ON THE second day of my March 2026 trip, rain was forecast to arrive around lunchtime and then hang around for most of the afternoon. Now, I’ve squelched, dripped and plodded through many a deluge but I’d just as soon not, if given the choice.
Accordingly, I hatched a cunning plan to be up and about at the crack of dawn, getting most of my walk done before the wet weather arrived. It was a good plan. A sensible plan. And it might even have worked, had I not slept right through my alarm…
Continue reading “CCLXV – Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Sunderland”
TOWARDS the end of the first week in August, Simkin and I met in the breakfast room of our hotel on Lindisfarne and discussed our plan for the day. This was to walk to Bamburgh (pronounced ‘bamborough’) via the roundabout route of the Northumberland Coast Path (NCP), as shown on my physical Ordnance Survey map. 
IT WOULD have been nicely synchronous if the last day of my August 2024 trip had also been the last day of that month but, alas, it wasn’t quite. Instead, the Lemming and I found ourselves alighting onto the platform of North Berwick station at some ungodly hour on the morning of the 29th, like the devil-may-care, unconstrained hikers we were inside our own heads, synchronicity be damned! And then, in a manner more befitting of two blokes now both inexplicably in their fifties and whose previous day’s walk had been quite tiring, we struggled to find the energy to get going…
IT HAS taken me a while to get around to writing up the last walk of my April 2024 trip, with several things conspiring to get in the way of so doing, which include amongst their number a subsequent walking trip, but here it is. That day’s walk was a composite of the walk I’d originally planned for that day, plus all the parts of the previous one that I’d abandoned due to fatigue. A good night’s sleep had restored both energy and enthusiasm and I was raring to go.
I WOULD be hard pressed to tell you if what woke me up on the fourth morning of my April 2024 trip was the sound of seagulls mewing or the threateningly thunderous rumble of my stomach demanding that it be properly fed. I lay in bed awhile, listening to the noises, until I found myself thinking ‘I wonder what seagull tastes like?’ and conceded that my stomach might have a point. I reluctantly arose and, hoping to still the strident seismic sounds, ventured out in search of breakfast…
AFTER a two-year hiatus in consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was with relief, joy and not a little trepidation – after all, just how out of practice would I be? ― that I resumed my perambulatory pastime in early March 2022, returning to Thurso to continue clockwise along the coast…
LURED by a weather forecast that promised sunshine in Scotland and rain in London, I headed back to Galloway in the middle of April in order to get in a couple more days of walking. The weather was sunshine and small fluffy clouds for most of the journey to Scotland. It was also sunshine and small fluffy clouds for most of the journey home. Can you guess how it was in between?
SHOULD know better than to try to make plans. Staying overnight in Millom, for instance, so that I could just get up early and start walking. That was a plan right up until the day before, when my hotel turned out not to have an actual room for me to stay in. 
MY RETURN to Lancashire came interestingly close to not happening, as I slept through my alarm and missed my intended train into central London. 
I CHOSE the penultimate weekend of March 2015 on which to return to Preston and continue what was in theory my coastal perambulation, not that much of the first day’s walking could really be described as ‘coastal’.