mutteringhousewife

Should one not start with day one? I don’t want to get myself all confused, so I’m going with the timing of our travel agents, who are counting the trip from London to St Bees as Day 1. And most of that was on two trains, so I’m sure you have no interest in that.

St Bees was lovely, built from local red sandstone and home to a twelfth century priory that has been lovingly restored thanks to funds from the very successful posh school adjacent to it. Apparently a beach town, well there is a beach and there is the Irish Sea. There’s even sand on the beach, and the size of the car park indicates that holidaymakers flock here to paddle in a sea that to our eyes just doesn’t do anything at all. It kind of ebbs a bit, and then in sharp contradistinction, flows a bit. It seems very unlikely to kill a tourist. All we needed to do with the sea was to walk out along the sand to where it was ebbing and flowing and wet our boots in it – a suggestion of Alfred Wainwright’s. A later tradition also has you picking up a pebble to drop into the sea at the other side, so we did that too.

After that it was up onto the headland (you can see it in the above photo) to start walking across England. Our goal was Ennerdale Bridge, which is slightly annoyingly a 22 minute car drive away. However Alfred Wainwright was a fan of the scenic and also spending a lot of time away from your wife (not applicable here), so we walked seven kilometres along the coast along a beautiful cliff walk before turning inland.

The walk to Ennerdale Bridge took us through some gorgeous countryside, over stiles, past sheep and cows, through some very unremarkable ex-coal mining villages which seemed to consist entirely of terraced cottages – no shops or pubs or village squares or fountains or anything that would make it worth living there. Past an entirely unexpected emu farm.

And eventually up Dent Hill, a bit of a slog that had me thankful for all the training we did. From the top one got a full 360 degree panorama of the surrounding countryside. Legend has it that you can see the Isle of Man from this vantage point, but not on a day like today which was of almost Australian warmth and sunniness but very hazy. Very difficult to photograph, so what you cop is the descent which had us using our poles to save our knees for tomorrow.

Wainwright’s guide book suggests that you pop down off Dent Hill, follow the Nannycatch Beck for a bit, go past the fake stone circle, and there you are at Ennerdale Bridge. But I’m fairly sure that was a good 7-8km, which brought my personal walking total for today up to 25km. The gazetted amount for today was 22.5 km, which is a fairly long walk and we’ll have a few days of that length. Like tomorrow. Apparently we’ll be wandering about the fells, which was a personal favourite of Wainwright, but for tomorrow only we get a guide. Which means there will be no comparing the two guidebooks we have with the travel agent’s app and the ordnance maps to work out what the gate on the left at the top of the pasture could possibly be. Apparently the Coast to Coast walk will be a proper listed walk next year which means signposts (and hopefully more than the zero toilets on the route today), but we’re not there yet. Part of the charm, though, has been wandering through fields and the back buildings of farms, and getting out of the way of a couple of farmers on a tractor who were up for a chat but had such an incredible accent that all I could do was to try to commit it to memory (not successful). They cheerfully blocked us out of a laneway we were about to walk up with a giant gate which they secured with blue string, and I think the idea was that it was to stop a cow that was on its way and we would have no trouble climbing over the gate (incorrect).

I shall end today (writing to you from the Shepherd’s Arms in Ennerdale Bridge after a long hot shower) with a note on the plant life I’ve encountered today. English plants are low key violent. On the cliff walk there were any number of scratchy plants: blackberry cane, thistles and a bunch I couldn’t identify. Inland we encounter a holly hedge that went for almost a kilometre. But there was a plant that I didn’t end up clocking that if you brushed against it gave you a good two or three hours of burning itch. That was my least favourite, and I’ll have to find out if there’s some kind of cream or hilarious remedy against it because I did not enjoy that sensation. Maybe tomorrow’s guide will know. I wonder if he’ll have a bottle of malt vinegar or a mustard plaster in his first aid kit against it? I’ll let you know tomorrow.