the restorative value of a changed landscape, briefly, as a way of seeing your own landscape more clearly when you return to it.
The cliff walk is four miles. I have looked at the topographic map online. It goes up to a headland about a mile in, where the path is level for a stretch and the view opens out to both directions along the coast, and then it descends gradually to a small shingle beach where you can stop before turning back or continuing.