The C2C Trail, Part 1: A Lot Can Happen on a Walk

I am home, lounging on my balcony in the late afternoon sun. Poplar fluffs dreamily float by in the breeze, getting tangled in my hair. Two magpies gurgle and caw at one another in the pine branches above. My intention is to write about my recent sixteen-day solo walk across Northern England on the Coast to Coast trail, but I’m struggling to find a place to begin; a place to end. 

I know, I know – it’s a silly problem, for a travel story. Before I set off on this walk, I read a few blogs about the trail and all of them, unsurprisingly, started at the beginning and ended at the end. When it comes to chronological and geographical order, tales about walking from one place to another are pretty straightforward.

My logical mind wants to follow in the footsteps (har har) of past travel writers. To relay events as they rolled out in a structural, factual way. And yet, some other corner of my mind, perhaps a more honest, or at least a more interesting place, insists on creating spider web connections between vignettes of memory that jump across miles and back and forth through time.

Choosing a roundabout way of spinning this tale rests more easily in my bones.

Something about playing with time suits this experience. When you walk all day, every day, for many days (much of it in silence), time has a way of sliding along, slowing to a crawl, speeding up, slipping away through your fingers and winding in circles.

The Coast to Coast trail in particular lends itself to interruption and fractured lines of interpretation. Cobbled together from several separate trails by Alfred Wainwright in 1973, it is a few hundreds years away from being as established as, say, the Camino de Santiago.

This means it is not as well known nor as well supported as other long walks and pilgrimage routes. Way finding is notably missing, and the path leads at times though farmers fields, calf-deep bogs, and through complicated, braided pathways. Both time and exact location become increasingly nebulous concepts.

So I shall start this tale from where I am now, mere days after my return.

My memories are still new and raw, and therefore sharp. I feel the need to record details – details I fear may soon melt from my mind. However, I feel equally untethered; it turns out that, even during the remotest experiences of my journey, my life was waiting for me here the whole time. And normal life is so familiar that I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was a dream. I am grateful for my blisters, regardless of how bad they look – the off-coloured, warped, and angry skin that is peeling and growing new, tougher skin. They are, in some ways, the only physical evidence that any of this happened at all.

But I find that if I tune into a singular moment, like tuning into a radio station, I can remember. I can hear the rain pattering on the saturated hood of my raincoat as my new friend Helena likens our steep ascent up a veritable waterfall in the Lake District to the staircase in Lord of the Rings that leads to Shelob’s lair (minus the marching army, but plus a deluge of rain).

In the span of a heartbeat, I can transport myself seven days and many miles later to a damp bus ride, where a vegan from Southern California named Brian is lamenting with me over my blisters. “Girl, you need bigger boots,” he says, shaking his head, before accompanying me to a closet-sized mountain goods store in the next town. He asks what my boot size is. I say six and a half. He asks the disinterested cashier for a size eight to accommodate my swollen feet. He and I then ceremonially throw away my old boots in a “litter bin” down a rather picturesque street that dates back to the 1100s. 

Now my mind flicks to the silence of my tiny, cell-sized room in Keld a couple of days before that bus ride. It had a single bed and a breathtaking view of the emerald hills outside. A place where I lay, blissfully clean, my feet up on a wall, a cup of hot chocolate in my hand, and a good book to read for a couple of hours before my dinner reservation downstairs.

In the spirit of a non-traditional way of travel blogging, I have begun gathering my vignettes into some kind of order and will spend the summer spinning this web of insights, mishaps, moments of victory, and, if you’re lucky, a noteworthy solo tantrum I had in the middle of a moor.

Two items of note:

1. You might see me in your inbox on a weekly basis, with a couple of breaks, rather than bi-weekly for the summer as I share all of this.

2. If you are interested in knowing more tangible things about a long walking trip – what I packed, how I prepared, what I did right, what I would do differently, or details and advice about the Coast to Coast in particular, please let me know. If there’s enough interest, I might create some more informative posts for the walking-curious :)

I hope all of you are enjoying the end of spring and beginning of summer, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you as we embark on our own holidays and adventures in the coming weeks!

Thanks for tuning in! If you’re new here and want to read more, you can access the full Happenstance Casebook publication below.