I meet my first fellow C2C’er at breakfast this morning—Tracy from Seattle. She’s just finished a medical degree, landed a great job somewhere in the Midwest, and is at the beginning of a three-month vacation before hunkering down to her new career. She’s doing two UK walks, sailing in Greece, and taking a safari in Africa. An adventure holiday for sure.I sit down to my full-English cereal, egg, bacon, tomato, and toast breakfast while she peels a hard boiled egg and butters cold, crisp toast. She’s mostly traveling with a girlfriend and just walked Hadrian’s Wall with her; for the C2C walk, she’s on her own before meeting up with her friend again. She’s done a lot of hiking in the US, especially around the Pacific Northwest mountains.
“My legs are holding up great,” she boasts. “It’s my feet that are the problem. Day-after-day walking is really hard on them. I’m babying a lot of blisters.”
We compare C2C itineraries. She’s finishing before I am, and will be walking the full 14 miles to Ennerdale Bridge today. As we look over our maps, I express my disappointment about the extra four-mile loop around St Bees Head, and about my compulsion to stick to it because that’s the “official” path.
“It wouldn’t be cheating to skip the Head,” she says. “You can do the walk any way you like.”
Blip. A light bulb goes on, and a great weight of expectation and anxiety lifts. I can do the walk any way I like. Even Wainwright had said that. It’s OK to take a different trail, to carve this path whatever way I might want to. Suddenly the idea of walking the added four miles is welcome, because I see it as a choice rather than an obligation. Another life lesson falls into my lap, and I breathe easier as I start out.
I finally get on the trail at 10:15a after a visit to the post office to mail the C2C map postcards. The entire beach looks different than it did yesterday. The tide is very low, and the water is very far away from where the toddler had spent an hour plunking rocks into the sea.
I climb the dusty cliff edge from the caravan park and follow an easy path with the Irish Sea at my left. The trail is reminiscent of the Southwest Coastal Path at Lizard Peninsula, only the coastline isn’t as ragged here. Cliffs drop off dramatically to thin strips of beach exposed by the tide. I don’t grasp how high up I am until I see a man and his dog romping down the strand. They seem like specks. The path feels uncomfortably close to the edge in places. The stiles are fewer, as well.Deep, chest-vibrating booms roll over the sea every fifteen or twenty minutes, sounding very much like The Flying Dutchman calling for the Leviathan in Pirates 2. Probably a much-less-romantic naval practice session going on.
Sheep are often only a few yards away, grazing. Gulls, insects, and seabirds call. It is hot, with no breeze to turn my sweat into personal air conditioning. How can a coast have no breeze? Doesn’t wind always gust or waft or float or whip at the sea? I drink lukewarm water, mop my face, and yearn for the cooling winds of Cornwall.
Fleswick (“Flezzick”) Bay, at mile 1, offers a respite of cold water to soak my kerchief and a layer of cool, smooth pebbles to lay back on in the shadow of cliffs. I break for a brief snack and rest here, having followed a man and his young son—10, maybe 12 years old—down the gully and over slippery rocks. They’re also on the C2C, reading from the same Wainwright book I am as they take short breaks.
I am entranced by the tide pools here—brick-red sandstone eroded into rippled troughs. Water-made caves, big piled boulders, and names carved in stones with the skill of a fine typographer await my leaping explorations.I decide to forgo a half-mile side trip to the lighthouse and Tarnflat Hall to keep the day short in the wilting heat.
Even with the foolproof concept of keeping the Irish Sea at my left, I mistakenly detour too soon off the grain fields that Wainwright describes, shooting south before I reach the disused quarry I should turn at. I begin to suspect I’ve gotten off track when a paved road I am on seems to be somewhere else on the map than where I actually am. My biggest landmark is a transmitter tower ahead of me—it’s on the map, but no intersecting gravel road also matches the one I’ve just come from.While I try to get my bearings, a car drives up and parks by a chain-link fence around the transmitter’s field. A man gets out and grabs fishing gear from the back of the car. I accost him for directions and he points me straight down the road to Sandwith, a quick, if unremarkable, village to pass through.
As I leave Sandwith, my liter of water is gone, the heat of the day is at its height, and I am about a mile from the railroad tracks that lead back to St Bees. The path goes through the dairy yard of Desmesne Farm, where a fella is working on a noisy tractor. Two barking dogs come at me. Above the din, I point to my empty water bottle and pantomime for a fill from a hose.Rather than merely point me toward a spigot, he shuts off the engine, calls off the dogs, and walks me down the concrete yard to the small kitchen of the farmhouse. I stand on the step while he fills both bottles with icy well water and lets me wet my kerchief. We chat a few minutes (he knows some folks in the US), I thank him and then verify directions past the last farms toward the tracks before heading down a shrub-lined road that offers the first, brief chance of real shade all day.
At last I am crossing the final cow pasture to reach a tunnel under the railway—my C2C stopping point for the day, a little under two miles outside of St Bees. Some men are working on the railroad, and they direct me back to town along a non-path that crosses cow and sheep pastures and edges a wood that Carole had told me about. I feel drained and headachy. I try to find a path into the woods, but barbed wire, fences, and rock walls surround it from all directions. I plop down in the shade of the trees at the edge of the pasture and lay down for a rest, carefully avoiding nettles and a few dried cow patties as I bed down in grass with my daypack for a pillow.When I finally get in, I learn that I have just walked over eight miles through a heat wave of 28C (82F) in the shade—close to 90F in the open where I’d been all day. I have a big-time headache and mild heat exhaustion to show for it. I make mental notes for the days ahead: take twice as much water, have electrolytes, ditch the Elastoplast for wrapping my feet, and do the best I can with Bandaids and double socks to reduce the chance of blisters. I take a cool bath, drink more water, and nap for two hours.
Dinner is at The Manor House pub—trout rolled in oatmeal, chips, vegetables. So much food that I can’t finish it all.
Over supper, I read ahead in the Wainwright book and begin to feel seriously outfaced and uneasy about what’s coming up. He describes tomorrow’s trek over The Dent and, later, over the hills of the Lake District in ways that sound strenuous, dangerous, and rife with opportunities for taking wrong trails. Will my feet hold up? Will my legs hold up? Will I be able to follow the route and signposts? I got off track today on the simplest of trails. Sure, I got back OK. But I don’t like feeling lost.
“Not all who wander are lost.” –J.R. Tolkein
Richard had sent me that quote early in the trip. Well, sometimes those who wander are lost. And sometimes, as I was for a while today, they are lost and don’t know it. It’s at those times that ignorance really is bliss for me. Being lost and knowing I’m lost is the scary part—except that it does, I suppose, spur me to actively seek my way home.
It’s clear this C2C walk will challenge me—I can easily do the mileage one off. But as Tracy said, it’s the day-after-day miles that’s the trick. That, and this heat to deal with. Weather reports say the temps will be even hotter tomorrow, and could continue for a few days. Maybe I should bus to Ennerdale instead of walk. Or call the Sherpa Van people and ride with my backpack to the next B&B. Or walk only to Cleator and catch a ride the rest of the way. Better that than getting heat stroke by walking 10 miles in the same kind of conditions as today.
I turn in early, too exhausted to do more than consider a few other options and decide to see how I feel in the morning.
Trail miles: 6; actual miles walked: 8.5
