Audio guides across Wainwright’s walk — the Norman doorway at St Bees Priory, the nine cairns on Nine Standards Rigg that nobody can fully explain, the smelt mills rusting into Swaledale, the smugglers’ alleys at Robin Hood’s Bay. Written for the crossing, and they play with no signal at all.
The narration plays in the free app and nowhere else. Every script is free to read here.
Not a museum handset and not a scraped encyclopedia entry. 24 scripts written for the Coast to Coast Path, and built to work where there is no signal.
Every guide is an original script, researched site by site and written for the ear — never lifted off a webpage. Where you are standing, what to look for, and the one story worth carrying away with you.
These are scripts, not articles. One image at a time, paced for walking, so you can keep your eyes on the path and the ground under your boots and still take every word in.
Walk into range of a site and the guide begins on its own. No hunting through a menu with the sun on the screen, a pack on your back and gloves on your hands.
Download once on wifi and the whole library plays in flight mode — down in a gorge, out on a ridge, at the far end of the trail where nothing has a single bar of reception.
Three steps, and the last one is just walking.
Free on iPhone and Android. Scan the code above, or tap through — it works out which store you need.
Open Downloads, tap Audio Guides, choose your language. The whole library lands on the phone while you still have wifi.
Reach a site and the guide starts by itself — or press play whenever you like. The full script is on screen too, if you would rather read.
Tap any pin to listen.
Every site on the Coast to Coast Path that has a guide. Open any one to read the complete script — free, no account, in every language it was written in. Each carries a code that opens that guide in the app, which is the only place the audio plays.
Listen to multiple guides and the catalogue starts working as a single piece. Three stories thread through it.
St Bees Priory (a Benedictine house with a superb Norman doorway) → Shap Abbey (the last abbey founded in medieval England) → Mount Grace (the best-preserved Carthusian charterhouse of hermit-monks). A thread of devotion and dissolution along the walk.
Nine Standards Rigg (nine ancient cairns nobody can fully explain — dummy sentinels against the Scots?) → Richmond Castle (where King Arthur is said to sleep beneath the keep) → Beggar's Bridge (a packhorse arch built so no lovers would be parted by the river).
By tradition you dip your boots in the Irish Sea at St Bees and pick up a pebble to carry the whole way across England — then throw it into the North Sea when you reach Robin Hood's Bay. Two guides bookend the walk.
The first words you hear when you reach Nine Standards Rigg.
You come up out of the mist onto the roof of England, and there they are along the skyline — nine great towers of piled stone, some taller than a person, standing in a line against the sky. Nobody living knows who built them, or why. And beneath your boots the very ground has made up its mind: from here, the rivers run east. This is Nine Standards Rigg, crowning Hartley Fell at six hundred and sixty-two metres on…Nine Standards Rigg: The Mystery on the Watershed · read the whole guide →
The app is free, and until 1 October 2026 every one of the 24 narrated guides is free inside it. Open a free account before 1 October and the complete library stays yours permanently. Separately and always: the full written script of every guide is published free on this website, in every language it exists in.
Yes, completely. Download them over wifi before you set off and they play in flight mode — the audio, the script and the maps. That is the point: the places these guides describe are mostly where the signal is not.
English, with its own narrator throughout the library.
No. The app starts a guide automatically when you walk into range, which is how most people use them, but you can play any guide any time — on the plane, over breakfast, or at home while you plan.
Yes. Every script on this page is published in full and free to read, with no account and no app. The narration itself lives only in the app.
We do. Each guide is researched for its own site and written to a fixed shape — where you are standing, what to look for, the one human story worth carrying away — then checked against the archaeology and the local record. That is 24 original scripts for the Coast to Coast Path alone.
It does. Two guides bookend the walk — St Bees, where you dip your boots in the Irish Sea and pick up your pebble, and Robin Hood’s Bay, where you throw it into the North Sea a fortnight later. Listening to the second one with the first still in your pocket is the point.
Every guide on this page is narrated in the free Coast to Coast Path app, and only there. This website is where you read and plan; the app is what you walk with.
Tell us your dates, difficulty, and what you need. We'll match tours, guides, accommodations, and transfers along the stages with audio guides.
Open Trip Planner →Free for hikers to walk with. The smartest way for local providers to get found. One independent platform — never an agency, never a commission on your trip.
Download the free Coast to Coast Path app and carry the entire 190-mile (306 km) route in your pocket — even with no signal.
Guides, B&Bs, transfer drivers and tour operators — put your business in front of hikers who are actively planning, on the web and inside the app.
