A 200-Mile Walk Across England Is the Perfect Honeymoon

Hills, dales, trails: the author and his wife enjoying pastoral scenery that hasn’t changed much in millennia

(Photos: Emli Bendixen)

Our Coast to Coast Walk Across Northern England Was an Exercise in Hope and Joy

Published: Nov 19, 2024

My wife decided we needed an active outdoor getaway, a romantic ramble across moors and fells and three national parks. I knew it’d be hard. I’ve never been happier.

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On the morning of Monday, May 6, the air on the Cumbrian Coast was 58 degrees Fahrenheit and very damp. The tide was neither in nor out, and the surface of the Irish Sea looked like a restless version of the paved parking lot where my wife and I stood. Before descending to the beach, I loosened my shoelaces, jogged a few experimental steps, and tightened the laces again. Emma was stretching her quads and fiddling with the nozzle of her water bladder. We had giddy prerace feelings, though this was not a race, or even a run, and we’d come to England because we wanted to slow down.

Above the beach, a muddy path crept up a green sheep pasture to the top of St. Bees Head, a 300-foot sandstone sea cliff teeming with birds and mist. We knew from maps and books and online research that the Coast to Coast Walk, which we were there to do, traversed the mesa-like head for four and a half miles before veering eastward for another 188.

“How are they feeling?” Emma asked, nodding grimly in the direction of my feet.

“I’m hoping they’re just nervous,” I replied.

A fishing boat was humming alone in the sea fret. Beach pebbles clacked with fright, delight, or some other rocky emotion as they were tumbled by the waves. Because it’s a Coast to Coast tradition, we spent a few minutes on the shore picking among these oblate stones until one felt right—mine a mostly solid matte black, Emma’s black with green veins. Then we slid the rocks into our packs, dipped our feet in the sea, and clicked our Garmin watches on.

“I’ll race ya,” Emma said.

Cottagecore in the village of Seatoller (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

Cruising Honister Pass (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

Emma and I met at New York University’s Creative Writing Program in 2014 and were married in 2022 near our adopted home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over the years, we’ve interrupted our work schedules to travel for family holidays and weddings, but we never committed to “a real vacation,” as Emma put it, partly because we’re cash-strapped writers, and partly because I, alas, am one of those restless depressives who oscillate between periods of frenetic can-do energy and desolate self-pitying torpor. I’m the guy who stresses out like crazy and sleeps terribly and wakes in a panic every morning because I can’t possibly do everything I’ve committed to, and for whom words like beach, museum, and TV show are the source of the worst kind of fidgety despair.

Emma knows this and has learned to give me tasks when she senses the torpor coming on. (“Go climbing!” she yells. “Refinish the rocking chair!”) But she also frequently laments my unsuitability for traditional vacations. So I was not all that surprised when, one evening last December, she interrupted my dishwashing duty by shouting, “I finally figured out what we can do for our honeymoon!”

“Honeymoon?” I said. “Didn’t we already have one?”

A year and a half earlier, Emma, who is not a climber, had rejected each of my dream honeymoon scenarios (a bouldering trip to France, a bouldering trip to South Africa, a bouldering trip to Switzerland) and instead dragged me to a spa outside Santa Fe.

“That was just a mini-moon,” she said.

I peeled off my dish gloves and limped to the couch. Emma’s computer displayed a map of the United Kingdom. A frail red line cut a rickety path across England’s northern neck, some 30 miles south of the Scottish border.

“A hike?” I said.

“A walk.”

“Across England?”

She nodded. “It begins on the Irish Sea.” She hovered her finger over the village of St. Bees and traced the line east. “Then it goes through three national parks. is where Wordsworth lived. It’s got all those bare, rounded mountains, like Scotland. And has the kind of moors the Brontës wrote about. We’ll end up in this cute little town called Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea.”

It seemed elegant. Start at the water, end at the water. Forever brag to British friends about having traipsed across their shrunken empire. The only problem: I was currently dealing with a severe bout of runner’s knee and some foot problems caused by .

“How far is it?” I asked.

“People do it on all sorts of different timelines,” Emma said, clicking through more images. “But I’m thinking we do 14 days of walking, plus a rest day. We’ll pay a company to transport our bags, and we’ll stay in inns, bed-and-breakfasts, Airbnbs, things like that.”

“So we don’t even have to carry packs?”

“Only a daypack. Water. Advil. Band-Aids.”

I looked at her. A poet and an essayist, Emma trains with a running coach and supplements her runs with hours-long dog walks, pretty consistently clocking more than 60 miles per week. The Band-Aids, I sensed, were not for her.

“How far is this walk exactly?”

“Not far. Oh, my gosh. Look!” She’d brought up another picture, this time of a shallow alpine pond in the Lake District that I didn’t yet know was called a tarn. The caption told us that Alfred Wainwright, the late creator of the Coast to Coast Walk, had his ashes spread there.

“We’ll need to buy a treadmill,” I said.

Emma’s computer displayed a map of the United Kingdom. A frail red line cut a rickety path across England’s northern neck, some 30 miles south of the Scottish border. “A hike?” I asked. “A walk,” she said, “that begins on the Irish Sea.”

Hikers atop the 2,000-foot-tall Haystacks, a fell in the Lake District (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

Our first day on the trail (and our second and third) was an exorcism of sorts, a feverish purge. Though cognizant that the walk itself—and not whatever pub or inn we were bound for—was our destination, we were also afraid that we’d prove unworthy of the restfulness we both secretly hoped to find. So we powered to the top of St. Bees Head and, almost running, kept up a manic pace north along the cliff’s slanting green edge. Week-old lambs galloped around their exhausted-looking mothers. Seabirds crowded each other off slippery ledges, while waves aerated themselves hundreds of feet below. We overtook a dozen or so other walkers, most equipped with gaiters and poles, some moving with novitiate timidity through inch-thick mud, one carrying a GoPro on a stick. As we passed, we said “Heya” and “Morning,” taking foolish comfort in our superior speed. My feet were fine! My training had worked!

I took notes on everything. I wrote, for instance, that the Irish Sea looked like a restless version of a parking lot. But also that it looked “like a sheet of molten gray plastic.” “Hints of a ,” I added proudly. “A great existential blending of sea and sky.”

During our first pee break, Emma squatted in a patch of stinging nettles and shot upright again, wincing. “Well, that’s not a great feeling,” she said.

I wrote that down, too.

A stile with a view (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

Valais Blacknose lambs (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

For thousands of years, people have been walking through the densely populated British Isles, weaving from farms to fields to ever shrinking forests and leaving a record of their movements in the form of footpaths. The largest of these grew into the roads and lanes now traversed by cars, but others remained as they were: thin tracks through fields, cairns laid like stone breadcrumbs over mountain passes, narrow alleyways (called snickets in the north of England) running between townhouses or walled suburban gardens.

Because these paths predate modern property divisions, their use has been grandfathered into law, regardless of whether they infringe on what’s now otherwise considered private land. They were extensively mapped by the Ordnance Survey (Britain’s still active national mapping agency) starting in the 18th century, and the national legal system now obligates landowners to keep public rights-of-way unobstructed. Each fence, wall, hedge, or canal laid over or through an existing path must be punctured by a gate, stile, or bridge.

One result of this ancient trail network is that England and Wales—which together claim a mere 59,517 square miles of land at low tide—are home to an estimated 140,000 miles of public footpaths, bridle ways, and byways. In comparison, Emma’s native state of Texas occupies 268,596 square miles but is home to only 3,170 miles of public hiking trails, while 155,813-square-mile California has 18,467 miles of paths. England’s wealth of walking infrastructure helps explain the nation’s historic—and ongoing—fascination with walking and walkers, something I learned to appreciate while reading a great British Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, on the treadmill.

Wordsworth was born in Cumbria in 1770 and spent much of his life rambling over the sheep-cropped fells near his Lake District home, ultimately covering an estimated 175,000 miles before he died at age 80. (That comes out to an astonishing six miles per day, every day.) Fittingly, many of Wordsworth’s best-loved poems—such as “” and “”—are freewheeling responses to things he heard or thought or saw while walking, which in turn ennobled the act of walking to some of the several hundred million English schoolchildren for whom Wordsworth became required reading.

One of these kids was (1907–91), who fell in love with the Lake District as a child and, as an adult, took a job as an accountant nearby. Unhappily married and determinably antisocial, Wainwright battled his depression by roaming the fells each weekend and then, on weekday evenings, translating these excursions into beautiful hand-drawn, handwritten guidebooks.

Though Wainwright originally sketched and wrote for himself, the publication of his seven-volume Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells (which went on to sell more than two million copies) transformed him into a 20th-century emblem of English walking. Sixty years later, the 214 fells featured in the pictorial guides are now known as the Wainwrights, and walkers collect them like Coloradans collect fourteeners. Wainwright went on to star in three BBC series about walking and publish dozens of other books—including a 1973 pictorial guide called A Coast to Coast Walk, which he pieced together from scratch after a careful study of Ordnance Survey maps.

The Coast to Coast Walk, then, isn’t so much a single uninterrupted entity, like the Appalachian Trail, as it is an imaginary string winding through England’s maze of public footpaths, byways, and country lanes. Sometimes the path is marked and obvious. Sometimes it’s not.

Since I was raised in New Hampshire, where every other climber in the late 2000s seemed to have a story about how an act of accidental trespassing put them into conflict with an armed landowner, I was initially uncomfortable about following public footpath signs down people’s driveways or across their lawns. But the vast majority of locals we met, many of whom were out walking too, seemed proud of their paths and our presence on them. Some sold cakes and sodas at trailside tuck shops. Others left chairs and water spigots for walkers to take breaks. Our land is here, they seemed to say, and it’s beautiful, and our laws allow anyone to go out and enjoy it.

Ruins of the 12th-century Easby Abbey (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

The author amid the moors (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

We covered 17.98 miles on day one—having detoured three miles off the trail to a B&B in Rowrah—but when I woke the next morning, I was surprised to find that my feet were feeling more or less fine. No sore bones. No brutally inflamed tendons. Nothing I’d call pain.

So we left our bags in the foyer of our B&B and dashed eastward on a bike path, then through sheep pastures, then down a dirt road in a lowland forest full of birdsong. Five miles into our day, we broke out of the trees and found ourselves on the shore of Ennerdale Water, the westernmost lake in the Lake District.

The Lake District is basically a gigantic, daisy-shaped massif with fjord-like valleys dividing the highlands. The lower valleys are lush and pastoral, home to stone farmhouses, patchy forests, and sheep, while the also sheepy fells, the highest of which rise some 3,000 feet above the valley, are smooth topped, steep sided, and famously bare of trees.

Ennerdale Water sits in a vast bathtub-shaped valley, and our trail took us rock hopping along the lake’s southern shore, first through open grassland, then through a small but gorgeous forest of mossy rocks and silver birches, where we leapt over the fast-running streams (locally called gills) that plunge down thousand-foot slopes. Walking quickly—sometimes jogging—we passed several other parties, including a foursome from Bristol. Three of the Bristolians were breathing heavily and seemed very reliant on their poles, but when we tried to pass them, the fourth—a tall, lean man, probably 60—sped up, easily keeping pace with us, and asked us our names.

As the three of us crossed the River Liza, we shared the basics of our lives, after which the man, whose name I didn’t get, told us that he’d studied “maps and rocks” in college because he loved them, only to spend his adult life mapping seafloors for oil companies, which he didn’t love. He’d walked most of the Coast to Coast’s sections before, he said, but had never done them in order, nor had he done the “boring” interstitial sections between the national parks. “But me and the wife, we’re retired now,” he told us, pointing back at his party, just colorful specks in the distance. “So if we want to do the whole thing the right way, we’d better do it now before it’s too late.”

At the time, I assumed that the oceanographer was frustrated with his slower companions and wanted to stretch his legs. Looking back, I wonder whether he sensed anxiety in our pace and stepped in to remind us that we were here as walkers, not runners, and that, on a vacation like this, a 17-minute mile is not better than a 25-minute one—though it can, as we soon learned, be worse.

Though Alfred Wainwright originally sketched and wrote for himself, the publication of his seven-volume ‘Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells’ transformed him into a 20th-century emblem of English walking.

Wainwright offers multiple routes for each Lake District day: one or more “hard” routes linking several high fells, and one “easy” route that follows a valley up to a lowish pass and down into another valley.

We took the high option up our first fell, Red Pike. Eating lunch on the summit, 2,000 feet above Ennerdale Valley, we chatted with a Canadian couple who popped up from the mountain’s other side. “What do you think of all these adorable sheep?” the woman asked Emma. “I just want to kiss one on the lips. But they keep running away.”

From Red Pike, we traversed a sheep-strewn ridge to High Stile and High Crag before surfing down a thousand feet of scree and grass to the foot of a distinctly lumpy-looking fell called Haystacks. (“Let there be no morbid thoughts on Haystacks,” Wainwright wrote. “Life seems good here.”) On the east side of Haystacks, we filtered water into our bottles from Innominate Tarn, Wainwright’s final resting place. An hour later, we were taking photos on the round summit of Brandreth Fell—which we tacked on because my middle name is Brandreth—when Emma clapped her hand to her forehead, suddenly remembering that our next B&B served dinner at seven sharp.

It was nearly 6:30. We were 16 miles into our day, yet still at least five miles and 2,500 knee-crushing vertical feet away from our destination in Rosthwaite. I googled alternative eating options. I found none.

So we ran.

We ran down steep grass slopes and steep stone steps, past the 400-plus-year-old Honister Slate Mine, and into one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been: Borrowdale Valley.

Unlike Ennerdale Valley, which has acquired several vast evergreen plantations, Borrowdale looks much like it probably has for the past 3,000 years. The valley floor is a checkerboard of bright green lambing meadows and the occasional stone house. On the slopes above these pastures are groves of huge, mossy trees, and between the groves, sturdy stone walls climb straight up the fells and carve the mountainsides into great vertical paddocks.

We ran through it all, grimacing, and were still 40 minutes late for dinner.

Thankfully, our hosts, Colin and Anne-Marie, noticed our sweaty shirts and visible limps and forgave us. Over dinner, as we listened to newborn lambs bleating in the twilight and the River Derwent coursing between its canalized banks, Anne-Marie—a prodigious “fell walker” who’s done all 214 Wainwrights—informed us that Borrowdale Valley holds the dubious honor of being the wettest inhabited land in the UK. She added that the trees on its slopes constituted “ancient woodlands,” some of the last existing groves of the Celtic rainforest that once dominated the western flank of England, Scotland, and Wales.

No one knew why these particular beeches, oaks, and hollies were allowed to survive, she said, but they are considered national treasures, protected from “the voracious sheep” by well-kept walls. The walls, too, are ancient. Their stones were originally extracted from the valley’s bottom by Bronze Age farmers, who piled them out of the way in great clearance cairns, where they remained for centuries until later farmers—now running short on wood—dispersed them once more across the land, this time in the form of barns and homes and sheepfolds.

“So these voracious sheep,” I said, “are they why the fells are bare, or have they always been treeless?”

She shrugged. “What do you mean by always?” she said. “The sheep have been here five thousand years. Maybe more.”

Talisman for the journey: Coast to Coast travelers traditionally pick up a stone on the shores of the Irish Sea and drop it in the North Sea upon completing the walk. (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

One of Yorkshire’s “wishing trees,” marked by coins (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

The next morning my knees were swollen and puffy, and the pads of my feet, when I put my weight upon them, seemed to burst into flames.

“I hope you’re not as bad as me,” I told Emma as I hobbled to the bathroom.

“Oh, I’m not,” she said.

But when I got out of the shower five minutes later, I was delighted to notice several Band-Aid wrappers lamely hidden beneath crumpled paper in the garbage bin.

“E��?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“How bad are they?”

“Not as bad as your knees.”

She sounded proud of this, but it was true. She only had a small, wet bubble on the tip of each pointer toe, and another on the side of her left pinky toe.

“I’m going with a cautious but optimistic number of Band-Aids,” she said.

When I asked how she’d gotten blisters while wearing the same shoes she’d run half marathons in all spring, she pulled on a new pair of waterproof running shoes—cue ominous drums—and said, “Running down your middle name with wet feet.”

We stuck to the plan anyhow, going two miles out of our way to ogle a semi-famous boulder where many of my British climbing heroes had climbed, reasoning that day three would still be the shortest of our entire walk, a mere 9.7 miles.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

Four miles in, when we reached the top of the 1,500-foot climb to Lining Crag, we were dismayed to come upon the oceanographer and his wife, since it meant we had to disguise the fact that we were severely flagging.

“How are you holding up?” he asked.

“Hard to complain with these views,” I said, gesturing down to the valley, which I only then noticed was invisible behind the fog.

He smiled, then invited us to walk with him. His wife wanted to talk about American politics and English politics, but when it became clear that we were all on the same side, the oceanographer grew bored and said they were stopping for lunch. “Oh, and by the way,” he said, “the best thing to do when your feet hurt is remove your shoes.”

Remove our shoes? But that meant stopping! Instead we forged on. By mile seven, I was driving Emma crazy by saying “youch, youch, youch” with every step.

When we finally stumbled into the pretty little village of Grasmere—which is dominated by Wordsworth tourism, because he’s buried there—I was nearly in tears. As I lay on the floor of our hotel room, elevating my throbbing legs, I performed two sets of mental calculations. First, that we’d done 48 miles—instead of Wainwright’s book’s suggested 35—in three days. Second, that even if we continued via the shortest possible route, we still had another 90 miles before our rest day six days later.

I relayed these facts to Emma while she applied Neosporin to her weeping blisters.

“In very American fashion, we seem to have underestimated England’s mountains,” she admitted. “But we can slow down, Steve. We can take breaks.”

So we slowed down, took breaks, and made friends with other walkers. To convince each other that this was fine, we quoted Wainwright: “Travel on foot amongst the fells should always be leisurely.” “Beauty is too rare to be hurried past.” And we discovered that, despite slowing down, we could still add extra miles to each day. On day four, we added six by incorporating both Dove Cottage (Wordsworth’s home!) and Helvellyn (the third-highest point in England!), but we did this in a leisurely way, stopping to take off our shoes and eat the four large scones I’d bought at a Grasmere bakery. Five days later, between Keld and Reeth, when I wanted to do the high route through some ruined mines and Emma wanted to see the bluebells that grow on the banks of the River Swale, we did both, utilizing a variety of rarely used footpaths to walk a large Z-shaped route.

We were still in pain, of course, but as our bodies got used to the consecutive 15-to-20-mile days, the pain shifted away from muscles and joints and became largely a product of our inexperience. My underfoot blister debacle, for instance, was both heinous and eminently my fault. It began on day five, because I got my feet wet, marched straight down 800 feet of steep grass in loosely tied shoes, and then denied my new blisters’ existence for another hour—by which point I had silver-dollar-size bubbles beneath the balls of both feet.

Emma’s blisters healed admirably. But I felt less alone when, near the end of the bluebell-strewn valley on the zigzag day, she was briefly felled by a bone bruise on her right heel, a consequence of the stitching on those new waterproof shoes her blisters had forced her to switch to. Unable to wear anything that touched her heel, she ended up walking the entire next day—12 miles from Reeth to Richmond—atop the folded-down back of her shoe. The next morning, she bought a pair of flimsy plastic sandals for $25 and breezed through the remaining 82 miles in those.

The pain was good, though. It made us feel like we were pushing through something, and this amplified our fun. We ate many scones. We drank many flat whites. We learned that the hottest time of day in England, in May, is between 5 and 6 P.M., which also happened to be when we were waterless and aching and six hours removed from lunch. Our injuries gave me an excuse to invent Scottish-accented about how much my blisters hurt. Like this one, composed on my birthday as we roamed the “glutinous moors” (in Wainwright’s wonderful words) between Kirkby Stephen and Keld:

My feet do not feel very good

They do not think we really should

Have gone for yet another walk

I think they may in fact soon balk

At plans like those of my dear wife’s

Who wants to walk like this for life.

And so on—for about 150 miles.

During one late-afternoon break, as I lanced an entrepreneurial sub-blister with my fingernails, Emma said that The Secret Garden, a classic children’s novel set in the Yorkshire Moors, promotes the very Wordsworthian message that “playing outdoors in jolly old England will save your life and restore your health.”

“I’m not sure I can corroborate that,” I replied.

Yet the English countryside did have some version of that effect on me. One element of the depression I struggle with is that I often spend my days engaged in a process of joy deferment, believing that once I climb a route of a certain difficulty, or publish an article in a certain magazine, or get my kitchen sparkly clean, all my doubts and fears and discontents will magically disappear. Walking long distances, day after day, snapped me out of this cycle. For two weeks there was no tomorrow. There was not even a next mile. The walk itself was the destination, and our easy but exhausting mandate was to stay cheerful while putting one foot in front of the other.

The day after our trip ended, when we were in London, I overheard Emma on the phone with my mom. “Did you know that when he’s happy he sings? Like, he makes up songs. For hours on end. I feel like it was my birthday and I got to unwrap a new side of Steve.”

Hearing this upset me, because I sensed (correctly) that I would sink straight back into my hectic old despair within a week or two of returning home.

A midday respite for the dogs (Photo: Emli Bendixen)

Robin Hood’s Bay is a gorgeous seaside village, but I was not glad to see it. New Street, which is closely lined with shops and taverns and looks like it should be paved with cobblestones but isn’t, descends a steep bluff and then, upon reaching the Yorkshire Coast, transforms into a boat ramp and carries on without walls into the infinite ocean. I know nothing about boats or sailing, but when I arrived there after 14 days of walking, I wanted to climb into one of the overturned skiffs and keep going. Instead, we saw other walkers we knew—a retired couple from Arizona, two septuagenarians from Newcastle, several members of a guided group—skipping the stones they’d picked up at St. Bees into the North Sea.

Rather than do the same, we waited a few hours until the tide went out, then walked around on the tidal flats, where I saw just one recognizably Cumbrian rock, even though 15 or 20 must be deposited there every day. After pondering this, Emma said, “You think they get yanked out to sea with the tide?”

Suddenly, I was reluctant to let go of my black pebble. It felt so smooth and soft between my fingers, and for a moment I considered keeping it in my pocket forever, a talisman that would remind me, in my darker moments, of the version of me I had been out here. Then I wished that I’d taken two stones—one to give, one to keep—because I felt like bad luck would befall me if I didn’t deliver my stone to the sea, and also that bad luck would also befall me if I did.

I’m not a superstitious person, though I sometimes wish I was. Emma and I spoke about this on the cold and misty moors between Blakey Ridge and Grosmont, agreeing that while neither of us believes in ghosts or immaterial souls, we both yearn to live in a fairy-tale universe whose metaphysics allow for such things. But as I stood among the tidal pools with my rock, it occurred to me that I do believe, and always have, that the land is a true and living ghost, haunting our eyes and ears and options with evidence of bygone people and events—and that transporting this one small rock from the Irish Sea to the North Sea was my obscure, infinitesimal contribution to the great ghost story that is the earth.

So I nestled my stone beside Emma’s in a tidal pool, among the colorful algae and seaweeds.

By now, I assume, the ocean has conveyed them elsewhere.

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Our Coast to Coast Walk Across Northern England Was an Exercise in Hope and Joy

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