Day 15: Grosmont to Robin Hood's Bay

Weather: Mostly sunny with light winds

Distance covered today: 25.6km (15.9mi)

Last night's B&B: The Gallery B&B

% Complete: Cum distance: 100%: 317.9km (197.5mi)

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 704m/ 736m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 15 (click!)

It’s just over a fortnight since I started the Coast-to-coast and it’s hard to believe it’s over.  In such a relatively short distance, I have experienced so many different geographies, states of mind, people and experiences that I feel really quite moved. I say a relatively short distance, because in fact the C2C isn’t really a very long walk. After all, on my LEJOG journey, I was only just north of Exeter after the same distance, but the two experiences can’t be compared. From the glory of Lakeland and the adventure on Kidsty Peak to my joyous return to the Pennines and my acquaintance with the Cleveland Hills and the North Yorkshire Moors, this has been everything I had hoped for, and more. Normally, by the end of one of these walks, I’m quite happy to return home and get on with things, but I have been so inspired by this experience that I spent some time today trying to work out what to do for an encore next year!

So what do I feel about the Coast-to-coast? In many ways it is by far the most varied of the walks I have done (LEJOG excepted), but also the most demanding. I have been at times quite amazed at how under-prepared some participants have been, with the result that sales of Compeed (blister plasters) have rocketed. Yesterday I was amused to hear one fellow from Austen, Texas, on a National Geographic guided walk, wearing sandals because he has so many blisters that he just can’t wear boots anymore, saying that no-one told him there were so many hills in England. He said that he had thought that England was all flat green fields!

Initially I was a little put off by the sheer weight of numbers and it remains true that if you want a quiet walk in the country alone with your companion or your thoughts, then the C2C is not for you. However, as time has passed and as passing acquaintances have steadily deepened, as people have visibly changed, sometimes with increased confidence and sometimes the opposite, it has all become more of an experience than I had anticipated.  As a boy, I was constantly subjected to immersive experiences, designed “to make a man of you”, mostly disagreeable, but probably effective. During most of my working years, other than the odd lunacy branded as corporate team-building, I managed to avoid that sort of thing, so it is especially strange to be hurled back into the midst of it, but among an older and much more mature set of people.  All I can say for certain, is that as the muscles have tightened and the callouses hardened, so it feels that the pain was all worth it and I feel very much healthier than when I set out. I can’t think of a better retreat in the good old Jesuit sense of the word!

Of course, I have been lucky in all sorts of ways. Though the Met Office records that the first half of May has been quite wet in the UK (as a whole the UK has had more rain in the first 17 days than the average for the month of May), the rain mostly held off, and with the exception of Kidsty Pike, the weather came mostly from astern driven by westerly winds, and for a walker that really isn’t a problem at all.

My equipment all worked perfectly and my little Garmin satnav, prepopulated with daily routes, carefully plotted by myself using the Ordnance Survey online mapping service and Martin Wainwright’s C2C guidebook, meant that despite the absence of waymarks on the C2C, I didn’t ever get lost (though of course I was helped by David and Gay on Kidsty Pike where I just couldn’t see a thing).  The magnetic compass and the barometric pressure altimeter built into my satnav have proved useful innovations.  I have learned from the experience of previous walks and I now understand that the use of decent clothing and equipment makes the whole experience both safer and more enjoyable.

Not everything was perfect. In particular, I was disappointed with the service and facilities in a number of the B&Bs along the way.  As a general rule, I have found that the more popular the route the less accommodating the B&Bs, because they have a captive clientele, which I suppose is obvious. By far the best experiences were those that were off the beaten track, where I was collected and returned to a point on the route by the proprietor. These people have to work harder for their living and they also look after customers who aren’t walkers and who expect better service, and they do receive it.  By and large, though, the standard of facilities was quite adequate: even the power showers are mightily improved from just a few years ago.  Availability of wifi in bedrooms was patchy at best, but then not everyone is a geek like me who needs permanently to be connected to the net!  Even in this area, though, things are improving, with the use of repeaters and increased understanding of the advantages to the business of having good access. Keld Lodge was by far the most outstanding experience of the trip, despite being right in the epicentre of the route. I would recommend anyone to go there even if you aren’t a walker. You will enjoy it!  The Gallery in Grosmont was a distant second.

Finally, I have heard privately that some feel that I have been a bit of a grumpy old man in these posts. I was rather disappointed to hear that, because it honestly isn’t the way I feel about it, and it must be that in expressing my thoughts too quickly, I have perhaps not reflected sufficiently on the result. My excuse can only be that the pressures of the walks, including getting all the verbiage, photos, maps and data out on time, when sleep calls and another stern test awaits tomorrow, presents something of a challenge. All I can say is that I heartily recommend the C2C to anyone who might read these notes. It is an experience you will never regret!

And so to Robin Hood’s Bay. My guide-book advised me to throw my pebble from St Bees into the North Sea and I’ve done that, including wetting my boots in its waters. It says that I have been “playing (my) part in a steady geological transfer that may one day baffle scientists”.  The book goes on to say, “Then celebrate and don’t feel let down by the absence of cheering crowds. Robin Hood’s Bay is a mecca for trippers who are unlikely to know of your amazing feat, and wouldn’t care if they did.  There may be a few, instantly recognisable, fellow ancient mariners, slumped about who will exchange yarns. And anyway, you know what you have achieved, and that is all that matters in the end.” Amen to that, and I’m off to Wainwright’s bar in the Bay Hotel to see if I can find some of my ancient mariners!!

To end, I recall the late arrival of my suitcase in Kirkby Stephen. I was talking to the attractive assistant behind the bar, telling her that I was off to take a shower, so if the suitcase did arrive, please would she not bring it into the room. The gruff, Yorkshire twang of the proprietor erupted from a dark corner, “Not to worry, mate. If she does go in, we’ll add it to yer bill!”

My beautifully appointed and decorated B&B in Grosmont last night

Elegant Victorian houses on the steep climb out of Grosmont

Everywhere there are the yellow bicycles commemorating the sensational start to last year's Tour de France

At last a lapwing!  It took ages to get him to stand still!

Eric and Jane saw me walking along the road as they passed in a car and slithered to a halt to say good-bye! Really touching!

The beautiful little village of Little Beck

The flowers are improving by the day!  A sea of Stichwort!

Chubb's eccentric cave

Falling Foss

Wooden paths over the bogs on the moors of Graystone Hills

My much missed pom-poms. They appeared all over the Pennine bogs years ago but perhaps it is too early in the season this year

How amazing a colour combination! The grey of the moors with the yellow of the gorse

The first explicit sign to Robin Hood's Bay. Relief and regret...

The Yorkshire white rose; frequently visible...

The first cliffs of the North Sea coast

Bluebells and stichwort

A hare trying to get away, but I caught him!

My first view of Robin Hood's Bay

These rocket posts were once used by the Coastguard to practice rescuing shipwrecked sailors

Victorian houses in upper Robin Hood's Bay

My B&B in the old town

Wainwright's Bar in the Bay Hotel.

My perfect pebble, about to be despatched from the Irish Sea at St Bees into the North Sea in Robin Hood's Bay

Here I am; too full of myself!

And so to sea-level!!

Day 14: Blakey Ridge to Grosmont

Weather: Mostly sunny with mild Westerley wind

Distance covered today: 21.8km (13.5mi)

Last night's B&B: White Horse Farm Inn

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 92.4%: 292.3km

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 226m/609m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 14 (click!)

The end is nigh, and though strictly I should wait for the denouement, I don’t think the final stage tomorrow will alter my opinion, so I might as well get on with it.  I want to do a great big turn-around on an issue on which I have already reversed my opinion. (If I keep this up, I might qualify as a politician!)

The more long-suffering of you will have registered my disapproval of Wainwright’s theory of the walk on the first day. My feeling was that the walk was traversing a path for which there was no alternative, and therefore pretending that alternatives existed by not way-marking the path seemed daft.  Once I entered Lakeland, I changed my opinion, because I finally got to understand Wainwright’s vision of people selecting their own routes through that wonderful playground.  Not only did he recommend a number of alternatives himself, but he also insisted that there were many more to be had and all that was needed was an OS map, a compass and some imagination.

In the personal notes attached to his guide he pours scorn on the idea of a national trail. He says “The first of them, the Pennine Way, has already been so much used that it is fast losing its original appeal as a wilderness walk and becoming a too popular parade. There are blazed tracks and litter where once there were neither. Some paths are so badly eroded that diversions have been necessary….”  He then goes on to promote his alternative approach, and suggests his actual route is just one of many.  He lambastes “the inexperienced who cannot read a map and the complete nogs who have never seen one”.

As with all long-distance routes, different authorities are responsible for the way-marking and maintenance of the trails in different geographies, and in my experience they apply quite different principles. In the case of National Trails, there are certain constraints, but essentially the same is true.

As far as I have observed, this differing approach very much applies to the Coast-to-coast.  The Lakeland authority, very much influenced no doubt by Wainwright’s love of the fells, his many books about them and his wishes in his Coast-to-coast guide, is at pains neither to improve nor waymark any particular route.  As I previously pointed out, the C2C waymarks in Lakeland are there simply to prevent walkers from straying onto private land and they are anyway few and far between.  However once Lakeland has been left behind and other authorities take over, a different approach is clearly apparent.  Although by no means ubiquitous, C2C waymarks are much more evident and the walk takes on the very definite route originally defined by Wainwright himself, altered only where the authorities have negotiated specific permissive paths with landowners to allow walkers legally to proceed. On reaching the Cleveland Way, we are very definitely on a National Trail with all the prepared paths, stairs, flagstones and waymarks that go with it.

What the authorities, especially the Lakeland authorities, have failed to notice is that the Coast-to-coast has become a de facto National Trail. As I said yesterday, the C2C is now the most popular long-distance trail in the world.  The people coming to use it come partly because it is so famous; they come with all sorts of skills and experience, often with none at all, because they feel assured that such an international phenomenon will be properly husbanded.  Very few of the many walkers I have met have had any idea about Wainwright’s philosophy.  Mostly they think the lack of waymarking is a budgetary issue.

The excruciating irony of all this is that by far the most dangerous part of the route is the walk through Lakeland, the very area with the least waymarking. On day two, when I was scrabbling up the rocky climb on the edge of Ennerdale Water, I had no idea that a woman had been killed there just days earlier. Just beyond the top of Kidsty Pike where the path switches back through 300 degrees, there is no sign, and many of the people I have spoken to kept on going over the top in the very poor weather we were experiencing. This is fun for the experts; it is quite clearly potentially calamitous for the unwary and inexperienced.

The result of course is that people walk all over the place trying to find their way and trying to avoid the bogs. This tramples the vegetation and destroys the sensitive bogs leaving an unsightly, muddy mess and a lot of unhappy walkers, up to their knees in mud. This is exactly what Wainwright was complaining about in his derogatory references to the Pennine Way.

Once out of Lakeland, the path is now fairly universally waymarked (though there are some curious and potentially misleading exceptions), and there are very few alternative routes even if one wanted them. Once the Cleveland Way is reached, the benefits of proper path maintenance and waymarking to the immediate environment and to the experience of the walker are immediately apparent.

Meanwhile, improvements on the Pennine Way, and a drastic reduction in the number of people using it, mean that the eyesore that Wainwright decried is much improved.  In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, the argument has been turned on its head. If Wainwright was around today, he would be amazed that his C2C has in Lakeland, of all places, turned into exactly the sort of walk he really didn't enjoy.

If I were making the decisions, I would make the C2C the premier National Trail in Britain. I would improve the footpaths using all the skills developed on the other National Trails and I would waymark it with the acorns of the National Trails. I would negotiate hard with the local landowners to turn permissive paths into permanent rights-of-way.  Given that all this would horrify the purists, I would simultaneously promote alternative routes, just as Wainwright suggested, both in and outside Lakeland, but preface all reference to these routes as requiring certain minimums of experience and skills. I would then promote all of Britain’s National Trails not only in the English-speaking world, but throughout Europe and in the developing world. 

There are very few places on earth which can provide the same extraordinary wilderness with the assurance of a shower, a pint, a dinner and a warm bed every evening.  Surely such a scarce resource should properly be protected.

This cross is incongruously called Young Ralph. There is another cross in the vicinity called Old Ralph

And this is Fat Betty. She is close to another menhir called Margery Bradley. It is said that when Betty, Margery and the two Ralphs meet at night, as they are said to do, a wedding invariably follows!

This excellent name, redolent of a good English breakfast, originally meant the remote valley (hop in old English) of the Norse God Freya. It refers to the beautiful valley of Fryupdale, and developed in the same way that the name of many pubs in England, called "Elephant and Castle" refer to Henry VIII's first wife, Catherine of Aragon, "Infanta de Castile"

At last, a clear view of the North Sea

Fryupdale appears on the left

There are no shortage of Coast-to-coast walkers. This was a slightly disheartened bunch of National Geographic tourists. Better to accelerate past them!

A bridge in Glaisdale

Stichwort amongst the bluebells

The River Esk makes my acquaintance

This path is known as a trod, with the stones worn down in medieval times by pannier-ponies, trading between villages and monastic settlements 

Spring colours

That's me weaving unsteadily along the road!

A live steam-engine in Grosmont; just shutting down for the night

With brasses gleaming!  Only in England!

And the station in its 50's glory!

The day's elevation profile. A down day!

Day 13: Clay Bank Top to Blakey Ridge

Rain, sleet and hail showers driven by Westerley wind

Distance covered today: 14.4km (8.9mi)

Last night's B&B: Buck Inn Hotel

% Complete: Cumulative distance: 85.7%: 270.5km

Total Ascent/Total Descent: 287m/147m

GPS satellite track of today's route: Day 13 (click!)

What a contrast!  The roller coaster was replaced by a railway line!  Literally!  I had been expecting more of the same, but after the first, and by now expected, lung-busting morning climb out of the valley, all changed.  The path meandered along the Cleveland Way’s flagstones, and then quite suddenly the Cleveland Way veered off at an acute angle and the Coast-to-coast continued on a disused Victorian railway line that had originally been constructed for the transport of minerals from these rich moors.  The rain-showers turned to hail, but the wind was from astern so that the weather wasn’t troubling at all. Moreover, the even, porous, tinder track meant that the walking was particularly easy, and I was able to gaze in awe at the splendour of the changing colours on the moors around me and in the valleys below.

The downside of all this, was that I had anyway scheduled a relatively short walk for today, and I had been packed out of the B&B quite early, so that given the faster pace on the railway track, I made my destination, the Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge by midday!  Out of the rain, and in front of a roaring fire, I was perfectly content in the brilliant atmosphere.  Then they all started to arrive!  With one or two exceptions who are either still on the trail, or have ceased and desisted, the team grew and grew.  I had many explanations of who had been where over the past few days and many more war-stories, but the fact that the Lion Inn is such an obvious resting spot on the trail meant that everyone had just converged.

There was Bill, the Yank from Los Angeles, aspirant actor biding his time in commercials while waiting for the break-through, smiling from ear to ear.  I first met him on Dent Hill, immersed in guidebooks, wary of taking half a dozen steps without consulting one of his many guides.  He is a popular member of the team, mostly because he was initially slower than everyone else because each step needed careful research.  He has certainly changed!  He doesn’t exactly bound over the hills, but the early trepidation has been replaced with a genuine heartiness which just glows out of him!

The two Aussie girls, Judy and Sue arrived.  They seem to have taken a very relaxed approach to the planning of their trip.  Every time I've seen them, they have been asking others about how to get from A to B. Today, apparently, their trip-planners had omitted a leading 1 from the 18 miles of the scheduled journey, leading the girls to think that they had only 8 miles to walk.  They were not impressed!  They were trying to cadge a lift off others, such as myself, whose B&B proprietors were scheduled to collect them from the Lion Inn to deliver them to their B&B.  I introduced them to the two Canadian girls, Giselle and Dianne who were in a similar plight.  There was no helping the four of them though, and as I was driven away from the pub, I caught sight of the four of them, no-one talking to each other, forlornly walking up the road to Rosedale Head.  I will have to do the same tomorrow, but on fresh legs and in brilliant sunshine! (Hopefully?!)

Andrea, the Kiwi doctor and Marilyn the Canadian widow weren’t present for some reason.  Marilyn especially has complicated travel plans, with an elderly aunt somewhere near Glaisdale, but I was assured by my fellow travellers that these two women would certainly show up in Robin Hood’s Bay on Thursday. Andrea makes slow progress, but she is an excellent map-reader and is very methodical, so she’ll make it. Just as I wrote this, Marilyn turned up in my hotel for dinner along with Bill the Yank. I am miles off the route this evening, in a village called Rosedale Abbey. This is indeed a small world!

Also unsurprisingly absent at the Lion Inn were Jane and Eric, the two Canucks from New Brunswick, though I had greeted Eric earlier in the day, as I have almost every morning for some time.  Eric has health problems, and he also is married to Jane, who is in turn the fastest walker I have ever met! No wonder poor old Eric can’t keep up. Their arrangement is that he walks with her for the first few kilometres every day, then turns around and heads back to the car. He then races (well, knowing Eric, drives carefully and considerately) round to the end of the walk, where he heads back up the trail to meet Jane and they complete the walk together.  In Richmond, they came unstuck!  I met Eric who had parked his car and was coming back up the trail, but no Jane had emerged. I assured him that she had been ahead of me, and he opined that she had obviously reached Richmond faster than he had! Neither of them have mobiles, so finding each other is an issue. Eric told me the following day that they had finally met at their B&B.

I could go on, but I sense you get the picture.  What all these people have overwhelmingly in common is that they are mostly from the English-speaking Commonwealth (in which I naturally include the US, though Bill tells me there was some war of independence or something! I understand tea was involved). The other thing which is generally true, though there are exceptions, Bill being one, they tend to be older people, often retired.  Surprisingly, the majority on this occasion were also women.  They all tend to be new to long-distance walking and the Coast-to-coast has been fiercer and more demanding than they anticipated.  

More than on any previous long-distance trail, I have interacted with all these people and many more besides.  In some ways, this is unsurprising, given the popularity of the walk and therefore the density of walkers on most days. I understand that the Coast-to-coast is no longer just the most popular long-distance walk in the UK; it is the most popular long-distance walk in the world! Sadly, partly because of numbers and all those interactions, I doubt that many of the new relationships will outlive this adventure. 

There is though something rather special about watching a group of people who just a fortnight ago had never met each other, take over a pub and interact amongst each other with a joyfulness that makes the regulars feel left out! 

Looking back over yesterday's roller-coaster. Four peaks are just visible, the furthest being Carlton Moor and the nearest the Wainstones

These ancient waymarks on the Cleveland Way are still mysterious

Here comes the rain!

Another pre-historic waymark

Awe-inspiring cloudscapes: this will be more than rain! It hailed!!

The four roller-coaster peaks were still visible down there, just!

Those people ahead on full zoom are undoubtedly Dianne and Giselle. I usually catch up to them about this time each day!

The famous "Face Stone" grimacing at me at the top of Urra Moor. Origin unknown.

Here comes the hail!

An incongruous fir plantation right in the middle of the moors

The green fields of Farndale start to appear

The disused, Victorian railway line, built to facilitate exploitation of the local minerals

With much attendant pollution. This appears to me to be iron oxide, probably mixed with other noxious extractive chemicals

I persuaded this red grouse to pose for the photo opportunity. He was very reluctant to start...

Incredible colours through changing atmospherics. This doesn't do it justice!!

The moor leading down to Farndale

The storms have eased. Peace in the valley...

The day's peculiar elevation profile!