Walking Coast To Coast: Adventures Along Wainwright's Trail Across Northern England

By David Butterworth

At the end of July 2013, David Butterworth made an impulsive decision to walk the second half of the 192-mile Coast to Coast Walk across Northern England from west to east, completing a second crossing.

During the seven-day adventure, he was surprised to discover how much ease and complacency towards the Walk which runs from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in Yorkshire, trends.

Casting his mind back to an earlier era, Mr Butterworth recalls that the remarkable scenery the Walk passes through: the Lakeland fells, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, would be enjoyed much better if hikers didn’t rely on support services.

The book floods with detail about the freedom to enjoy some of the most stunning landscapes found anywhere in the British Isles. It richly describes the scenery and what it is like to walk this iconic route, particularly if you decide to carry your bed and belongings on your back. Furnished with detail about heritage sites along the Walk, contrasted with several unusual situations, much of one’s walking experience is told in this book’s pages. It is an immersed account of one man’s unforgettable journeys and adventures walking this fascinating and timeless trail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Butterworth
• Release date: Jan 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310961052

David Butterworth

David Butterworth was born in London and brought up in Newcastle upon Tyne in the north-east of England. He attended the University of Northumbria where he graduated with a (BA Hons) in Historical and English Literary Studies. Unsure of his vocation, he completed the TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) course and left the United Kingdom to teach English. Since 2001 he has been teaching in Japan and now in China where he has been resident for several years.As well as in Britain, he has hiked in Japan and traveled widely in China and in parts of South-East Asia. He enjoys swimming, jogging, reading, music and watching dated movies.He has been writing short stories, travel essays, journals and intends to write some novels - suspense and one based on his working class upbringing in Northern England. He's currently working on one, a suspense novel concerning Richard III

Book preview

Walking

Coast To Coast

Adventures Along Wainwright’s Trail

Across Nothern England

By

David Butterworth

Copyright © 2015 David Butterworth

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved. This ebook is licensed for your own enjoyment. No part of this ebook may be copied, re-sold or given away. If you would like to share this book with other people, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and didn’t purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Prologue

August 4th, 2013

Part One First Half

April, 1985

And all for nothing!

Eagerly to Ennerdale

Sluggishly to Grasmere

Up and Over to Patterdale

Uncertainties at Shap

Lonesome to Kirkby Stephen

Trudging Down to Keld

Part Two Tenting

July, 1990

Deciding to Camp

To the Ennerdale Basin

Stiff Slogs to Grisedale Tarn

A Dash to Haweswater

Halts to Sunbiggin Tarn

By Bog to Crackpot Hall

To Richmond, ‘Killing Two Birds’

To the A167

Down, then Up to Urra Moor

Slogging it to Glaisdale

And finally….Robin Hood’s Bay

Part Three Second Half

July/August, 2013

July 28th

Wet Feet to Reeth

Sunny Climes to St Giles

Hard Thudding to Ingleby

Up and Down to Hasty Bank

In Company to the Lion

A Detour to Grosmont

Pacing to Robin Hood’s Bay

Epilogue

Author’s Note

For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Luke 12:34

We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features…

Thoreau

When you have this sense of the whole, you will be related to the universe.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A thing of beauty is a joy forever.

Keats

Prologue

August 4th, 2013

The Coast to Coast Walk is now a trade-off between comfort and flexibility, remarked a bald guy sitting on the ground with his back to a wall nursing a lavishly covered door-stepped paperback of literary musings. The walk, a long-distance jaunt across Northern England, connects the coastal resorts of St Bees, a village hugging the Irish Sea and Robin Hood’s Bay, a clustered settlement that kisses the North Sea. It was devised over forty years ago by the famous outdoorsman, artist and cartographer Alfred Wainwright (1907-1991).

The guy stopped my gravel-crunching footsteps as I passed several stout semi-detached houses, to ask if I’d just finished walking the 192 mile route.

Yes, and for the second time, although I’ve just traipsed the second half, having done the first during one occasion a long while ago when I first set off walking it. The other time it was done right through. Now the walk is all about convenience, I assessed. My thoughts wandered to its beguiling setting.

Too convenient, he responded.

He couldn’t help but admire my sizeable pack smothered in a torn and scuffed purple covering clinging to my back, a constant wayfaring companion. As I loosened the straps from my shoulders and jettisoned the load for a countless time, he asked if he could lift it.

Go ahead.

The pack dangled from his hand several inches above the ground for a few key moments as though suspended from a weighing hook.

My, that’s heavy!

He indicated his admiration that carrying such a load and for such a distance was a tough ordeal. He then directed me further into the upper, more residential part of Robin Hood’s Bay, away from the beach huddle, and advised that I go and find the nearest pub to sink in an easy chair, nurse away my walking worries and carrying labours by quietly getting drunk.

***

That end-of-the-walk exchange bore all the hallmarks that an independent stalwart backpacker was some hero; that it’s unusual to see someone having walked the crossing unsupported. But why should it? Those manifestations were once the norm. No one twenty or thirty years ago batted an eyelid if they saw a fellow Coast to Coast walker carrying his bed on his back. Is it because comfort and convenience - a feature of today’s climate; relying on backup transport business companies to shift the bulk of one’s belongings - is making things easier? Some walkers that start out with everything but the kitchen sink clinging to their backs find, after the first day or two; they can’t manage both the weight and the walk, particularly if they are walking from west to east.

Arduous ascents on the Lake District’s packhorse trails that come early prove too much – at least without enough walking experience on similar mountainous terrain. A shuttle mini bus service is immediately called, like some emergency service, to move the bulk of one’s belongings to the next port of call and even arrange accommodation at the end of the day. Voila! Everything becomes timed and scheduled. But is this sacrifice too tempting to miss?

The Coast to Coast Walk is never more popular. It’s not uncommon for some to have done it ten times over, wishing to emulate again and again an enriching experience. Most of the 5,000 or so wayfarers that annually complete the Wainwright enterprise don’t want to miss out on a chance to escape into something fulfilling, grand, however transient, on a walk that is arguably England’s, if not one of the world’s, most scenically variable. More folks across the globe are hearing about it while others, getting online, are Googling it.

The route, from one side of England to the other, encompasses the following. Deep thrust valleys and mountain passes of the Lake District, a limestone escarpment, desolation of the Pennine hills, the ‘swollen and glorious’ Yorkshire Dales, the switch-backed Cleveland Hills and the windy heathery North Yorkshire Moors. The whole scenic endeavor, ending on the sea cliffs at a huddled fishing village with a smuggler’s past, is too good to miss. The variety speaks volumes about the cause of the walk’s popularity.

It’s fitting – if not ironic – that this book should be written over forty years after Wainwright routed the walk. But it’s partly a response to the tradition of unsupported independent travel along the route getting sidelined. Gone are the days when all walking the route set out from one of the starting points and simply shouldered their belongings and began walking until the end of the day. Then they went in search of the nearest youth hostel or bed and breakfast to see if a bed was available or others found a suitable place to pitch a tent before politely moving on the next day.

I’ve always done it on the hoof. Using a carrier service, which some might call ‘throwing in the towel,’ didn’t cross my mind until I met others using it. It was somewhat of a revelation to see minibuses, having their doors thud shut, and speed to the arranged ports of call to collect clients’ rucksacks and then dislodge them at the end of the day. I was surprised if not dismayed by the equal incredulity towards a tent carrier by those I met along the way who were using the service.

The idea of shouldering all your belongings and carrying them throughout, especially a tent is, was thought as heroic, foolhardy, or just plain agonizing. I hadn’t given much attention to unsupported backpackers or tent carriers being in a notable minority. And it’s not just the Coast to Coast, among the otherwise designated footpaths in Britain, which has transport pick-up. These services are sitting on a gold mine.

A gold mine or not, I’m certain the tradition of unsupported simplistic backpacking along the Coast to Coast won’t die out altogether. There will always be wayfarers that can’t afford or simply dislike the idea of having the so-called ‘luxury’ of getting their packs ferreted from place to place for the rate (in 2013) of seven pounds per bag per day. They might not want to pay to have their independence along the route as well as their bag snatched away. I was told, while chatting to someone in Patterdale about one guy who did the crossing supported, ended up with an unbooked bill for £2,000 – or so I was told. Although that amount isn’t usual, it indicates how much money can be involved regarding deficit.

The simplistic unhindered attitude of finding a bed, sleeping under the stars, pitching your tent when and where you want, is this book’s story. Watching closely a mental and physical response, how a conditioned attitude towards a pattern of convenience has limited or overtaken things, is told on some of these pages. If this volume lessens in any way the idea that ‘something or someone will come along and do it all for me,’ then it has done its job.

I’d like to communicate a heartfelt thanks to a family at St Bees all those years ago, who gave me a room and board for nothing. To a small group of Canadians who shared some sandwiches and fruit before I needed to snatch at some hunger rations on the North Yorkshire Moors. To a guy from the USA who bought me beers. To them I gratefully dedicated this book, and I hope some, if not all of them, may find it.

Part One

First Half

April, 1985

And all for nothing!

The two-car train edged and clunked its way down the Cumbrian coastline shaped like the side of an almond or an outstretched bow ready to release an arrow into the mainland. The local service between Carlisle and Barrow; the latter a drab depressed town with a once-thriving industrial base in Cumbria’s Furness district, wouldn’t be stopping there before calling at much smaller settlements. They house stations that resemble dinky toy train sets. One of them happens to be called St Bees, derived after a saint with the name of ‘Bega.’ Bega was thought to be an Irish princess who escaped from being forced into a loveless marriage to a Viking lord by crossing the Irish Sea. She landed at this spot on the coast where she might have led an isolated life of extreme piety. Once pirates invaded the land, she escaped along with her virginity, according to The Life of St Bega, to Northumbria where she continued to live a life of saintly devotion. Did she, in fact, actually exist? The discovery of a bracelet found at the spot led to a cult being set up in her name, or was it a fantastic idea based on an fictitious name? Whether Bega was fact, fiction or cult, the name ‘St Bees’ seems a likely derivation of the name.

The train picked up momentum; scraped on its tracks and ground to an abrupt halt at the village’s small station. I stepped from the train onto a flat tarmac platform. The sparse buildings that adjoined it seemed dull. Steeped sloping roofs covered in lifeless gray tiles, houses a waiting room and toilets. It seems doubtful if there’s even a ticket office among this edifice. Nowadays you pay the conductor once you‘re on the train as it hums again into life.

St Bees once had an outstanding ecclesiastical past. Founded by the Bega cult or otherwise, a lonely 10th century stone cross with a distinguished past, planted in the priory grounds, attests to religious worship which began before the Norman invasion. It’s not exactly a cross, as crosses go, but is really a stone plinth or a slab set in a square moss-covered tiered base. Some of these ‘crosses,’ as they were and are usually recognized, might have been structured later when Britain became more, to coin a phrase, ‘officiously ecclesiastical.’ The priory, built of sandstone, now an Anglican church with an ancient tiered Romanesque style-curvature chiseled in deep chunks around its door, might have resembled Lindisfarne on Holy Island or Whitby’s ruined abbey, and might even go unnoticed.

Since the monastery dissolved in 1539 no monks shrouded inside their thick brown habits with their hoods pulled over, will be seen passing in line to and from their place of worship or to their cloisters. The only evidence of a once-thriving monastic community is broken stones and pieces of wall that tumble down to the ground. The remnants of any activity will be the occasional visitor whose imagination of a distant past might run riot as his or her eyes slip-on and closely observe the ruined surrounds and wonder what might have taken place. What, for example, might have been eaten? How did the monks sleep? How did they worship? What other activities might they have done to fill out their daily routine unless it was nine-tenths of the time spent in devoted isolation? Was it hemp making? Handicrafts such as pottery? Might it have been weaving? Did they wear hair shirts?

Once the visitor has gone with a mind full of surmises, an occasional bird might drop by and perch on one of the stone ledges in rest from its flight. It may even get a chance to preen its feathers and close its blinking eyes and snuggle its head into its breast. The occasional hedgehog might scuffle its way between the tidily honed grass at the base of a fragment of wall scouting and be foraging for insects or a tidbit or two it might be lucky enough to sniff. Village parishioners each Sunday stir themselves from their homes at the sound of intermittent bell-clanging from the square tower to make their way to the church for Sunday service to sing hymns at the sound of drawn-out organ keys, kneel and pray for forgiveness, listen to the sermon and give thanks.

Leaving aside rolling rural land, fields and enclosures surrounded by walls that extend and flood inland, a stream called Pow Beck splits the village in two. The central part where the train stopped comprises huddled terraced houses along a main street, bed and breakfasts, the church, pre-Norman, a school, a local store and a pub which has the Cumbrian Ale brand of ‘Jennings’ emblazoned on the front. The minor part is more like a tag-on that brushes a sea wall, a dull sanitised caravan park; prefabricated mobile holiday homes that resemble white gigantic blocks of lego that are slapped here and there along numerous stretches of Britain’s coastline. During winter, they are abandoned, neglected, like some chilly graveyard. The only activity to be heard and seen are the miry depths turned gray as they crash their waves venting their white angry foam smashing against the wall. The occasional stroller, walking their dog, might come along and have the pet scampering off the lead for awhile to let it sniff around to its heart’s content and do its business.

Why, then, come here? Not that any visitor would go out of their way to do so besides visit one’s relatives or to have a natter with friends leaning over the counter in the pub, supping a hardy pint or two. It’s to do one thing. To set out to complete the infamous Coast to Coast Walk, a 192 mile route to Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea at the opposite side of the country. Alfred Wainwright over forty years ago devised and initialized the way, more famous for his pictorial guides to the Lakeland Fells. Although the later inked, drawn and hand written guide covering the walk added to his fame.

***

There is something attractive mingled with the alluring about completing a walk that passes through some of the most grilled and romantically furnished landscapes to be found anywhere in Northern England if not the world. It’s a bonus to feel part of this up, down and flat terrain; the sights, the sounds, the smells, the textures. Deep cut valleys to the top of mountain passes in the Lake District give way to a shaded green limestone escarpment decorated with crisscrossed bright grey dry-stone walls. It continues on bleak and boggy Pennine moors before following blue skies and billowed clouds that enhance the pastoral and broad landscape above and beside the River Swale. The comparably flat, dull, arable farming country known as the Vale of Mowbray, reminiscent of Cambridgeshire, doesn’t last long. Then it’s up and down the Cleveland Hills from their summits that cast views that stretch forever. Trudging on the windy North Yorkshire Moors descends to confined river walking along the Esk Valley through a few settlements before reaching the final cliff tops above Robin Hood’s Bay.

A scenic assortment indeed, which ‘this blessed plot’ called England offers, laid before me as I eagerly waited to set off on the adventure the following day. Armed with the Wainwright guide, I had been consulting and fondling the book for months before finally taking a chance to walk the first step. I’ve always had an obsessive fondness for the author’s neat meticulous inked efforts, admiring, for example, the artwork of the Lake District’s Pillar Mountain soaring above the Ennerdale Forest or St Sunday Crag and Grisedale majestically depicted above Ullswater. Captivated by their flawless detail, I regarded the Lakeland Pictorial Guides, if I could get my hands on any, as companions, even friends; something of a substitute when I couldn’t escape to enjoy the Lake District from my hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Since my early teens, I’ve always had a close affinity for the District’s only sun and rain-soaked crags, mountain ridges, wind-blasted summits, elevated views and tumbling becks. Situations like these soothed the imagination. They began to fill an empty desire for yet another wander as I finally took the chance to use the Wainwright guide. After walking