As I caught my breath at the top of Dent Fell, the first summit on my 14-day walk, I looked out towards the much larger hills to come and thought, “I probably should have trained for this.”
My ethos of “it’s just walking, right?” now seemed unwise. I had a good base level of fitness, but the fact remained: each day would involve walking alone between 15 and 23 miles, and the furthest I had ever walked in a day until now was five miles.
I found a sheltered spot to enjoy the packed lunch made by my B&B host, eating my way through the fear. This might be tough, but that was the point. I had wanted to challenge myself for a long time, and when my mum died unexpectedly last summer I figured a long hike could be the perfect therapy.
I was walking the coast-to-coast, 192-mile route that begins on the beach of St Bees in Cumbria and ends at Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire. It was devised by the fellwalker Alfred Wainwright, who published it in 1973. My mum’s father was from the East Riding of Yorkshire and we spent time there as a family when I was young. It felt appropriate that I was tramping across our county of origin.
The weather was beautiful on the first morning; warm sunshine with an edge of coolness in the spring air. I clutched my new hiking poles, slung the comically large A3 waterproof map case that I had accidentally ordered around my neck and I was off. It’s tradition to pick up a pebble from the beach at St Bees, on the Irish Sea, and drop it into the North Sea at the end of the walk. I picked a small, reddish stone to slip in my pocket.