Well, Swaledale actually. Wensleydale is the next valley (or dale, in the local vernacular) to the south; you can almost see it over the top of the intervening ridge. But they do sell real Wensleydale cheese in the dale of the Swale River, and we were having some for a picnic lunch as we took a short break on our walk from one coast of England to the other.
Yes, crazy as it sounds, we did indeed walk across England. Most of the way, at least; we did shorten a couple of overly-long day’s walking — and crap out entirely on one especially rainy day — with the strategic use of wheeled conveyances. But of the 192 miles that constitute the fabled Coast to Coast Walk, we trod about 165 miles (including one or two minor “gringo perdido” moments) in 14 days plus one rest day.
In a land of long-distance walkers, this walk is undoubtedly the most famous and possibly the most frequently walked, although in May the “traffic” was still pretty light — almost unnoticeable, in fact, except for the small number of people we encountered with Coast to Coast maps hanging around their necks like “Kick Me” signs. However, not content to walk the Walk like almost everyone else — as in most of what we two do, it seems — we traversed the Coast to Coast the reverse of the standard (or “recommended”) direction, from east to west instead of west to east.
Our perverse desire to be different had two notable results: First of all, since the Coast to Coast is not an “official” path and hence is only rarely signposted, navigating backwards, as it were, was often a considerable challenge. There are several guidebooks of the “cross over the style and take the first gate in the wall on the right” genre, but directions such as these (I can now attest from considerable experience) are all but useless when walking in the “wrong” direction. Only one map actually marks the route — and thank god for that, since this was our only useful navigational resource — but unlike in France, where the Grandes Randonees are marked with abundant blazes on the ground as well as with green lines on the map, the paucity of actual trail markers meant that Robert had to keep a constant eye on the map to be sure we were actually where we thought we were.
John was content to let Robert navigate, but the fact that he was happy to walk second in line may also have had something to do with the meager shelter Robert provided from the elements. For the weather is the other notable reason for walking in the recommended direction. Not surprisingly, the weather in Northern England comes mainly from the west, and when walking as we did, it is almost always in your face. And for many days, the wind (and at times the hail or the rain) did indeed hit us smack in the face, usually with a lot more force than we might have liked. English weather can be raw, and walking straight into it proves the point in an especially emphatic way.
Modern Celebrity Walk?
We knew, of course, that a walk that works its way through the Lake District couldn’t avoid the likes of Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, but little did we realize that we would also encounter famous persons of a more modern vintage. But first, lest you think that our walk was unrelenting work, you should know that we ate many of our meals in restaurants, we stayed in bed and breakfasts, and our luggage was ferried for us from one B&B to the next; all we carried was food, clothing, and water for each day’s walk.
On several nights we stayed at working farms, and it was early on in the walk, at a delightful farm stay on the edge of the North York Moors, that we encountered our first celebrity. At dinner and at breakfast the following morning, we shared our meals with an elderly couple from southern England, and the Missus turned out to be none other than Dame Edna Everage. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that if Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna (www.dame-edna.com) has a real-life inspiration, our table companion at Intake Farm is most assuredly the one. And if you’ve ever encountered Dame Edna, you can imagine how difficult it was for us to eat our sizeable farm-style meals and suppress the guffaws at the same time.
The following day, our route took us to Grosmont and the terminus of the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, a non-profit “heritage railway” that runs steam trains through the North York Moors National Park. We discovered that the railway doubles as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter movies, so we could hardly resist hopping on the train for a quick trip to the Goathland (aka Hogwarts) Station and back. Of course, if all you do is sit (as most of the passengers do), it doesn’t much matter if your old and threadbare train compartment is pulled by steam or diesel. But if you ignore all the “Do Not Lean Out Of Window” signs and lean out the window, which is what we and all the (probably volunteer) ticket-takers were doing, you got a grand view of the engine choo-chooing its way around bends and over bridges (yes, it really does sound like that when it’s pulling a load uphill), belching acres of smoke and steam. We didn’t see Hagrid or Harry on the trip, but I’m sure many of the kids on the train (the day happened to be a bank holiday) were thinking of them.
So we should not have been surprised to find Wallace and Gromit in Richmond, our scheduled rest day. Richmond is the closest large town to Wensleydale, and hence a big outlet for Wensleydale cheese. Need I add that Wallace and Gromit, exclaiming over “real” Wensleydale cheese, were pasted on the refridgerators of nearly every tea shop and grocery in town. Since by this time we had seen the real-life models of nearly every Wallace and Gromit caricature (antic sheep especially, but alas no penguins) and scene, their appearance was well-timed. We searched for a stuffed Gromit to tie to a knapsack as trip mascot, but no luck; Paddington bear still outnumbers every other faux animal by a huge margin, even here in Gromit country.
Coast to Coast Countryside
Of course, there was much to savor between our celebrity encounters. By and large, we were lucky with the weather (aside from the in-your-face part), and had many days of sun and clouds, or sun and infrequent showers, or sun and occasional hail. In the lower elevations, Spring was bustin’ out all over. Many trees were just coming into leaf, and thus the hills displayed countless shades of pale green, green-yellow, yellow-brown, red-brown, etc. The interiors of twisty-limbed beech woods and gnarled oak copses were astoundingly bright yellow green, even on rainy days. We encountered many bluebell woods, where carpets of deep blue flowers fanned out through the trees, up hillsides and down stream banks, as far as you could see. Other woodlands carpeted entirely with white-flowered wild garlic appeared to be covered with feathery drifts of snow and smelled like onion soup.
We covered a lot of ground up on the moors, and came to appreciate how the likes of Heathcliffe could get lost on a dark and stormy night (or day, for that matter). Because this has been an unusually dry Spring, the infamous muddy tracks on the moors were actually pretty dry in most places, and where they weren’t, we usually (note that I say usually) could pick a relatively dry way around. At one spot, we found a sheep who had recently gotten so thoroughly stuck in the muck that he expired, and nearby the bones of other sheep similarly afflicted in years past. A number of times, we encountered the (apparently rather well-known) British tradition of placing the only style or ending an initially helpful stone or wooden walkway in the middle of a sea of mud. And on our next to last day, the second of two mostly rainy days, we hiked along a long, narrow lake at the bottom of a steep mountainside that was, at that point, essentially one two-mile-wide stream; there was hardly any difference between walking in the lake and walking on the trail beside it, except that the lake bottom appeared to be considerably flatter.
In contrast to the continent, where bird and animal life usually flees at the approach of humans, we had many pleasant wildlife encounters here in Northern England. Up on the moors we saw (and heard) countless numbers of grouse, often at very close range, looking just like the stout, awkward fliers you see in those tired, old genre paintings of hunting scenes. Lapwings were also common up high, with their delightfully curved crown-feathers, spooky calls and remarkable (given that their wings look about as aerodynamic as ironing boards) aerial acrobatics. Skylarks were abundant as well, and we just couldn’t resist putting their endlessly bubbly mating calls, delivered only while hovering high up in the air, to the stopwatch; many calls lasted a minute and a half or more, leaving us (and presumably the larks) breathless. And then there was the pheasant we came upon, asleep in the middle of the trail. He looked like a big, bright red-gold ball with a tail, and only when we were practically on top of him did he wake up, pull his head from under his wing, and make a mad, squawking dash into the woods.
As for mammals, there were, of course, the ubiquitous sheep; by the end of two weeks, we could appreciate (if not actually name) the many different types, and the colors of their lambs. (We were at the very tail end of lambing season; we saw many very young lambs, but only one just born and still covered in green-brown goop.) We became particularly fond of the all-black lambs with white ears that were found in the Lake District and further west. Cows, on the whole, were rather scarce as a result of hoof and mouth disease; we were, of course, much chagrined to hear about the economic distress the disease had caused so many people (not just farmers), but very pleased with the resulting dearth of cow pies. We also saw abundant rabbits, a few red deer and roe deer, several stoats (what we would call weasels) and a solitary red squirrel with its startling chestnut body and cream-colored tail.
Our walk started at Robin Hood’s Bay, near Whitby, on the North Sea, and ended at St. Bees Head overlooking the Irish Sea. Naturally, as we approached St. Bees, the wind was blowing at gale-force right in our faces, which fortunately meant that it was, for the most part, blowing us into the cliffs, not over them. (We later learned that the wind has, in fact, blown people right off the cliffs.) Dramatic sun and clouds highlighted our last few miles, and here and there we were able to crouch behind very minimal cliff-edge blinds and watch hundreds, no, thousands of murres, razorbills and kittiwakes clinging for dear life to the face of the cliff. In one spot we were able to get very close to a pair of razorbills in beautifully immaculate plumage squatting on a small outcrop near the top of the cliff. Quietly and carefully shuffling along the narrow ledge, the one in front would crouch down, nose at the wind for a bit, and then suddenly launch itself into the storm, wheel around for a minute or two, and then land behind his partner. Now at the front of the line, the second bird would do much the same thing, and in a few minutes be back in the number two spot again. Round and round they went, apparently practicing heavy-weather landings after long months at sea and before nesting began in earnest. For people are not the only creatures hurled to their deaths by the raging winds; as we circled St. Bees Head, we found two dead gulls that had, apparently, lost control and been slammed at high speed against the cliff.
With feet less sore than I would have predicted, we took the train from St. Bees to London where we stayed several days and witnessed first-hand the highest price ever paid at auction for a photograph (a daguerreotype, amazingly enough). We checked out the Art Deco show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (overpriced) and the Titanic artifact show at the Science Museum (even more overpriced, not to mention ethically troubling), and then headed back to Paris on the Eurostar (the channel tunnel train). Walking coast to coast, our best sustained speed (achieved one drizzly afternoon on an almost endless but nearly flat gravel road) was about 5 km per hour; in France, the Eurostar hurtled toward Paris at 300 km per hour. That’s progress for you.