Guiding walkers from west coast to east

One day I will walk across Northern England from St Bees Head on the Irish Sea coast to Robin Hood’s Bay, approximately 190 miles westwards on the North Sea coast.

Well, that’s what I like to think. Sometimes. But if ever I decide that the time has come to walk from the place where the sun sets to the place where it rises, I will reach for the latest splendidly illustrated publication from Chris and Tony Grogan’s Saltaire-based Skyware company.

A Coast To Coast Route Guide follows in the bootsteps of Alfred Wainwright, setting out for the intrepid hiker a dozen scenic routes from the Lake District to the North Yorkshire Moors, the longest being 23.2 miles from Reeth to Richmond. The shortest is 10.7 miles from Keld to Reeth.

“Since Wainwright’s Coast To Coast Walk was first published in 1973, there have been a number of changes to the route,” say the Grogans.

“Despite Wainwright’s intention to ‘use only rights of way and areas of open access’, his route in places followed tracks across private land that were not rights of way. This became a particular problem in the section between Shap and Kirkby Stephen.

“The authorities were later able to negotiate permissive status with land owners on some tracks which allowed their continued use. In other places this was not possible.

“Elsewhere, Wainwright’s route problems were of an entirely different nature. Many of the rights of way across the Vale of Mowbray were neglected and inaccessible. Wainwright found himself ‘beaten back to the tarmac by barbed wire, dykes, too-friendly bovines and other obstacles’.

“He was forced to revert to quiet country roads for more than eight miles. Today things are much improved, and the modern route now follows easily along grassy footpaths for most of this section, just as Wainwright originally intended.”

The Wainwright Society, founded in 2002, has been talking to all the local authorities with a view to waymarking the route that threads them once and for all. This is the route mapped out by Chris and Tony Grogan.

They actually do more than that, as users of their previous guides will know. Each coloured relief map contains little red bordered boxes offering advice: “Nip under the arches to see old Beggar’s Bridge”.

There are warnings too: ”Don’t bear right too early to avoid hitting a dangerous scree slope.”

It’s as close to walking with Satnav as you’re likely to get.

Alfred Wainwright died at the age of 84. His ashes were scattered at Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks. In Memoirs Of A Fellwalker, Wainwright said: “All I ask for, at the end, is a last long resting place by the side of Innominate Tarn, on Haystacks, where the water gently laps the gravelly shore and the heather blooms and Pillar and Gable keep unfailing watch. A quiet place, a lonely place.

“I shall go to it, for the last time, and be carried – someone who knew me in life will take me and empty me out of a little box and leave me there alone. And if you, dear reader, should get a bit of grit in your boot as you are crossing Haystacks in the years to come, please treat it with respect. It might be me.”