by Mike Parker
Half an hour later, I caught up with them on the sandstone cliffs of St Bees Head, Cumbria’s most westerly point. It had been a moderately stiff climb up there, but the reward was sweeping views of a freezing grey sea, and an assortment of caravan parks backed by the dark bulk of Sellafield nuclear power station. ‘Ye might as well walk wi’ us lad,’ one of the Yorkshire blokes said, entirely kindly, I know. But I was in a pretty strange mood, and not keen to inflict it on anyone. I thanked him and declined. He wasn’t at all pleased, ticking me off with, ‘Well, that’s not t’spirit of th’Coast to Coast, lad. We’re all in this together!’ His mates all nodded and smiled at me. I walked on, feeling like a complete shit. Sod’s Law, I’d be bumping in to them now at least four times daily for the next fortnight.
After circumnavigating St Bees Head, the path ambles inland through a quarry and down various dusty tracks. For those that think that Cumbria is all tea shops and Beatrix Potter bunnies, have a look around the west of the county, a land forged in rust and pebbledash. That combination of hard-bitten villages, mountains and mines was making me homesick, for it is very much like my part of Wales. Cumbria and Cambria, much though they’d both care not to admit it, are spookily alike, both physically and temperamentally.
Another similarity is that, despite all the obvious natural advantages, they don’t always do tourism very well. Brits generally are temperamentally rubbish at the Welcome Host routine, but the more taciturn corners of our island – most of Wales and west Cumbria, for instance – are just useless at it. Even when they’re trying to smile, it comes across as slightly defensive, scared or hostile. And sometimes they just can’t be arsed even to try. On the second day, I had an early lunch in a village pub-cum-hotel right on the CtC route, somewhere that evidently makes a huge proportion of its income from those walking the path. The interior was brown and faded, the silence hung as heavy as someone standing on your chest and the food barely squeaked across the line marked ‘just about acceptable’. The girl behind the bar desperately didn’t want to be there and told me how much she hated this time of year, when the walkers starting returning in droves, and keeping her in a bloody job, the bastards. At that point the door swung open, motes of ancient dust swirled around in the watery sunbeams and a middle-aged American couple breezed in, replete in Trail Gear.
‘Why, hello there!’ the fella opened with. The barmaid grunted in return. ‘Do you have a menu please?’ She handed one over, plastic and sticky, which they read with lots of forcedly enthusiastic little ‘ooh’s’. My toes began to curl in embarrassment for them. It was not going to end happily.
‘I think I’ll have a chicken sandwich,’ the man ventured.
‘Got no chicken,’ replied the barmaid, in a tone that verged on the victorious. ‘No tuna either.’ He opened his mouth to ask for the next option on his list, but the barmaid cut him dead: ‘And duck’s off too. So’s the gammon.’
‘What is the soup of the day?’ enquired his lady wife with a dazzling Iowan smile.
‘Vegetable,’ the barmaid snapped back.
‘Oh. And what sort of vegetable would that be?’
‘Mixed.’
I met the American couple a little later along the trail, and felt obliged to apologise on behalf of the entire nation for the terrible pub where we’d all suffered lunch in musty silence. They laughed, and told me that it had not been the worst they’d experienced on their British holiday. We got talking about accommodation, and it transpired that they’d booked all of theirs for the entire two weeks of the walk some four months earlier, back in January, and that even then, there were many places that were already full. I’d read online that accommodation was very scarce, but that had been posted by one of the ‘sherpa’ companies that not only ferry your luggage between guest houses, but offer a bespoke accommodation booking service, for a fairly hefty fee. I’d presumed therefore that they were trying to scare people into using them rather than have to make a stack of their own calls, but it was beginning to look like a royal battle of tenacity to find accommodation for the rest of the trip. If the rubbish places were full night after night, then what chance finding anywhere half-decent?
And the rubbish places seemed to be doing just fine. When I left the sullen pub in which I’d shared lunch with the Americans, that night’s bag drop, by one of the many CtC sherpa companies, had just taken place. I had to pick my way through the small hallway of the inn, through a garish sea of hold-alls, rucksacks and suitcases, and an owner quietly swearing under his breath at them all. In an instant, I saw a picture of minibuses full of tat weaving their daily way across the country, scattering bags and belongings to the four winds as their owners tramped inch by inch across the landscape, never deviating from the one decreed route and daydreaming about being reunited with their trainers. B&Bs, pubs and hotels that, under the normal influence of market forces, would have gone out of business years ago, were being kept alive by this quotidian transfusion. There was something indefinably depressing, and pointlessly Sisyphean, about the whole thing.
As I crossed into the National Park, I noticed a folded piece of paper on the path in front of me. It was an immaculate CtC itinerary, printed off an elaborate spreadsheet and dropped by someone who’d recently passed this way. I half-marvelled, half-shuddered at the level of organisation it demonstrated. Not only did it detail every night’s accommodation booked, with contact phone numbers and email addresses throughout plus what packed lunch they were or were not supplying, it contained numerous annotated notes, such as the fact that two taxis were booked for 1900 hours next Tuesday to take the happy throng to a pub near Reeth for dinner, and that, on the following Sunday, Trevor, Gordon, Elaine and Terry D had already opted for the lobster at the restaurant in Grosmont, while Peter, Marie and Terry K were having the chicken chasseur.
I didn’t even know where I was sleeping that night, let alone what I’d be having for dinner 11 days hence, and as I bumped along the rocky path above Ennerdale Water, I silently congratulated myself on being smart enough to have stepped off this ghastly treadmill, for I was heading instead for a night’s wild kip in the woods. My next-door neighbours had lent me their ancient bivvy bag, which I’d tried out one warm night in my garden a week earlier, and had found to be fine for the job. Not for a moment did I consider that a dry night in a lowland garden might be inadequate preparation for wild bivvying in the fells, and not for a moment did I think that it would be – could be, even – anything other than a lovely evening. To that end, I hadn’t even gone so far as to check the weather forecast, but, as I’d left my Egremont B&B that Thursday morning, the landlord’s last words were, ‘Forecast looks good for the weekend.’ At the time, that had seemed enough.
At about five o’clock, I breezed past the Ennerdale youth hostel and camping barn, feeling terrifically smug that I was saving myself six or seven quid by going to camp for free in the woods. I say camp: I mean, of course, lie in a large plastic sheath, like some kind of jumbo boil-in-the-bag snack. About two miles further on, I suddenly spied a track that looked interesting, and just up there was a lovely hollow centred on a graceful beech tree in her first flush of the year’s leaves. I find that most years, a particular species of tree seems to present itself for my especial consideration, something to sit under, ponder by and read up on. This year’s tree, particularly since my Ridgeway walk through ‘Beechy Bucks’, was unquestionably the magnificent beech. I’d mistimed the Ridgeway trek: in any normal year, my walk in mid-April would have coincided perfectly with the first fluttering of lime-green leaves amongst the legendary beeches of the Chiltern Hills, but this was a year when everything was two or three weeks late, thanks to a sharp winter. Consequently, I’d walked for days through the massive beech woods still in their skeletal winter state: impressive, for sure, but not the breathtaking display I’d been expecting. Since then, I’d seized every chance to hang out with the beech trees and couldn’t get enough of their first week or two in leaf. The chance of a night beneath just such a
tree seemed like a present from the gods.
Like a little Walt Disney critter, I made camp under that spreading tree, building a fire pit, collecting wood, getting the fire going, even carefully stripping logs in order to build myself a bed of moss. I ignored the ever-greyer clouds whipping in from the west and the freezing – and strengthening – winds. What could possibly hurt you when you’re lying on a mossy bed under a quivering beech?
Dinner was a Cup-a-Soup and a few pawfuls of some berry/ seed/nut combo from the health-food shop in Barrow. I was still starving, and getting really quite cold, even if the sleeping bag was doing its best. It wasn’t dark much before ten; the rain started minutes later. At first, the noise on the bivvy bag was strangely charming, a pitter-patter reminder that I was keeping dry and mainly warm, particularly if I curled up. I imagined drifting off to sleep to its comforting rhythm and waking to a brilliant dawn.
Before long, the pitter-patter went up a few notches and began to physically hurt as the raindrops pelted my head and body. One move – to try and get some air into the bivvy bag – resulted in rivulets of rainwater surging in and drenching me and the sleeping bag. Of all the trees to be sheltered under, a beech in its first few weeks of delicate, feathery leaf, is not high on the list for protection. Despite the fact that I’d had a good four hours of daylight in my little camp, I’d never once thought to go and scan the surroundings for the best places to go in the event of an emergency – I was just too busy being Bambi the forest fawn. There were, I remembered, many conifers and firs in the vicinity, but I had no idea where they were or how much protection they might give.
Whenever you’re tempted to think that summer nights are over in a twinkle, think again. This mid-May night went on for bloody ever. I staggered around with a fading headtorch illuminating the branches and rain slicing through the dark in front of me, eventually stumbling on a sizeable fir with what looked like a low, dense canopy. Sure enough, there was barely any rain falling beneath it, and I sank in gratitude against the trunk, huddled in a damp sleeping bag. I could now keep my head out of the bivvy bag and peer through the hood of my cagoule into the dark – encased in the bivvy bag (or, as it was starting to feel like, entombed in the body bag), I’d been hyperventilating and terrified that I was about to have a heart attack. And then up a few more notches the storm went again, and the branches above me were protection no more.
Soaked by now, deafened by the incessant rain and with a freezing wind flaying me, my brain danced with vivid hallucinations. Clearest of them all was a vision of Alfred Wainwright, a man who made Gordon Brown look like Billy Connolly, laughing his scratchy woollen socks off at me. I’d already been fairly rude in print about the cussedly misanthropic Wainwright, and now, here on the path that he created and just below the peak upon which he’d had his ashes scattered, he was exacting a typically well-calibrated revenge. In between panicky hyperventilations that were making my ribcage ache, I blurted out loud an apology to the God of the Lakeland Trail, and begged him for both forgiveness and to let me live, in return for which I would apologise to him in print and promise to keep off both his manor and his legacy in future. He must have listened, for the hallucinations dimmed and into their place swam a plan to gather my stuff and get back, somehow, to the youth hostel I’d passed hours earlier. The forest track was broad, pale and stony, just about traceable in the dark. On the way, I passed gullies, spouts and streams that had been bone dry the previous night, and which were now foaming and roaring with water.
At the youth hostel, I found an open barn, its concrete floor providing little in the way of comfort, but at least its roof worked in keeping the rain off. Hunched on the floor, soaked and freezing, I watched the water splash down off the greenery and drifted into a stiff, uncomfortable doze to its rhythm. Feverish dreams of my own bed skittered across my subconscious, and when I woke up, I knew that I was going home.
The people who worked in the youth hostel thought otherwise. ‘No come on, you just need to relax a bit, and you’ll be on your way in no time,’ I was assured by Susan, an assistant at the hostel, as she cooked breakfast for me and – wouldn’t you know it – the two Iowans that I’d met the previous day in that terrible pub. She was quite magnificent, not flinching at all when she came down into the dayroom to find a wet, bedraggled stranger huddled in a chair, whimpering. ‘Lots of people have a bit of a shock at the beginning of the Coast to Coast,’ she continued. ‘It’s completely normal. You wouldn’t want to give it up so soon, would you?’ YES! Yes, I would. From whichever angle the question was posed, only one answer came booming back.
The taxi driver who took me to Whitehaven train station was even nicer. To him, giving up the CtC after two short days and about 20 miles was nothing to be ashamed of. I wasn’t, but it was very kind of him to reassure me anyway, telling me how he’d once picked up an American lady who’d given the walk up in Sandwith, the first village on the trail and about a mile inland from its beginning at St Bees Head. ‘She said that she hadn’t realised there were going to be hills.’
On the eight-hour train journey home, I had plenty of time to mull over my sharp exit from Britain’s favourite long-distance path. As per usual, this boiled down to the sticky question of exactly what I was going to tell people, which little excuses I would hide behind. There was the lack of accommodation. The apparently poor standards and high prices of the rooms that remained, and of the food and drink on offer. The zombiefied mass march across the country, a regiment of rambling beards, outdoor OCD and half-a-bitters. The relentlessly upbeat camaraderie of my fellow trailblazers that had succeeded only in making me feel even more alone.
Ah. The real truth.
I was lonely, and envious of those boring beardy bastards, smugly anticipating their chicken chasseur a week on Sunday. However hard I scoff at them, they had got it right and I had got it drastically wrong.
Somewhere past Preston, an idea seeped into my battered brain, and I perked right up. I’d failed to do Wainwright’s Coast to Coast, but it would be far truer to his legacy to devise one of my own and walk that instead. And not across northern England, either – this latest sorry saga had been yet one more in a lifetime’s litany of unfortunate experiences of the Lake District. I know how passionately many people adore it, and I can absolutely understand why, but it’s always seemed alien to me, succeeding in being both surly and twee at the same time. The relentless Outward Bound heartiness, the cagoules and calendars, the fell-bagging one-upmanship – it all left me as cold as a midsummer day in Witherslack. Years ago, I remember hearing a warning broadcast on the radio on some bank holiday Monday that ‘the Lake District is full,’ roadblocks were in place, the M6 was nose-to-tail and on no account should would-be daytrippers attempt to go there. This made it sound less like an area of stunning natural wonder, and more like an out-of-town retail park. Which, for very many people, it is.
As Cheshire rolled by and the far emptier hills of Wales loomed lovely on the horizon, I remembered Harri Webb’s immortal verse: ‘What Wales needs, and has always lacked the most / Is, instead of an eastern boundary, an East Coast.’ That was it! I would create and walk a Welsh Coast to Coast, starting with my feet in one of the rivers that form the England–Wales border and heading home to cool my toes in the tidal waters of the Dyfiestuary, just three miles from my front door. There was the added advantage that such a route would indeed take me across the entire width of Wales, but at its narrowest point, only 50-odd miles. After days of feeling nothing but vague, creeping dread, excitement pounded through my veins and I couldn’t wait to get home and get the maps out.
Better still, I could devise a route that took me across my adopted home county of Montgomeryshire, for it is the only one of the old Welsh thirteen that touches both sides, from the anglicised redbrick of borderland market towns to Cymraeg huddles hewn out of sweat and slate. Three days I decided it would take me, and not much wanting another night crying in a wet bivvy bag, I promptly found and booked a couple of B&Bs and
set to working out a route that incorporated them. The options were glorious, and limitless.
A few days later, my partner dropped me off early one morning on the border, between Bishop’s Castle and Montgomery town. It was the obvious place to start: not only does the modern border run along the Caebitra river, but the spot is perfectly dissected by Offa’s Dyke, that mighty eighth-century bulwark between the tribes of Mercia and Wales. I paddled in the river, put my boots back on and set off on my three-day walk homeward. By car, the journey had taken an hour and a quarter.
For the first few miles, I walked along the Offa’s Dyke path, one of the loveliest of all our National Trails as it edges its way through the land that is neither England nor Wales, but hovers between them both, a delicious chimera. At this point, the path hugs the dyke itself and exactly straddles the official border. Puddles of bluebells could be seen shimmering in the hollows of the earthwork rampart, orchids in outrageous colours winked from the grass banks, the brand new leaves of oak, ash and beech trees trumpeted their recent return to life. I bumped into two groups of Offa’s Dyke walkers in swift succession, and had the same conversation both times. ‘Doing the whole thing?’ I was asked as I approached. ‘No, walking home to the other side of Wales, and making it up as I go along,’ I replied smugly.
In Montgomery, I had a pint of local scrumpy, which I fancifully thought might attune me to the rhythm of the place, but which turned out to be vile and left me burping acidically all afternoon. I wouldn’t dream of saying that that was the spirit of the place, although there is a culverted stream under the town called the Shitebrook, so maybe it’s not quite as Jane Austen as it first looks. Climbing up to the castle, a regular favourite, I spotted a sign for the Montgomeryshire war memorial, which I’d never visited before. It seemed like an appropriate stop on a pilgrimage across the county, so I followed the path high up on to the top of Town Hill, just over a thousand feet above sea level. The monument was soberly impressive, but the view thrilled me viscerally: not only was it an endless panorama of borderland loveliness, but it was the first time I’d seen from the same spot both the Clee Hills in Shropshire, behind which I’d grown up, and Cadair Idris, above the village I now lived in. My whole life in one view: I hadn’t realised it was even possible.
