COAST-TO-COAST ACROSS ENGLAND: 2013

The Coast-to-Coast (C2C) in England is another of what are considered the “classic” walks of the world. Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991) was a tireless walker and writer who scouted out walks which he then illustrated and compiled into guidebooks. One of his better known is the Coast-to-Coast walk across northern England, a 192-mile traverse over three national parks - the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. Completion of the walk guarantees a sense of accomplishment; by beginning at the Irish Sea and ending at the North Sea, one has put the entire breadth of England under one’s feet. Wainwright’s original itinerary is no longer the preferred way to go since highways and other impediments have rendered parts of it less scenic than they were in his day. However, you can walk very close to the way he suggested, and that was the route we planned to take.

Ellie and Suzy

Getting from Washington to Manchester, our gathering point for the walk, necessitated a stop in Heathrow. This is never a pleasant experience; even the trek between gates in the same terminal requires good conditioning. But heightening the misery this year was the fact that one of us had acquired a FitBit which could calculate the exact number of miles we had to run to make our connection. And run is the operative word; no matter how much time there is between flights it is never enough for one of us. Now the complaints and hysteria were punctuated by obsessive FitBit updates along the lines of “It’s already been half a mile” “Now it’s three-quarters!” “Okay, we’ve gone ONE mile already and the gate isn’t even in sight.” We were closing in on one and a half miles by the time we got to it, breathless, but with plenty of time to spare (as one of us felt compelled to point out with some severity). It was perhaps the most stressful segment of the entire journey from Washington to Manchester.

The next morning we met our group: thirteen hikers, two guides and a driver. We started out with a fairly long drive to Ravenglass, on the Irish Sea, and the Ratty Arms Pub, where we had lunch. Beer lovers immediately found themselves in a beer heaven that would extend all the way to the North Sea, salient qualities being mature hops, live yeast, lack of pasteurization, and relative cheapness. After lunch we traipsed dutifully over to the water and picked up the obligatory pebble which we were to toss into the North Sea, if and when we got there. The quaint rationale we were given for this was that the west coast of England is sinking, the east coast is rising, and by removing weight from the one and adding it to the other we would be doing our bit for the stability of England.

Ravenglass

That obligation shouldered, we began our walk in earnest up a fell. A fell is nothing more than a rounded, barren hill unworthy of being called a mountain. Some people become “fell runners,” getting their jollies by running from fell to fell. We looked more like fell staggerers, but it was still Day One, and we consoled ourselves with the thought that there was plenty of time for improvement.

We were in the heart of the Lake District, beloved by English holiday makers for centuries. The weather was perfect for walking - clear and cool. We passed Roman ruins, and the impressive Muncaster Castle. At one point we could see as far as the Isle of Man. There is only one place from which it is theoretically possible to see all four countries of the United Kingdom at one time (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), and that spot is on the Isle of Man. Weather permitting, of course.

Further walking brought us to our hotel in Cumbria. It was an old building that had been converted into an inn, and our room was in what used to be the barn. Modern conveniences like electricity had been added, but not always thoughtfully; outlets were hard to locate, and sometimes positioned unobtrusively behind heavy unmovable furniture. Water pressure was one luxury that didn’t appear to have even been attempted, either there or in any of the other hotels we stayed in. With luck a reluctant trickle would ooze out of the faucet or shower head, but never with any kind of conviction. Dinner, however, met expectations: Mussels and haddock, and the inevitable chips. (Indeed, we will save ourselves time from here on by not mentioning chips; it is safe to assume they came with every meal, even pasta.) Lest anyone felt calorie-deprived, the meal ended with “sticky toffee pudding,” topped with custard or cream. We waddled back to our beds in the barn.

Lake District

The next day we reveled in the magnificent Lake District scenery of mountains and lakes. There was little evidence of human habitation, but we did stop for a visit to the Eskdale Mill, one of the oldest water-powered corn mills left in England. An enthusiastic miller led us through the process and explained the working of the machinery, some of which dates back to the 1700s when oats were the main source of food in the area.

Eskdale Mill

At a higher, more remote elevation we came across a prehistoric stone circle, one of many such mysterious sites to be found in Britain. Their function is the subject of ongoing archaeological investigations today, but stumbling upon one unexpectedly in such an isolated location set the imagination and curiosity reeling. Why? Who? What? When?

Our walk that day ended in the picturesque village of Wasdale Head, where we were met by our van and driven back to our hotel of the previous night. One of the selling points of this particular tour, for us, was that we would always spend at least two nights in each place, with the van shuttling us to and from the starting and stopping points so that we were in fact covering the entire distance.

Wasdale Head

Unpacking, reorganizing and repacking night after night gets old very quickly, and no matter how many labeled ZipLock bags we start out with, by Day Three we will have lost all control over our belongings. Inevitably there are some hotels we were glad to see the back of, and others we could happily have stayed in longer. Suffice to say our barn bedroom looked good to us that evening.

Homey quarters

The following day the hiking got more serious. After being bused back to where we ended yesterday we started steeply uphill, about 1700 feet, to Styhead Pass. There our guide had the brilliant idea of continuing up even higher. Eventually we were allowed to stop for lunch before the 7.5 mile, sometimes steep and brutal, downhill.

Styhead Pass

Our home for the next three nights was to be Keswick, an old market town already on the map in the Middle Ages, but with evidence of prehistoric habitation going back well before that. The beauteous surroundings have inevitably contributed to the town’s development as a tourist mecca, but they have also been the inspiration for some of England’s most beloved Romantic poets, among them Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. And most of all, William Wordsworth, about whom more later.

Our first hike out of Keswick featured a long uphill, a long downhill, some scrambling, glorious views in all directions, and as a reward, an end-of-the-day stop in a beer garden that was being prepared for a beer festival. Little-known microbreweries hoping to get noticed were taking part, and long rows of taps stood ready to go. Alas, the festival was scheduled to start only after we left, but the mere contemplation of it was heady for some.

Beer Garden

Inspiration of a more sober sort was to be found the next day on a visit to Dove Cottage, William Wordsworth’s home from 1799 to 1808: “eight years of plain living, but high thinking.” Living with him was his sister, Dorothy, to whom he was close, and who gave him the idea of penning something having to do some daffodils she had noticed. The little household grew significantly; first came a wife, Mary, then a sister-in-law, and then in short order the first three of his and Mary’s children. By 1808 the house had been outgrown and larger quarters were sought. However, the inspiration for some of Wordsworth’s best known works came while he was living at Dove Cottage.

Suzy got a reprieve from hiking later that day. Not for the first time, her boots began to disintegrate mid-hike and she was forced to go back to Keswick to acquire a new pair. (This gives us another item to add to our list of Do's and Don'ts: Do NOT, between hikes, store boots in a warm place as the heat can cause glue to perish and uppers and lowers to part company. Suzy’s had been sitting in a closet by a heating vent for a year, despite Ellie’s sensible and repeated admonitions.) By having to shop that afternoon she missed seeing what was described (by Ellie) as a spectacular fall on Ellie’s part. In her defense, it was a very long, steep, and uneven descent, and those are tough on the knees.

Up until now the weather had been unaccountably pleasant, but it couldn’t and didn’t last. On this day we would be climbing to 2200 feet and were warned to expect brutal conditions - cold and windy. The trickery was that although the sky looked ominous, it was not actually raining when we set out. Therefore, all our rain gear was sensibly packed in our backpacks. Very soon came a slight drizzle - not enough to warrant waterproofing ourselves. That advanced steadily, and still we dithered. But by the time it got to the “throwing it down” stage it was, of course, too late. There was no shelter of any kind, neither trees nor huts, and opening a backpack to retrieve a rain jacket is more or less inviting the water to pour directly into the opening. It is not possible to perform the operation quickly enough to prevent further soaking. Back on the trail, we asked our guide why, in this dependably wet part of the world, they don’t have some architecturally pleasing and strategically placed huts for humans, but the very suggestion of such a thing seemed to so offend his sense of proper values that we let the subject drop.

At the top of the ridge our group of very cold and very wet hikers found themselves walking along part of a Roman road, built high so as to be defensible. Eventually we made a long descent, past a dammed lake which concealed several no-longer-visible villages and straggled into the guesthouse where we were to spend the next two nights. We had been cold and wet for hours and now were we muddy and miserable to boot, but that was all put to rights in no time. The owners had seen wet hikers before and had the situation well under control. The front door led straight into the sitting room, and there everything that could be decently shed in mixed company was removed and thrown into piles: jackets, hats, gloves, socks, backpacks, etc. The next morning the belongings of thirteen drowned rats had been miraculously dried and sorted - socks and gloves properly paired up, which was more than either of us had ever achieved at home. Nor did the warm welcome end there. Bottles were set out on a table, along with a notebook for recording drinks drunk. Wifi was available and free, although it did entail sitting at a particular end of a particular sofa in the living room. Attempting a seat by the blazing fire and a wifi connection at the same time was overly ambitious and doomed to fail.

Near Shap; view from our room

We were driven some distance for dinner at the Fat Lamb, a 17^th century coaching inn. Our notes say that we were “outside of Shap,” but it would be more accurate to say that we were outside of virtually everything except rolling hills as far as the eye could see. Stone walls, and, of course, the ever-present sheep. They had nothing to fear from us that night, our superb meal at the gastropub featured sea bass and trout, but no lamb.

The owners of the guesthouse didn't do dinners, but they had the “full English” breakfast down to a fine art. The next morning it included Cumbrian sausage, or “bangers” - so called because of their propensity to split open with a bang while being cooked unless vigorously and repeatedly pricked with a fork before and during cooking. We did justice to it all so as to be fortified for the eleven mile and 50+ stile walk to Kirkby Stephen. Suzy had grown up in stile country and viewed them smugly, mildly surprised that the guide made such a big thing of them when describing the day's walk. But she soon realized that for some obscure reason stiles are now much higher than they used to be. Have sheep been honing their high-jumping skills? Also, stiles now crop up with unnecessary frequency; you barely recover your breath after scaling one before you are confronted with another.

Stone fence with stiles

Once in Kirkby Stephen we had two options: we could continue the climb up to the Nine Standards Rigg, or we could find some place to have lunch and explore the sleepy little town at our own pace. The former sounded interesting: more standing stones of uncertain purpose, but possibly the demarcation between Westmorland and Swaledale? However the latter sounded irresistible; we were hungry and exhausted from all those stiles, and there was a church that looked really, really interesting. (And a sign in a storefront window indicating a masseuse on the premises, but we prefer not to dwell on that because it doesn't fit with the image we hope to convey.) Lunch in a small cafe on the High Street was forgettable, but the church was interesting. The present building dates from 1240, has a very lovely cloister, and, since 1990, serves both the Church of England and the Roman Catholic congregations of the area - at different times of the day.

Stone fences

Leaving Cumbria, we were about to enter the Yorkshire Dales National Park. There we walked alongside the picturesque River Swale, with which we felt an affinity: it too had come from the Nine Standards Rigg and was heading towards the North Sea. Pretty little villages dotted the countryside and a pretty little pub cropped up just around lunchtime. Beyond that it was sheep and stone walls in all directions. Our walk ended in the small but very old village of Reeth, once important enough to merit a mention in the Domesday Book of 1086. From Reeth it was a short van ride to Richmond, where we would spend the next two nights.

River Swale

Richmond has plenty of attractions, but by far the greatest among them is the Norman castle which dominates it. It was begun 1071 during the Norman Conquest, and is one of the oldest surviving stone castles in England. During the next three centuries the castle was substantially enlarged and reinforced, but some of the original masonry is still to be seen. By the end of the 14^thcentury the castle was no longer in use, and parts of it fell into ruins. In the early 19^th century some repairs were undertaken. Conscientious objectors were housed in the castle during the First World War. 

It was when we left Richmond and entered the North York Moors National Park that we encountered what the trip notes described as “invigorating switchbacks.” Quite suddenly it seemed that we were in a dramatically different world. The word “barren” doesn't do it justice. It was cold, windy, and rainy. There were neither discernible landmarks nor habitations of any kind – just a vast moorland in all directions. We were gripped with a resolve to reread the Brontë sisters when we got home, and thankful to have with us a guide who appeared likely to be able to get us there.

North Yorkshire

Purple heather blanketed the moors, providing some cover for the red grouse that bring the well-heeled to the moors during the shooting season. It's a very pricey pastime, and a meticulously managed one (according to its enthusiasts). We saw some of the “butts” (blinds) that shooters use, and one of our guides had the grouse call down pat and was usually able to summon them up for photographs on demand.

Red Grouse

A welcome sight in the wilderness was The King's Arms. In addition to food, that remote, isolated hostelry had rooms in which those attempting the classic C2C could spend a night. (We should mention that one thing that deterred us from signing up for the purists' version of the walk, that is with no van support, was an unavoidable 22-mile day somewhere in the middle. We would find a day like that extremely boring.) Either The King's Arms provided us with an unexpectedly good lunch, or we were just very ready for some food.

In quaintly named Hutton-le-Hole we stopped to visit the Ryedale Folk Museum, an open air museum where cottages and shops have been relocated and lovingly restored to give a glimpse into the daily life of past centuries. One of us was discomfited to recognize some of the objects on display as things she remembered from her own childhood home.

At our hotel that evening our guides had devised a jolly parlor game, the anticipation of which had both of us stressed. We were given several pipe cleaners and some straggly bits of wool that had been picked up along the walk and the instructions were to make something out of them that related to the C2C. It happened that Ellie had already bought a cute little stuffed sheep for a grandson, and we had the inspired idea of using that as the maternal centerpiece and surrounding it with little lambs. Prizes were to be awarded, and with that inducement we applied ourselves with will and determination to making something roughly resembling lambs out of the wool and pipe cleaners. We were feeling quite proud of our entry, and even had a little rhyme to go with the fetching tableau:

Some little lambs make excellent roast,

But these little lambs trekked coast-to-coast.

Lambs

We were beginning to idly wonder what the First Prize might be, when one of the judges unceremoniously tossed the main ingredient of our scene – the stuffed animal – the one element that actually looked like a sheep – out of the window into the shrubbery below and declared us disqualified for having included a non-sanctioned item! It was a bitter disappointment, but we graciously congratulated those who had wrested the trophy from us. They deserved to win.

Our guide must have thought us insufficiently challenged by that little competition because the next day, when we happened to be passing through some of the familiar haunts of his childhood, he had us cross a small river that had, in lieu of a bridge, about a dozen widely spaced but not very large stone platforms. He insisted that he had loved crossing this as a child. In principle it was very doable, but one needed both confidence and a good sense of balance when leaping from one to the other. Sticking one's landing was absolutely critical, and although the platforms were a lot wider than a four-inch balance beam, we were not teen-aged gymnasts. It was also possible to avoid the challenge altogether by walking along the river bank to the nearest bridge. Suffice to say some of us went one way, and some the other, and we were all dry when we reached the other bank of the river.

The walk from there was charming. Still in the North York moors but no longer on the moors, we passed through lanes with neatly-tended cottages on either side and gardens ablaze with color. There were pictures waiting to be painted and photographs waiting to be taken wherever one looked.

We eventually arrived at the train station in Grosmont, and took the sole remaining steam-powered train in the United Kingdom to Pickering. We found some empty seats and were pleasantly surprised at the luxurious furnishings in our coach until our attention was directed to a prominent sign: FIRST CLASS COACH. The conductor had immediately noticed that our second-class tickets were incompatible with the seats we were occupying. He kindly said he would check to see if there were any second-class seats available further along the train. He came back with the bad news, and sounded apologetic: “It wouldn't be fair to the people who have paid for first-class seats if I let you stay here, would it?” Not for the first time in our lives we were being shown where we belonged. As it was, our new surroundings were much livelier than those we had left, being full of uninhibited locals happily telling everything they knew about the countryside we were passing through. And any feelings of inferiority we might have felt were banished when we got to our hotel in Pickering and found ourselves assigned to a room that had a large plaque on the door: SUPERIOR ROOM. Finally the cream had risen to the top!

At dinner that night our guide further heightened our spirits by announcing that the next day's hike, our final one, would be shorter than we were expecting, and we would be at the North Sea in time for lunch. This was welcome news as we awoke to a convincing rain the next morning. The first part of the hike was uphill through dense bracken as high as our shoulders. It made using walking poles impossible, and balance that much more difficult. But as we climbed higher the landscape opened up into beautful broad fields, and before long we were high enough to catch our first glimpse of the North Sea and Robin Hood's Bay far below. It was for us a euphoric sight. The rain had let up but it was very muddy underfoot, and there was still a long way to slip and slide before the path led us down to the shore.

Robin Hood's Bay

We walked out on the beach to the water's edge, and with some fanfare gave our pebbles an energetic fling into the North Sea. After the required group photograph had been taken with at least a dozen different cameras, we made our way to the pub where we would have lunch.

Robin Hood's Bay is a tiny village at the foot of a steep cliff. Formerly kept alive by fishing, it now owes what prosperity it has to holidaymakers who must park their cars at the top of the cliff and walk down into the quaint village. We were to have lunch at Wainwright's Bar, named in honor of the man who popularized the coast-to-coast walk. Both guides and our driver had been salivating over the prospect of what this lunch would consist of, and describing its epicurean delights since Day One. For Yorkshiremen like them, it would have every single thing that a meal is required to have if it wishes to qualify as a meal: sausage, mushy peas, chips, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding! It had all of those. And it could sink a ship.

Final meal

We worked off a token ounce or two by trudging up to the car park at the top of the cliff, where our driver was waiting with the van to return us to our SUPERIOR ROOM in Pickering. Dinner that night was to be a celebratory farewell with our group, and it was a festive affair with only one sour note. We had pre-ordered our main dishes, and by some mix-up Suzy's lamb shanks were put down in front of Ellie, who managed to scarf them down before the mistake could be rectified. They were to have been Suzy's act of revenge for all the sheep poop she had trudged through over the past ten days.

The boots were soon cleaned of all remnants of the walk (and stored in a cool place), but the memories won't be erased. There is a spirit of England that is ancient, and easily overwhelmed by modernity. It cannot be experienced in any of England's cities or tourist attractions. But it does still exist, and it accompanied us from one sea to the other. It was a fine companion.

click here to see a gallery of the photos