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.