Beach Bum at Robin Hood’s Bay

I had planned to stay an extra day at Robin Hood’s Bay, and am glad I did. I want to relish the completion of the Coast to Coast walk. Most of my friends left the day after they arrived. Michael and David headed back within hours of finishing on that rainy Wednesday...sopping and singing and changing clothes in the back of the Sherpa van that came to return them to Richmond for the drive home.

The morning is easy. Sleep in ’til 7:30, eat breakfast at 8, say goodbye to Marv, nap again ’til 10. Walk into town and buy postcards and a replacement shirt for the two I’ll be tossing soon. They got seriously faded in bands across the shoulders and the front from sweat and the backpack and repeated washings these past two weeks.

I wander around a lot today. My feet don’t seem to want to stay still after all that walking. They also don’t want to be in shoes, so I get to feel the sand and asphalt and stones of Robin Hood’s Bay and its village a lot of the day.




I buy a strawberry ice cream from the on-the-beach ice cream van, meander the labyrinth of skinny side streets and stone steps, sit on the slipway watching beach goers.

The day is another hot one, and people are out with beach shovels and pails, plastic dump trucks, romping dogs, inflatable rafts, plastic fish nets on 4' bamboo poles in pink, blue, green, yellow. Up a hill and around the corner from the Maritime Museum, some kind resident has propped a whole collection of these colored fish nets for free use—quiet competition to the shops at the top of the hill that sell them for a few pounds apiece.



Families and children are digging sand, making walls against the tide that overruns them as quickly as they’re built. People push strollers along the packed sand, up and over cobbles on the slipway, through rivulets of water running to the sea from the town’s stream. There is a strong smell of sea today: a muggy, seaweedy smell. A sweet fragrance of pipe tobacco passes by—he is the only pipe smoker I’ve come across this trip.

The tide is much higher than it was yesterday at 3:30 when I got in. I am getting eaten by beach flies where I sit, so I decide on a water walk.

This beach and how people enjoy it is very different from Wight, Cornwall, St Bees. There are no miles of hotels, sand, and beach houses like at Wight; no rugged boulders and crashing waves like at Cornwall; no evenly spaced jetties and water-level boardwalk like at St Bees. Here is a towering seawall built to bolster the village from dropping into the sea. Beach that disappears rapidly with the tide; a main street that slides directly to the water; boardwalks along the top of the seawalls; concrete ramps and steps that lead down to the sand at low tide and are barricaded with chains at high tide.

A boy and his dad have made a sand boat at the base of the northern seawall. The flags are fish nets stuck up at each side. The boy sits on a towel in the boat, “Because,” his mother explains to me, “he hates to sit in the sand.” They soon have to abandon ship with the swamping tide.

Waters overtake another deserted sand fort, and farther on three children are desperately trying the protect the stronghold they’ve abutted to the seawall.

I admire their work.

“My brother likes building castles,” says a girl of the trio. She’s the eldest, about 11.

“How long has it taken you?”

“All day!” proclaims the boy, whose citadel this is. “We’ve been here since eight in the morning!”

It is about noon now.

“This is the castle.” The girl hikes over the mounds and points to a pile of sand the size of a grapefruit that’s molded against the wall. The castle keep. They’ve surrounded it with semicircles of ditches and high walls—the builders of Old Sarum Mound in Salisbury couldn’t have done it better.

“This one’s called The Flying Cape Castle,” says the boy as he and his sisters fortify the third ring of sand against the incoming sea. Their father comes by and we chat a bit. They’re from Suffolk, Cambridge area.

The girl chimes in, “We’ve been coming here for holiday every year since I was born.”

The father laughs: “I’ve been coming here every year since I was born.” He points to his kids. “They’ve been at this since before breakfast. I came to find them for lunch.”

The tide has come in enough that my way back to the slipway is now under water along the seawall. I say goodbye and slosh back to town to find a bit of lunch myself.

Not in the mood for a pub, I retrace the line of people walking around with fish-and-chips containers and end up at a take-out up one of the village’s angling side streets. The shop is so tiny and narrow that patrons form a U-turn queue through its single door, entering to place an order and leaving with their hands full of hot goods. “’Scuse me, ’scuse me, oh I’m so sorry,” as we all bump shoulders to make way for each other while advancing to our next place in line.

The servers are sassy twenty-somethings, all men, and loving their popularity at the busy lunch hour. I drop a tip into their “Staff Beer Fund” as recompense for the photo I take, and one of them says, “Thank you miss. For that, you get something extra.” He lays one extra chip speared with a wooden fork onto my meal box. “See that, folks?” he says to the rest of the patrons. “Generosity never goes unrewarded.”


Blowing the heat off the fish and chips, I take a bench at the upper boardwalk for more people watching from the overview point. A fellow next to me plays Sudoku. The sun keeps coming and going, brilliant and hot when it’s not behind clouds, which is where it’s been most of the day.

I visit the Maritime Museum at see interesting displays of how tides work (a working model of the moon, the earth spinning, and a diorama of the sea rising and falling along the shore of Robin Hood’s Bay).

The Morris dancers are still here, so I catch a more of their show and mostly hang around the village for the rest of the day. I am feeling like a tourist again, only different. More able to sit and just be here. That is enough for now.

C2C Day 19, Robin Hood’s Bay (Mile 192)—The End of the Road

I am ending the C2C as I began it—on a day of solitary walking.

I feel tears welling up as I talk with Judith about this being my last day of the walk. Grief that it’s almost over. Happiness at what I’ve done. Some relief, too.

Near nine-thirty, I’m just getting ready to leave Intake Farm, and I receive a text from David and Michael wishing me luck on my last push to Robin Hood’s Bay. Funny, by now this doesn’t feel like a push. I’m just walking 12 miles to RHB from Littlebeck today.




The path out starts with a lovely, long, cool walk through May Beck and its forest—the “valley somewhere over there, lots of twists and turns along the river” that my guide from yesterday had told me about. This forest trail is more lovely to me than any I’ve walked in Olympia. No wonder someone spent months (years?) carving out The Hermitage from a boulder in 1790.



A waterfall, Falling Foss, near Midge Hall (once converted to a museum but now boarded up and derelict), seems to appear out of nowhere around a bend, and I understand why Wainright dubs this area one of “bewitching beauty.”

I feel strong and surefooted as I tread over rocks and stepping stones and tree roots. This is different from my gingerly walking across similar footing at the beginning of the C2C. I am gaining a new kind of physical balance, which pleases me.



The southerly forest route gets left behind for a sharp turn to the north, which meets up with a north-easterly path across moors, roads, and more moors before it jogs around the coastline for the last three miles.

I stand on Greystone Hills (at mile 184) and look back on how far I’ve come in just the past two days, let alone the past 18. I can feel tears sting again. They are a mix of happiness and sadness—happiness over what I’ve accomplished, what I’ve learned, whom I’ve met, how far I’ve come, how much more is yet to come—this journey never ends. And sadness that this part of the journey is almost over.

I am also sorry that I packed my last OS map and put sole (pardon the pun) trust in the Footprint map today. The path looked so easy, but it has been sometimes tricky to follow, especially over Greystone Hills, a rolling moor where promised signposts are difficult to spot (far apart and not always visible until I’d crested a rise) and where several paths crisscross from boots, sheep, and natural runoff areas.

The Footprint map just doesn’t have the necessary detail over this kind of terrain, especially when a trail fades across a sheep pasture. Having passed successfully, if somewhat erratically, over Greystone Hills, for instance, I stand next to a stile and beside the only fingerpost in sight to reconnoiter. The post points to where I’ve just come from (a good sign in that respect), but not also to where I should go next.

The field ahead of me has grass cropped short as a new marine’s hair, leaving no tracks. The map is little help—I’m correctly at Normanby Hill Top by all reckoning, but the map doesn’t offer additional visual details such as boundary lines and stone walls. No one is around to ask but the sheep, and I’m not yet proficient in the language of Baah. So I just forge ahead in the general, gut-feeling compass direction and manage to find my way to something that resembles a track.

I feel more sure of my decision when I come upon a tight, hedgerow-lined dirt trail that is still muddy. Bootprints are clearly visible (yay!), and I wonder if any of them belong to friends who have passed ahead of me this week. I swear I see John and Elaine’s bootsoles at one point. This little overgrown lane is full of wildflowers and butterflies. I hang around nearly half an hour watching and trying to photograph the flighty things.

Quarter after one, I sit down to a bacon-and-cheese-melt baguette and orange-cranberry J2O at the Hare & Hounds Inn in High Hawsker. I am cooling down from a sweaty and tiring walk, easing my feet from the now-familiar ache on the sole of my heels, and wiping off miniscule hitchhiking bugs that are crawling all over me and my juice glass. Not sure what’s different about where I’ve been today—I haven’t encountered these nuisance bugs until now. Must be the nearness to the sea.


I leave High Hawsker a little after two for the last leg of the walk, three miles of which follows the cliffs of the North Sea, just as the beginning followed the St Bees Head coast. The long-range view is turning murky, the kind where the sea melts into sky at the horizon.

Along the bluffs, I begin passing many people going the other way on the coastal trail—no packs, so they’re only out for day walk. Probably trekking from the caravan park outside Hawsker to RHB for the day, or coming back from the same. One man is a dead ringer for Rowan Atkinson/Mr. Bean.


Breezes cool my skin. I hear only the shush of waves, a sea-silence anytime I’m away from the cliff, the scream of distant gulls. Occasionally the smell of cow patties wafts over from the fields at my right.

I pause on a cliff to take a photo of what I think is RHB way off in the distance, and am suddenly greeted by a grinning, scruffy, shirtless man wearing a backpack and camera and a bandana on his head, holding up his hand in a high-five—it’s Aussie John! He and Elaine are staying in Whitby a few miles back; he’d walked to RHB to find more postcards with Wendy the Sheep, and was hoping he might see me there. He’d also just run into Marv five minutes before—oh, yay, I may have a chance to commemorate the walk’s closure with a friend, after all.

We take photos of each other, say goodbye again (rats!), and I walk into Robin Hood’s Bay, which, John has happily informed me, is actually just around the bend (and just over my shoulder in this photo).

It is also crowded. Having spent the past 19 days meeting barely anyone, I am overwhelmed by the number of people going down RHB’s hill.

It’s steep, a 33% grade straight down to the sea, and passes through an old village that’s riddled with winding alleys and angled side roads and itty-bitty peekaboo gardens. I am at the top of the village, aiming for the sea, and getting blocked by doddering old folks who walk two abreast and somehow take up the space of four, by families whose children and strollers spread like a Roman phalanx across the sidewalk, by people walking dogs that zig and zag after every new scent, by folks streaming out of car parks and side streets. I had no idea that this place is such a draw for visitors.

I weave around them all for the first 200 yards, a woman on a mission, a woman who needs clear space in front of her, dammit, before I catch myself rushing the moment. I slow down to take more in. To savor these last quarter mile of the walk.

From the bottom of the hill comes a steady drumbeat—the kind of drumbeat that Native American singers use. I recall the Native American buskers in London in their feathered and leathered regalia. My heart sinks. Surely not here. Please don’t let it be some cheesy performance here, at the end of this celebrated walk.

I round the last corner in a flood of relief—no befeathered, befringed Native American Indian mockups, but a troupe of traditional Morris dancers dressed in white shirts and trousers, bells around their knees, beribboned hats on their heads, dancing like the ensemble in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang who sing “Me Old Bamboo.” Their straw hats are decorated with wheat braids in many shapes—wreaths, ropes, baskets, each with a colorful ribbon on it.

They are at the very bottom of the hill, at the entrance to the sea slip. I decide the water ritual can wait and hang around to watch the troupe—all men except for one fiddle player—do a couple of dances. Their bells jingle cheerily as they stomp and spin and kick to the beat of drum, horn, and fiddle, and my toes tap to the rhythm. All discomfort and hurry is forgotten. I scan for a glimpse of Marv somewhere in the crowd, but do not spot him.



Finally I turn to go to the sea. I fish out the red sandstone I’ve carried for the last 190+ miles. I strip off my boots and socks and wade into the cold water. The tide is in; the sand is hardpan beneath my feet. I ask for a photo from another walker—one of a group of ten (mostly 20-something boys) who had walked the path in an astonishing seven days. Ten is really pushing it. They are exhausted, exhilarated, blistered, and flinging themselves backwards into the water with the delight of being done.

I wander the tide line, happy to be barefoot and to feel the cold water around my ankles and calves. Two men play football in the sea with their re-homed German shepherd. The dog loves to chase the ball, but hates to drop it. Hisssssshhh goes the ball as it yields to the dog’s jaws, and hoouuuuhghhgh it goes again as it refills when he releases pressure. “He gets a new ball every two weeks” laughs one of his stewards.

I still have the stone in my hand. It’s been like a talisman these past weeks. I toy with the idea of keeping it, of taking it back to the US. I collect things like that. Special rocks that remind me of where I’ve been. Sometimes I keep them a long time. Sometimes I leave them at other special places I visit or live at.

No. Not this one. I need to let this one go. I need to let it go here, as a final, grateful gesture of my achievement. All that it has stood for is stored in my heart, and I need no physical reminder.

I wade to a spot that feels right and pitch the stone side-arm into the sea. It plunks unceremoniously into the water.

There. That’s it. It’s over. Who knows what the North Sea will do to that rock in the years ahead, rolling it along the seafloor, eroding it more, pushing it onto the beach. Perhaps it will decorate a child’s sand castle some day. Perhaps it will crack open a shellfish for a seagull. Or perhaps it will accompany another C2C’er on his own personal trek back to the opposite side of this island known as Britain.


The cold sea has practically numbed my feet, so I go in search of a beer at the Wainwright Bar, the last pub at the very end of the road, standing beside the cobbled sea slip and sporting an official plaque marking THE END of the 192-mile walk and illustrating the elevation changes we covered. (Official mile counts vary from 190 to 192, but it certainly can get longer with detours, alternative routes, and miles added for getting to and from off-trail lodgings.)

In that cramped little pub, I meet the entire group of ten who had walked the trail in seven days. We all order beers and compare stories. I have traveled 19 days and had one day of pouring rain; they have traveled seven days and had five days of pouring rain. Such is the fickleness of timing and British weather.

I would never wish to do that walk in seven days, but their gusto for the sheer challenge of it is entertaining. They bemoan the wet camping, the piercingly aching knees, the lunches taken without break on the road. They boast of doing the Keswick (Kezzick) to Barrow walk (40 miles, mostly roads) in 12.5 hours, and of wanting to do the Lyke Wake Walk (a race of 40 miles in 24 hrs, trail walking with hills) next. One of the women is in her fifties and, judging by her effusive delight over these challenges, is clearly better equipped than I to meet them.

I sign the C2C guest book that is kept at this pub, finding entries from Michael and David (“I did it!”) and from John and Elaine, who have written “Hello Audrey, Jenny and Len” next to their entry. I write “Hello—I made it!” back to them, then find a clean line to sign my own way into C2C history.

Having finished my beer, it’s time to find my B&B, Fern Leigh, which is somewhere past the top of RHB hill. I reject the idea of putting my boots back on, and instead walk barefoot up the half mile long road. The miles and miles of walking, even in boots, have toughened my feet so much that the hard, sharp asphalt and warm, smooth cobblestones and cool, prickly grass actually feel good instead of ouchy on my soles.

I keep trying to spot Marv among the many people in town, and am disappointed to miss him. He could be anywhere, staying at any of the dozens of hotels and lodgings that line the roads here. The prospect of eating dinner alone tonight depresses me.

I walk into the cool, tiled anteroom of Fern Leigh and I am pleasantly surprised when the proprietress informs me that Marv is staying at the same B&B, just down the hall! My depression lifts, and we plan for dinner together.

We end up at The Dolphin pub, upstairs at a table by the piano—literally by the piano, where we’re practically eating off of the covered keyboard. Nearby is an old forgetful jukebox that will play any song you don’t select for 20p. I order a tuna slab on a bed of basil noodles with fruit and tomato salsa. There’s so much food that I can’t eat it all.

After dinner, we briefly watch more of the Morris dancers, who have come back for an evening performance, then wander around window shopping and admiring the architecture of this quaint little village.

I am to bed by 9:30, very tired, and very glad that I had planned two nights here at RHB, instead of just one.

Trail miles: 12; actual miles walked: 13.5

C2C Day 18, Littlebeck (Mile 179)—Harry Potter & The Vanishing Cairns

I’m two days and 19 or so miles away from finishing the walk, and my trail has slowed down instead of sped up. I like this. I overnight in Littlebeck today, where several of my walking friends will have also stayed ahead of me.

I leave Ashley House at 9:20a and walk the few miles to Grosmont (Grow Mont) with another guest at Ashley House who’s been walking the full C2C. He is friendly walking company, but I quickly find that it’s best not to be downwind of him. He says he’s been waiting until the end of the C2C to wash his hiking clothes, and the lack of a laundering after nearly two weeks is beginning to tell.


It’s only 4.5 miles to Grosmont on a trail that’s mostly asphalt or gravel farm road after a brief stint through a leafy forest. We pass Beggar’s Bridge just outside of Glaisdale (some romantic story is attached to that, but I didn’t absorb the full gist of it from Margaret), and we move at a good clip to arrive at Grosmont in a little over an hour. The path takes us along the Esk River, which can flood to 6 feet or higher at the ford spots, and has the standing markers and flood-ready footbridge to prove it. Astonishing.


Part of the trail was a toll road in 1940s, with a cost of 4 shillings for a horse and two-wheeled cart, 8 shillings if the cart had four wheels, and 1 pound for motor cars and motor sidecars. A hearse was 6 shillings. We pause at the Toll House, but, alas, no warm chocolate chip cookies are waiting.

My cohort goes on to Robin Hood’s Bay today, so we exchange goodbyes here in Grosmont. I’m taking a stopover for a train ride, before moving on to Littlebeck. I wave hello to the two women from the New Zealander Pack ’n’ Boots club across the street.

“Where you off to today?” I holler.

“Robin Hood’s Bay all the way!”

“Where are the others?” I notice the men are absent.

“Where else?” She points into the grocery. “Getting more food for the walk!”


I wish them luck then buy a ticket for the 10:45 scenic roundtrip train ride to Pickering (the end of the line, a little over an hour away) on an old diesel train that’s reminiscent of the Hogwarts Express. I can sit anywhere I like, and choose a carriage that has compartments with red cushioned seats and a narrow aisle to walk along one side of the train, a la Harry Potter. Steam trains make the same Grosmont/Pickering run more often during the day; I’m sad I missed one of those, as this one smells of diesel and lacks the full HP ambiance.



Several adults join me in the compartment and comment on its being like the one in Harry Potter. One of the women giggles, “Maybe we should dress up like the Dementors and scare the children in the next compartment.”

I like these people.

Alas, they and the children they’re accompanying in the next compartment are all required to be in another part of the train because of their selected stop. The conductor moves them along, and I’m left alone in this traveling parlor room.

The train pulls into Goathland, its first stop, and to my surprise the platform is a shuffling mass of black cloaks and pointed black hats. Scores of children and teenagers, all dressed as HP look-alikes, have packed onto the platform for the next arrival. I hope they’ll join this train, but as we slow down, the whole body of black begins to stir confusedly, and within moments they are pouring along the platform and going and up and over the overpass to reach the northbound platform, where a steam train like the Hogwarts Express is slowing down toward us beneath plumes of white vapor.

Turns out that the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, the 18-mile renovated line I’m riding now, was actually used in the first HP movie—in particular, the Goathland and Pickering stations I’m visiting! Both the stations and the trains are meccas for HP fans, and this bit of track through the North Riding Forest has become as popular as the train through Glenfinnian, another HP movie site up north. Like so many other enterprises, the railroad aficionados of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway Society (www.nymr.demon.co.uk) who revived this defunct steam line and converted it into a living museum are undoubtedly indebted to Rowling for sparking the renewed interest that keeps their darling trains going.




As well as being famous as a movie set, these old-fashioned locomotives are also the kind of trains that prompt people like me to stick their head out the windows like dogs in a car—because we can.

Watching the carriages wind around the bends in the track, seeing flag signals go up and down, gliding through tree-lined valleys—it’s easy to imagine myself on a miniature Lionel train set, humming down the tracks through elaborate manmade topographies like those at the Hobby Hall of the Puyallup Fair.

Me, a tiny person in a tiny train passing through carefully landscaped plywood-bottomed tableaus, past wooden to-scale homes and village stores and blacksmiths shops, over hills and through tunnels made of chicken wire and paper maché, directed by invisible hands that have laid out track and set up electrical switches and flags that tell us when to slow, when to advance, when to switch tracks to avoid an oncoming train.

Only here, at the North Riding Forest, we ride on carved through gloriously green hillsides, past an occasional fen bog, and through a few stops at mostly nondescript stations, save for the colorful bridgework and decor at Pickering and Goathland.

The ride gives me time to sit and think. I’m feeling both sad and happy about my itinerary for this walk, about taking an extra day to get to Robin Hood’s Bay. Sad that I’m not there to celebrate it with my friends (I haven’t met anyone yet who’s also ending on Saturday) and glad that I’ve created my own experience for the journey.

Being able to take my time near the end has removed the driving aspect of the walk—I’ll get there when I get there—and I have the time to enjoy the journey the way I choose to. Rather than make for a final push to Robin Hood’s Bay, I’m entering at my leisure, as part of traveling across England by foot, instead of making “doing the Coast to Coast” a goal in itself.

Early on, I decided to stop saying that I’m “doing” the C2C, and “doing” York, and that I “did” the Isle of Wight. Those phrases carry a kind of chore-ness about them—I did the dishes—and imply that I saw it all, experienced it all, have nothing to return to. Even lingering in a small area for several days at a time often wasn’t enough to “do” it, to take it all in. Having this more relaxed, three-month itinerary has helped, though. I feel as if I’ve lived in England for three months, instead of just traveled and toured through here.

It takes living in a place for four seasons to really feel its rhythms. I wonder what place I should go to next to do that.


The skies right now are turning grayer, and temps cooler. The train has taken me almost twenty miles south of the trail and left behind blue skies and gentle sunshine. At the end of the line, I pick up a pasty-and-crisps lunch at Pickering station and then hop back onto the train for the reverse trip to Grosmont. I move down the train to check out the other carriages; one is a dining car and another full of red velour bench seats, but the others that are far less interesting than the HP-like compartment.




The train ride has been a fun diversion (albeit nap-inducing on the way back), and when I disembark at Grosmont I eagerly return to the C2C trail at a huff-n-puffing 33% incline for the first mile out of town. The climb is a grunt, but it affords a lovely backward view of the village. Following the trail leads me to a disturbing moor, Black Brow, that, rather than expanses of heather, is covered with clumps of spongy, chopped-up moss. It’s like walking on a field of crumble topping.

From here I can see the infamous coastal town of Whitby off my left shoulder, and I get my first glimpse of this whole endeavor’s objective: the North Sea. It is the first sighting of water that isn’t flowing down a river bed, trickling down a beck, or pouring out of the sky in over two weeks.

And once again I get lost.

First I follow the trail over Black Brow, just as it says on the OS map. The trail peters out, so I begin to follow a spotty series of low-lying cairns—sure signs that at least I’m following a blessed path. Then I run out of cairns, too. I see two more cairns in the distance, but up close they turn out to be sheep.

I pause. OK. So no trail. No markers. But I am still facing the right direction, more or less.

I doggedly keep my heading due east toward the A road that I know is ahead, all the while looking around for access to a path that’s supposed to go a bit more southeasterly, per the map.

By now the spongy bits of ground have turned to deep heather and I am stumbling along a vague trail that, I realize too late, is actually a channel made by water runoff. Right after I say aloud, “OK, angels, I could use another trail marker now,” I look up from watching my footing and see a trekker just off to my right—in the perfect southeasterly direction.

“Aha!” I wave his way and yell. He stops and I yell again. “You must be on that trail I’ve missed!”

He waits as I tack over thick heather toward him. Local walking etiquette encourages walkers to stay on the trails, as wanton trekking every which way, especially the sensitive moor areas like this, can quickly deteriorate them. However, given the choice between tramping across 50 yards of moors to get to the trail, vs. stalking another 400 yards through even thicker stuff to reach the road, I elect the shorter route and lift my legs high to march through heather that’s so thick my feet never reach the soil where I tread. The plants are soft and yielding, like walking over mounds of stiff foam pillows.

The walker is a tall man, easily in his 70s. He has a small pack and a walking stick, wears trousers and jacket and cap. He has taken a bus and “walked over here from somewhere over there,” pointing vaguely toward my destination of Littlebeck across the A road. He is heading to Grosmont where he’ll catch a ride home, preferring this plan to the alternative of driving to a car park and walking. “When did you start your walk?” he asks.

“July 17.”

“About 18 days. I walked it twenty years ago in 10 days, maybe 12. I did two walks then, Pennine and the Coastal. Can’t remember which one took me 10 and which took me 12.”

I hear that the Pennine is usually 18 days at a pushing pace, so this fellow must have been really moving. And certainly to do a 20-mile day at the beginning of the C2C is to turn it into an ordeal. I can still feel twinges of pain in my knees when a downhill path gets really steep—those Lake District fells were rugged, even with trekking poles.

He gives me guidance on the track ahead: “You’ll cross the road, then follow that valley somewhere over there, lots of twists and turns along the river.”

Not very specific, and because I’m heading for a farm outside of Littlebeck tonight, his directions aren’t true to my path, so I ignore them once I cross the highway.

Littlebeck Intake Farm is easily spotted in the distance, and I follow a gentle downhill detour to approach the farm from the back, instead of the usual alternative that would have meant going uphill to reach it from the front. (This is one of the few tips I recorded from the little research I did for this walk.)

These OS-marked footpaths not only take me directly around and in front of the gardens at the neighboring High Quebec farm, but also between the buildings of Low Quebec Farm and through its back garden, right between their swing sets in the trees and their polytunnel. In the center of the garden stands a two-way finger post to direct the many walkers who undoubtedly pass through here. I still marvel at the freedom this public access thing throughout the UK. In America, “No Trespassing” signs would be posted at every possible ingress.

I arrive at Intake Farm around three. Owner Robert and a collie, Ben, meet me in the farm yard; his wife, Judith, comes in from feeding the hens and we talk as she feeds me tea and homemade cake in her kitchen, clearing magazines, mail, and papers from the crowded table as if I were an old friend dropping by for a visit.

Intake Farm is one of two B&Bs in Littlebeck, but it’s really the only one worth going to, and almost everyone on the C2C who makes Littlebeck their last stop passes through Intake Farm.

Several of my fellow travelers have stayed at her place since Tuesday. I’m the only guest tonight, Friday, for which she is grateful; last night she had nine, including those who camped in the fields. She prepares rooms, feeds dinner, and feeds breakfast to six to eight people every night for a week—even more when the weather turns wet and campers come in for a cot and hot tea.

Michael and David had come on Tuesday. As I sit outside with Judith in the sun, the Sherpa Van man arrives with my bag—today is the only day on the walk that I actually beat my luggage to my destination. The Sherpa fellow says that he had met David and Michael two days ago at Robin Hood’s Bay to take them back to Richmond, where they had left their car at the beginning of the walk. They had arrived at RHB in the pouring rain, met the van, and had changed clothes in the back of van, singing the whole time, so pleased they were to be done.

John and Elaine had arrived at Littlebeck that same day, sopping wet from having walked 20 miles from Blakey Howe, most of the time in the rain. Andy, Jenny, Len, Marja, and Nico were all here last night. Each day, Judith’s visitors had told her about this American woman, Audrey, who is traveling alone and would be staying with her. They all said, “You’ll like her!” and Judith and I have a great laugh over this reputation that has preceded me.

The only C2C companion I haven’t heard about, then, is Marv, and I think he’s a day ahead of me, probably pulling into Robin Hood’s Bay today.

I shower, rub balm into my feet, set out my laundry for washing, then play with a few of the farm’s many cats—Adolf (shown here), Lil, Bill, and Jill—and use their broadband (yay, fast!) Internet for a couple of hours of e-mail. I am arranging for Patti to pick me up at the airport on Tues evening, when I get home on Aug 15. I’m glad to know I’ll have a friend waiting for me.


With my warmest socks in the wash, Judith supplies me with house slippers to keep my toes toasty as the evening turns a little chilly. I select the purple fuzzy ones with ladybirds and sit down to a yummy dinner of shrimp cocktail starter in a homemade “rose marie” sauce (cream, mayo, tomato juice, lemon juice, Worcester sauce); chicken casserole, new potatoes boiled in mint, cabbage steamed over the potatoes, and cauliflower au grain. Dessert is fresh fruit in fresh cream with ginger-lemon herbal (with H pronounced) tea.

Well fed, relaxed, and ready for bed, I am feeling content and just a little sad. Tomorrow: the last 12 miles to Robin Hood’s Bay and the waters of the North Sea.

Trail miles: 7.5; actual miles walked: 8