Opening the door at St Bees, I wondered what lay ahead, the future unknown. We were about to walk across England, from one side to the other. Coast to coast.
On the shore, we dipped our toes in a slate-grey Irish Sea and collected smooth round pebbles to carry across our island. My children ran down steep inclines, only stopping to skim stones across a narrow inlet. Already we felt something slip away. A loosening.
Turning inland, shafts of light fell like daggers through the pines of Ennerdale Forest. Beyond the Lake Fells rose up, bleak, grey lumps under scuttling cloud.
The rising hill, the endless slope, the sheer climb: I took great gulps of breath as we climbed Loft Beck, legs as heavy as iron. We reached the sky and the boys careered across the moor, whirling with the wind, light as kites. I watched them on the skyline racing the clouds. And smiled.
From Loft Beck the land fell away to the sea. We could see the route we had travelled. We’d been invisible dots on this sweeping landscape, moving across the days like ants on the earth. Now, I felt connected to the rhythms of my ancestors, to the land that ground me and the time that bound me. You see the world differently when your pace has been slowed right down.
Over the days we followed the sun, the wind and the driving splinters of rain across the landscape. By Grasmere there was water everywhere: above our heads, below our feet, rushing down the mountainsides in every direction towards us.
Still we walked on. Above Patterdale, the Fells stretched out like ripples on the horizon, each range an echo of the one before, until the last was just a faint smudge on the skyline. Here, there was a dark beauty and a threatening wind. With relief we dropped off the mountains to Haweswater.
“Taking the children for a walk?” A walker called out to us, looking uncannily like Mr Miyagi from the Karate Kid.
“Just across England,” I replied on cue.
“What a wonderful gift to give your children.”
They are fitter and faster than me,” I laughed.
“Oh, yes. They have health, youth and time. Treasure these gifts,” he advised solemnly.
At last we’d crossed the Vale of Mowbray and reached the Cleveland hills. Early morning and the sun was already hot as we climbed onto the ridge. We plunged into cool, dark pine-scented woods and emerged blinking in the sunlight. A moon still hung palely in a powder-blue sky.
Happiness crept in and curled up beside me.
My body was now in rhythm with the ground I was walking on. I could feel the Earth breathing beneath my feet; sensed it spinning in space. Each day I watched the sun rise in the east and fall in the west. The movement of time, the days and the seasons was ever present: the morning dew on my boots; later the crackle of dried grasses underfoot; an arrow of birds heading south; pollen drifting across my vision; my boys growing up in front of me.
Then at last the North Sea. We were marching on over the last rise and onto a wide dismantled railway, twisting and cutting a long five miles over the moors. I could smell the sea now; hear it whisper to us. Robin Hood’s Bay was beckoning. We turned a corner to see the red-topped cottages tumbling into the ocean.
While we shed our rucksacks on the beach, my youngest set his flat pebble free, fitted with straw and leaf to sail across the North Sea.
The burden of life, we’d shed a long time ago, somewhere along the road..
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