You come over the last rise and there it is at last — the North Sea, wide and grey-green and glittering all the way to the horizon. And below you, tumbling down a steep cleft in the cliff, a jumble of red-roofed cottages falling almost into the water itself. This is Robin Hood's Bay. This is the finish.
Coast to coast, sea to sea, from St Bees to here — you have walked the whole width of northern England, and the end is under your feet. There is no other village on the walk quite like it.
The old part pours down its steep ravine in a tangle of red pantile roofs, cottages stacked so close that alleyways — the locals call them 'bolts' — squeeze between them, and steps and passages thread down and down to the slipway and the sea. It grew as a fishing community, its living wrung from these hard waters, and in the eighteenth century it grew rich on something else besides: smuggling.
This was one of the busiest smuggling havens on the whole Yorkshire coast, a place built, it seems, for the quiet passing of untaxed goods. Despite the name, there is no genuine link to the outlaw Robin Hood; the most colourful old tale merely claims he once drove off raiders from these cliffs and was rewarded with the village's name. Take it, as ever, as legend. So here, at journey's end, is what to look for.
First, the descent itself — the steep, cobbled main street dropping through the old village, a proper adventure to walk down, and every turn opening a new view of roofs and sea. Second, the 'bolts': the impossibly narrow alleys and passages that lace the cottages together, made for a village that lived cheek by jowl.
Third, the slipway at the very bottom, the Dock, where the street meets the water — the true finishing line of the Coast to Coast. Fourth, the shore itself at low water, a wide scar of rock ledges famous for its fossils, the bones of ancient sea creatures written into the stone. And fifth, the sea — simply the sea, the North Sea, the water you have aimed at for two weeks and more.
Do take real care here: mind the tide, which comes in fast across those flat rocks; watch your footing on the wet, steep slipway; and stay well back from the cliff edges above. Now, the story this village keeps best: smuggling. In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, tea, brandy, gin, and silk poured into hidden coves along this coast to dodge the King's heavy duties, and Robin Hood's Bay was the master of the trade.
So dense were the houses, so tangled the cellars and connecting passages, that it was said a bale of silk could pass from the bottom of the village to the top without once seeing daylight — handed hand to hand through a maze of secret doors, from house to house, while the excise men searched in vain. Stand in one of the bolts and you can believe every word of it. And now — you.
There is a tradition here, and you have earned it. Walk down to the slipway. Reach into your pocket for the pebble you picked up on the beach at St Bees, on the far Irish Sea, all those miles and days ago, and carried across every fell and dale of England. Throw it into the North Sea. Then dip your boots in the water. Coast to coast, sea to sea — the whole width of a country walked under your own steady feet.
Whatever weather, whatever aches, whatever doubts you carried up here from the west, you carried them all the way, and here they end, in the salt and the spray. Stand a moment and let it land. You did this. Well done. Walk safe.
