6. Honister

Cooking breakfast was dark and lonely. Wearing almost all the clothes I had with me I huddled over the stove in the drizzle, watching as the ghost of a day began to soften a horizon I still couldn’t see out beyond the trees. Christian was up with the dawn, and together we drank sweet tea and ate porridge, almost without saying a word.

He washed up our dishes in the beck that ran down the side of the hostel, and I dropped the tent, then we started off up the path, with hills springing up on all sides. That morning at Black Sail was the first one where we started to help each other put our packs on, saving ourselves that savage jerk when you arch your back and wrench your shoulder, tottering for a moment before you get the weight even.

The stony path quickly vanished into a barely defined track over marshy lumps of grass. We banked left and started to climb sharply up through a soupy, wet mist, tramping up uneven steps dug into the hillside by years of volunteers opening up the Lakes for a generation that have mostly abandoned them. I stopped Christian for a moment so I could take a picture of him damp and out of breath with the climb, so we’d be able to prove to any nay-sayers that it wasn’t all easy rolling and sunny skies. We needn’t have worried about that.



Up on the tops there was a biting wind, but we had good jackets, and with it came beautiful gaps in the mist where you’d suddenly see a deep valley open up to your left or right, only to be swamped by the rushing grey a few moments later. By this stage we’d worked out that in the cold you needed to be eating every couple of hours at least, so when one such view appeared below us we sat on our packs by the side of the path and ate a cereal bar for early elevenses. Along with his trolley full of Pasta ‘n’ Sauce, Christian had also bought us a few packs of glucose tablets, which we sucked on as we walked.

‘I got orange flavour, so we’d be getting some vitamin C. Just about all we’ll be getting I think.’ He was not wrong, and better men than us would have shuddered at what a diet of porridge, freeze-dried pasta and Bovril sandwiches was doing to our insides. But not us. In that stretch over the top, gradually soaking through, I started to feel strong for the first time. The sort of strong that comes when you’re a little bit beat and only really means you can feel your body and all your limbs and your heart thumping, but it’s good all the same.

We followed easy lines of small cairns along the top, looking for a ruined mine building that we didn’t see until we were almost on top of it, then stumped steeply down what I think might have been an old rail track to the Honister slate mine at in the valley. The Coast to Coast is a deeply crafty walk, the work of a complete obsessive. It winds its snickety route across the country through ways that only a man on his own two feet can go, and in these lonesome parts of the country where once industry cut the mountains to shreds, scarring the hillsides deep enough that you can still see it centuries later, a lot of the paths are old packhorse routes, or abandoned monorails. There’s something a bit comforting in their functionality.

The writers of one of our guidebooks, a home-made but terribly useful pamphlet called Camping it up on the Coast to Coast, end their book with a little note telling you to remember Wainwright. They say you are kicking at his heels the whole way across, and there are times when you feel like you almost are. Like you might come through a pass and find a bespectacled old man sitting on a rock, content in his own company. Wainwright spent years crossing and re-crossing these hills, totally in love with them in his cheerful, understated way, and you can look at the Coast to Coast almost as a novel about England, just you write the story yourself.

A dog sat outside the Honister mine, and there were the cars of tourists outside the shop. People were moving about round the edges of the youth hostel and after the solitude of the tops it felt quite busy. A lot of people stop and have a cuppa at the mine, but as ever Christian and I were chasing daylight, so we pushed on down a sloping road by a river to a little hamlet called Seatoller.

5. Black Sail

The forest was never-ending. In total I think there was around four miles of it, and it just seemed to go on forever. And it all looked exactly the same, so you never really felt like you were getting anywhere. Our feet and shoulders were getting sore, and we started to take it in turns to walk one behind the other, the one at the back hooking his arms underneath the leader’s pack and lifting it up, taking the weight off the other’s shoulders for a couple of minutes until we swapped.
‘I’m bored of this bloody paggering forest’, said Christian.

Eventually, as the afternoon drew to its grey close, we came to the youth hostel at Black Sail. It must be one of the most beautiful places to stay in the Lake District: a rustic former shepherd’s bothy at the head of a valley, where you can see for miles down over the tops of the forest to the lake beyond. That and apparently the warden is an amazing cook and if you let him know in advance he’ll get a bottle of wine in for you.

At this time of the year, Black Sail was locked up and deserted, lines of upturned mugs laid out neatly inside the window, but we sat on the bench in front of it, inscribed with the name of a guy from Leeds who’d once looked out from that very spot and been so overwhelmed by what he saw that he dedicated his life to bringing inner-city children to see the Lake District. You could see how it might have happened. Christian lit the Trangia stove, and with our hats and coats on we sat in the blue failing light with cold faces and sipped from steaming mugs. Christian had soup and I had a sachet of hot chocolate that I’d brought as a luxury. We knew our walking was over for the night, but we didn’t want to get on with the business of setting up camp and cooking supper just yet. Some of my fondest moments of the trip are of those quiet, tired times where we just stopped for a minute or two and soaked up the memories of the day.



I left Christian up by the hostel and took my mug down onto a small, grassy plain just below out of the wind that rushed up the valley, bouncing my heels on the spongy ground until I found a patch that wasn’t too damp. By the time I’d got the tent up it was dark. Across from us and a bit lower down in the distance, a growling forestry machine was finishing its work by the light of its glaring headlamps, but up where we were there was just the glow of Christian’s head torch and the flicker of the stove.

It was another ludicrously early night, but more disturbed than the last one. The wind rose, shrieking past us and rattling the flysheet savagely against the poles, and a couple of times when I’d just drifted off to sleep I was woken by concerned nudges from Christian.
‘It’s getting very fierce’, he hissed.
‘It’ll be fine.’
‘But what about the stove and the plates? They might blow away.’
I remembered bleakly that, to save ourselves rooting through rucksacks in a crowded tent before dawn, we’d left the stove and breakfast things in the back porch. Listening carefully you could just hear the rattle of metal. Presumably our most important possessions tumbling away into the woods to live with the fairies.

I unzipped my sleeping bag, pulled on my unlaced boots and ventured out into the cold. The forestry machinery had gone and all was black. It felt wild and hostile away from my warm bedding. The stuff in the porch was not in even the slightest disarray, which all goes to show that however rough it sounds outside, if your tent’s good enough, it should hold. Anyway, we’d put out every guy rope we had and tied the flysheet to the frame four times over, so if the little dome was going flying then so were we.

Back in bed, I’d nearly slipped away again when I got another nudge.
‘There’s a light coming towards us’, breathed Christian.
I couldn’t see anything, but a few moments later there was a definite flash of torchlight, which vanished abruptly then reappeared half a minute down the line, as if someone was crossing hummocky terrain towards us. After a little while we could hear the faint crunching of footsteps. Irrational fear crept over us.

Stay quiet, or make noise to show we were awake and ready? Whoever it was, it hardly seemed likely that they’d miss us, especially considering our tent was a conspicuous bright yellow, so in a sudden fluster, with the footsteps almost upon us, we shouted confused greetings and hurriedly unzipped the entrance.
‘Evening lads’, said a man’s voice, and we saw a thin silhouette with a small pack and a head torch disappear up the path beyond our camp.

It was only at a guess about half seven or eight at night, but where this cheery loner was going at even that hour of the evening, who knows. It was a mean old night and the path climbed up to exposed tops in every direction, with the nearest village near on five miles away, as far as we could tell.

Resigning ourselves to never knowing, we wriggled deep down in our sleeping bags and slept well as the wind moaned beyond our thin fabric walls.

4. Ennerdale

Our way went on through woods, down towards Ennerdale water, and we began to feel like we were really in the Lake District. Seeing the water stretching out before us with the peaks in the background made me nostalgic for the days of my mid-to-late teens, when through a combination of the scouts, the school outdoor pursuits society and family friends I first discovered the lakes. I used to have a chart on my bedroom wall showing a Wainwright sketch map of the Lake District, with all the peaks marked, and a list at the bottom with little check boxes next to them so you could tick them off when you’d done them. I think I was up to forty odd.

By the by, I do have the dubious honour of having failed to climb the fourth or fifth smallest Wainwright hill: the forebodingly-named Black Crag, actually barely more than a hillock. I was twenty at the time, I think, on a jaunt in my old 2CV with WRM. On the day we went for Black Crag it was pouring with rain, and we could only snatch glances at our map to avoid it getting completely soaked through. The terrain looked sort of like it ought to, though alarm bells should probably have sounded when the bridge we were aiming for proved absent, and we had to take off our boots and socks and ford the river. Turned out we were in a very similar valley a couple of miles away from the one we should have been in, and had been screwed from the very start.

The one cloud hanging over these happy reminiscences was the state of Christian’s bowels. As anyone who knows my brother can confirm, this is a source of unending concern and analysis. A friend of mine once remarked that she’d never held a conversation with him that didn’t at some stage involve poo. In our flat on Caledonian Road there are two toilets, each of which contains reading material, and after a lengthy spell in ‘the pooing bog’ you can usually expect a vivid account of the state of things.

All was not well on this particular morning, and as we passed a little copse just at the edge of the lake, Christian looked furtively around then dropped his pack and disappeared into the trees, leaving me to keep watch. I sat on a fallen trunk, eating a Mars bar. I looked one way, and there was nothing. I looked the other way. I looked back, and a cyclist whizzed past out of nowhere. There was a frantic scuffle from the undergrowth. An old couple in waxed jackets advanced upon our position at some speed, with a dog. I looked towards the lake and called behind me. There was more scrabbling around, and a harassed-looking Christian stumbled out of the trees and sat down next to me, exchanging mock conversation and keeping a beady eye to make sure the dog didn’t venture anywhere untoward.

The mood lightened after that, and we had to walk almost the whole length of Ennerdale along the less busy southern bank. It wasn’t exactly overcast, but it wasn’t really sunny either; that perfect walking weather where you don’t get too hot or too cold and you feel like you could go on just about forever. I had dim memories of one of my old schoolteachers telling me that she had once walked all the way along barefoot, though maybe that was another lake. We passed a few walkers, all of whom stopped and asked us why on earth we were carrying such big packs and where we were going, but all of whom seemed quite encouraging when they discovered how cracked we really were.



Nearing the top of the lake we slumped on the pebbly beach and ate more Bovril sandwiches, along with some chocolate slice that my mum had sent us with, carefully wrapped in tin foil. The rocky bank path, with its straggly trees clutching at the sparse clods of earth, gave way to lush meadows, and we made our way past some limping sheep and an outdoor centre with racks of canoes up against the side of the house, to a hard Forestry Commission track through a managed conifer plantation.

3. Dent

We became very used to the sound of the alarm on Christian’s phone. The gentle crescendo which heralded the morning’s aches, pulling yourself from your sleeping bag in the cold to make a start. Neither of us are morning people, but the timing was such that we had to be up and away at first light most days.

On this first morning I changed out of my clean sleeping clothes back into the dirty ones from the day before and crept out into the dark to cook breakfast. The flicker of the stove was a strange but pleasant sort of company, and I had to lean precariously over the steep banks of the river to wash the pots from the evening before, reaching down into the black until I felt the icy rush of water. I cooked a pan of sugary porridge as the first light of day crept over Cleator. Before long Christian emerged, narrow-eyed and displeased with the hour, and by eight o’ clock we were shouldering our packs, and squelching across the field. Our legs seemed fine after the exertions of the day before, but already I could feel the ache across my chest from the dead weight of the rucksack.
‘My shoulders are going to be round my knees before we’ve finished’, pronounced Christian, as he opened the gate. There was a shout from across the river, and at the far side of the bridge we saw Tom hanging out of the window of his bungalow waving.
‘Good luck, lads.’

We began our ascent by getting lost, until a nice man from an isolated house leaned out of his window and pointed us in the right direction. The Coast to Coast isn’t a national trail, so it’s not very well signposted, especially in the carefully conserved Lake District, but that doesn’t mean you’re without direction. Our progress across Cumbria was marked by a series of silhouetted farmers pointing from the opposite end of fields or shouting from their Land Rovers as they saw us going wrong. Whether this was out of a desire to keep us off their land I’m not sure, but I’d like to think it was just good spirit. To be fair you’d have to be quite a bastard to casually watch two laden walkers heading off in completely the wrong direction.

Navigation always seems easier once you get away from fields, or maybe it’s just because the walking’s more pleasant. We cleared the last houses, crossed a forestry track and started in earnest on the tramp up Dent fell. It was quite steep, and hard work with our packs, the path hemmed in by tight, scratchy rows of conifers that caught on our clothes. I quietly cursed myself for not removing my long johns in the cold of the morning. I should point out I had never, previously to this trip, been a long john wearer, and I can report it to be an interesting experience. Apart from the obvious practical value on cold evenings and mornings, it also gives you a cheery sort of feeling that you might be wearing your pyjamas underneath your clothes. But not when you’re hot and struggling up a hill.



When we came out of the trees onto a slippy green hillside, the sun was properly up, and below us fields and woods stretched out to the sea, all bathed in a lovely gold light. The sun was ahead of us to the east, peeking blindingly over the summit and throwing long shadows back down the slope. As anyone who has ever climbed a hill or mountain will know, perspective is a cruel beast, and what you think is the top almost never is. After three or four occasions of thinking we’d crested it, only to see another hump stick up in front of us, we finally reached the Western summit of Dent. The grass was longer and browner on the top; a breezy, sun-drenched plateau, and we paused to take a picture, looking back at what would be our last view of the sea until we saw the North Sea in the failing light from a soggy Yorkshire moor two weeks later.

The top was fine walking, but the drop down the other side was unpleasantly severe. The ground was greasy, and I fell over into a spiky bush. Once I’d finished swearing, I found that holding up my bare forearm and watching the tiny droplets of blood welling out of the dirty pinpricks was quite diverting, and I nearly slipped again. It sounds strange, but there’s something quite confirming about hurting yourself a little bit. I don’t mean I intend to start paying money to ladies in high heels, but you can get a bit paranoid about scrapes and cuts and bruises, and then when you do get scuffed up one way or another you realise it’s not the end of the world and you feel quite human.

‘Supper for you’, Christian shouted from up ahead, pointing to a patch of particularly pestilent-looking crimson fungus bubbling up by the path. A couple of days earlier, sitting by the brazier in the garden at our Bonfire Night party, B had been trying to describe to me which wild mushrooms were safe to pick and eat. Having been hunting out the things since childhood she made it sound quite straightforward, and I might conceivably have chanced my hand at foraging, had Big WCR not leaned over and butted in. He has known me since we were knock-kneed schoolboys of four years old in bright blue caps and blazers.
‘Can I just say: do not, under any circumstances, suggest to this man that he starts trying to pick mushrooms. He will die.’
So that was the end of that. Christian however found this a terribly funny joke, to be repeated on every occasion during two weeks that we passed anything remotely resembling a mushroom.

We picked our way past a deer fence and down into the bottom of the valley, stopping to refill our water carriers from the fresh stream that slithered along at the foot of Dent fell. The way wound up the valley, round kinks in the stream and sheepfolds, then climbed sharply up the side and out, quite abruptly, onto the road running the last mile or so down to the village of Ennerdale Bridge.

It was a faintly ghostly sort of place, Ennerdale Bridge. There was a very quiet school next to a phone box, and the sign in the window of what had once been the village shop read that it had closed down in 2006 due to lack of custom, and now operated two mornings a week as a post office. We had been nursing hopes of picking up a tin of something for the next day’s breakfast there, but it was not to be. Sort of reminded me how far away we were from the world I was accustomed to, where a shop was so totally reliant on passing trade from wanderers that a slump in our sort of domestic snail tourism meant curtains.

2. Cleator

Inevitably the weather didn’t last. The cliffs were exposed, and when the wind picked up after a little while the dry grass from the fields whipped across our faces, and we got knocked over repeatedly by gusts, until we had to hide behind a hedge and pull on our windproofs. You sort of forget that a six foot bloke with a vast pack on his back is a rather unstable creature. The sky clouded, the afternoon drew on and after an hour or two we turned our backs to the sea, descending with a little relief through sheltered fields and farm tracks and a stop in a waterlogged field where we made Bovril sandwiches then got lost. In front of us rose the neat hill of Dent fell, the first real pull upwards of our trip, and doing sums of the miles and hours we realised we were going to have to go over it in the dark if we were going to make Ennerdale Bridge.

But we never did. Coming down a winding path into the village of Cleator at the foot of the hill, we were accosted by a rotund man with a dog.
‘You don’t want to be up there at night, lads’, he declared, gesturing up towards Dent. As the shadows crept up the side it did look a bit forbidding. ‘You want to get yourselves kennelled up before dark.’ It looked like we would have to stay in Cleator, which did not please us. I was due back at my desk in London in less than two weeks, and apart from the obvious problem of getting behind on our already tight schedule, we both felt inexplicably unpleasant towards Cleator. It was difficult to say why.
‘I think it’s because it sounds like a cross between that bad guy out of Flash Gordon and Cleethorpes’, said Christian. It looked cluttered and depressing. The harpy. In our frustration at the morning’s delays, Cleator became an emblem of the obstacles in our way – a place that had suckered us in and wouldn’t let us leave. Worse, there was no campsite on the map.

We could not have been more wrong about Cleator. In a bid to find somewhere to sleep, I took off my boots and gaiters, already caked in mud, and padded into the village pub. In a poky little room full of old timers the barmaid smiled pleasantly at me.
‘Did you not see the sign outside? It says muddy boots welcome. What can I get you? I’m sorry, we’ve no pies.’
‘I was just wondering if you knew of any campsites round here. We meant to make it to Ennerdale Bridge today but we’ve run out of daylight.’
She looked doubtful.
‘No campsites round here, no. Sorry. There’s a hotel down the road, but it’s quite dear.’
‘You can’t think of anywhere we might be able to put up a tent?’
At this point an old man in a flat cap by the bar pitched in.
‘You can stop in my field if you like. Makes no odds to me.’
The man was a widowed old farmer called Tom who lived in a bungalow down by the river. Across the river was a good flat field, sheltered by hedges, which he owned, and where we put up our tent, looking across at the village on the other side. On returning to warm ourselves in the corner of the pub, Tom sipped at his pint of mild, and along with three or four other retired farm types, quizzed us about our plans. In the Cleator village pub there were no private conversations. Whoever was talking, everyone else in the room was involved. Tom would not accept even so much as a drink by way of thanks.
‘You’re alright’, he said. ‘I’ve got to be off in a sec. Me daughter’s making me a shepherd’s pie.’ When he did leave, it was only for a period of about fifteen minutes, and by the time we’d ordered our second pint, he’d returned.
‘Pie was there but she hadn’t cooked it yet’, he announced to the assembled company.
‘Could you not have put it in the oven yourself, Tom?’ asked the barmaid.
‘Oh no. I haven’t cooked for meself in years.’
‘I tell you one thing’, said another old man, ‘I’ve never washed a pot in me life. When the wife was in hospital havin’ our second I kept all the dirty dishes in the fridge for when she got back.’
A man in a boiler suit walked in and gave one of the regulars a bag of scallops. A brief discussion followed about whether scallops were potato or fish. A large lady breezed in breathlessly.
‘Hey Tom, I thought you’d be here. I’ve just seen two lads putting up a tent in that field of yours.’
‘I know. They’re in the corner.’ We waved, and exchanged more pleasantries with the neighbourhood busybody. A small man with a moustache who seemed to know a lot about fellwalking told us we should aim for Black Sail the next day.

They turned the fire on for us, and with warmth and conversation and beer it was tempting to stay in the pub all evening. This early on in the walk though, our resolve was still strong, and we left after a couple of pints to go and make supper. As I struggled to get my gaiters on in the hallway, Tom popped his head out of the bar.
‘It’s cold out. If you lads get too cold then there’s a spare room at the bungalow. Just give me a knock.’
My Grandpa Braime once wrote a little book called Continental Kindnesses. It was a collection of short anecdotes from a lifetime of adventures in his motor cars and aeroplanes when people helped him out for no good reason, and I reckon among the collections of Irish farmhands, Swiss receptionists, Scandinavian office workers and wordless Frenchmen, there would have been a place there for old Tom.
Down by the riverbank Christian cooked supper. Two days before he’d convinced the checkout lady in Asda that he was completely insane by cheerily loading up the conveyor with 30 packets of Bachelors freeze-dried pasta, and it is true that our menu was perhaps not the most varied. Everything tastes better outdoors though, and the most important question of each and every day was how we would end it. Would it be cheese and ham? Macaroni? Italian herb (this one was described on the packet as ‘delicately seasoned’)? Bolognese? There was a rather suspicious mushroom and red wine one which always seemed to find its way to the bottom of the pile of potential pasta. This evening was carbonara. It was Bonfire Night, and as we ate from steaming bowls rockets lit up the sky above the village.
I was worried about the cold, and put on all of my clothes before I got into my sleeping bag, but in fact that night in Cleator was one of the mildest nights of the trip. As I drifted off to sleep I could hear the river and more rockets going on in the distance.
‘Jols’, whispered Christian, ‘It’s only half past six’. He chuckled quietly and rolled over.

1. Setting out

There’s nothing quite like setting out on an adventure. That moment when you realise you’ve gone too far to turn back and all the courage you haven’t had up ‘til then suddenly comes on in a rush of inevitability.

I don’t know if on the morning that Christian and I left home to walk across England I seriously thought we’d make it to the end. Given the time of year and the fact that we hadn’t walked anywhere serious in years, both terribly out of shape through indolence and alcohol, I had a sort of feeling that we might have to call it a day somewhere down the line. But in many ways that wasn’t really the point of the exercise. Christian’s reasons for coming were his own, but for me, the Coast to Coast was a rock to break myself against. An absurd and impractical jaunt to snap me out of a creeping and hateful sense that I’d lost the person I once hoped I might be, desperate for the faintest touch of an adventure. If I went the distance then that was fine, and if I didn’t then it was probably alright too.

There was a lot of time to consider this and other things on that first morning. To get by train from Leeds to St Bees, right on the West coast of Cumbria, takes around six and a half hours. I waited in Leeds City station by the side of the 6.15 to Lancaster, with that sick feeling you get when you’ve got up too early, watching Christian jogging along the opposite platform where he’d just put Lucy on her own train to Birmingham, his skip hat at a tilt, bowed under his ridiculous pack. I was having difficulty manoeuvring with mine. Come a week’s time the weight would seem alright, and walking around without them on made you feel a sort of unnatural lightness, but on this first morning my shoulders hurt already.

It was light by the time we made Lancaster, and the trains were beginning to fill up with commuters. Already with our boots and bags it felt like we were outsiders, no longer part of the everyday that was otherwise going along as it always did. We would feel like that quite a lot over the weeks to come. When you’re part of something you barely notice it, but when you’re on the outside, looking in, everything seems more interesting. We sat on a bench in Lancaster station, drinking tea, fiddling with our gaiters and waiting for the next train, a Virgin one to Edinburgh. It was raining.
‘Trust Lancashire to piss on a couple of Yorkshiremen’, remarked Christian.
‘No sort of place at all’, I replied.

There was no space for us in the carriages, so we squatted on our packs in the vestibule, trying not to look at the haggard alcoholic lady with short cropped hair who shambled up and down the train with a slipstream of noxious booze fumes, desperate for the buffet car to open so she could get her hands on some tins. Lord knows where she was going at that hour of the morning, and I’m almost certain she didn’t have a ticket. Still, she somehow escaped the inspector, and was still wandering around, talking incessantly to herself in a gravely voice, when we rolled out onto the platform at Carlisle.

The line from Carlisle to St Bees is possibly the oddest one I’ve ever been on. It consists of a single carriage which winds its way with remarkable slowness along the coast, through little pebbly hamlets, sometimes running almost at the top of the beach, heading for its eventual glamorous target of the Sellafield nuclear power station. A bit like a bus, you have to tell the conductor if you want it to stop at the next station, but it almost never did, because there can’t have been more than six or seven people on the whole train. Not many people live in this quiet corner of Cumbria, and not many visit either. If tourists are going to that part of the world, they go to the Lake District. I think the only reason I’d ever heard of St Bees before was that there’s a school there that sometimes competed against ours in sports. Not that I was ever involved of course, but I mainly remember the headmaster reading out the results in assembly and stumbling over any remotely ethnic names. Anyway, it took forever to get there. Christian dozed against the scratched windows and I drank tea from a cardboard cup and read the guidebook.


The idea of Wainwright’s Coast to Coast is that you begin by dipping your booted feet into the Irish Sea at St Bees in the West, then march across to Robin Hood’s Bay in the East and touch your bare toes in the North Sea. By the time we made the beach, and waggled the tips of our boots in the water, it was already half 12. It was November, and the days were short, so it looked like we might not make the full distance of our first day, but it was a lovely start all the same. The rain that had dripped glumly down in Lancashire was long gone. The sun shone bright and clear, the air was salty, and an onshore breeze cooled us as we made our first climb up worn wooden steps onto the cliffs. We were both gloriously happy, and it felt a bit like days when we were little, tottering along the cliffs at Sandsend or Hayburn Wike back when everything was an adventure and whatever you made it. Two weeks later we would struggle through our last day in snow, wind and driving rain, but this first afternoon someone somewhere was smiling on us.

The path along the cliff tops was broad and grassy, and below us, with the town all but hidden by a lump of hill, the sea sparkled for miles. We were short of breath, and I had that tight, liquid feeling in my lungs like you get when you haven’t used them much for a while then you give yourself massive gasps of fresh cold air and they don’t know what to do with themselves. I resisted the temptation to use an inhaler, and within 15 minutes my chest felt clean and clear. Christian boasted about how great his new trousers were, then promptly tore the knee right open on some barbed wire by a lighthouse.