Historical Sites Along the Coast to Coast Path

St Bees Head is the great red headland that launches the Coast to Coast, and the only stretch of Heritage Coast on the English coast between

St Bees Priory — the Priory Church of St Mary and St Bega — is where most Coast to Coasters take their first steps inland, and it richly rep

Black Sail Hut is England's most remote youth hostel — a tiny whitewashed former shepherd's bothy standing utterly alone at the head of Enne

Ennerdale Water is the most westerly lake in the Lake District and among the wildest — uniquely, it has no public road along its shore and n

At the wild summit of Honister Pass (356 m / 1,167 ft), gouged into the flank of Fleetwith Pike, stands the last working slate mine in Engla

Grasmere is the spiritual heart of the Lake District's Romantic legacy. William and his sister Dorothy Wordsworth moved into Dove Cottage in

Haweswater is the long, steel-blue reservoir that the Coast to Coast meets at the foot of the steep Kidsty Howes descent on Stage 5 — the po

Kidsty Pike, at 780 m (2,560 ft), is the highest point reached on the entire Coast to Coast walk — the climax of the Lakeland high-fell cros

By the River Lowther, about a mile and a half west of Shap, stand the serene ruins of Shap Abbey — and its full-height west tower, glimpsed

Kirkby Stephen is a handsome grey-stone market town strung along the upper River Eden, and for Coast to Coast walkers it is a pivotal place

Smardale Gill Viaduct is one of the most striking structures on the Coast to Coast, a graceful 14-arch sandstone railway viaduct striding 90

On the great watershed of England, where becks to the west fall to the River Eden and the Irish Sea and those to the east feed the Swale and

Keld is a tiny, remote stone hamlet at the head of Swaledale whose name is simply the Old Norse word for a spring — and it sits at a quietly

High on the bleak moor between Keld and Reeth stand the gaunt, roofless ruins of one of the best-preserved and most structurally complex lea

A short way east of Reeth, where the Coast to Coast follows the River Swale, the squat tower of Marrick Priory rises from a meadow above the

Towering 100 feet (30 m) above a bend in the River Swale, Richmond Castle is the best-preserved early Norman castle in England — and the dra

Easby Abbey is one of England's best-preserved monasteries of the Premonstratensian 'white canons', set in a quiet bend of the River Swale a

Mount Grace Priory is the best-preserved of England's nine medieval Carthusian charterhouses, founded in 1398 by Thomas Holland, 1st Duke of

The Wainstones are a striking jumble of weathered Jurassic sandstone crags crowning the western end of Hasty Bank, the largest such outcrop

The Lion Inn stands utterly alone on the crest of Blakey Ridge, the only building in a great sweep of open heather moor and, at 1,325 ft (40

Beggar's Bridge is a graceful single-arched packhorse bridge over the River Esk on the eastern edge of Glaisdale, on the northern fringe of

Grosmont (pronounced 'Grow-mont') sits where the Coast to Coast drops out of Eskdale to end the day's walk. A scattered hamlet until the 183

Hidden in the steep, oak-clad valley of Littlebeck Wood, Falling Foss is a graceful single-drop waterfall where May Beck pours over a lip of

Robin Hood's Bay is the eastern finish of the Coast to Coast Path: a knot of red-pantiled cottages tumbling down a steep ravine in the cliff