The land ends here, and your walk begins. Red cliffs plunge some three hundred feet into the Irish Sea, seabirds scream and jostle on the ledges below, and a white lighthouse stands sharp against the sky. Fill your lungs. This is the edge of England, and the first step of a very long line eastward.
St Bees Head is the only stretch of Heritage Coast on the entire English shoreline between Wales and Scotland — a wall of warm red St Bees sandstone rising to around ninety metres, three hundred feet, above the waves. Two great promontories, North Head and South Head, reach out into the sea, and between them they cradle a hidden shingle cove called Fleswick Bay.
The whole cliff is an RSPB nature reserve, the largest seabird colony in north-west England, and the only place in the country where the black guillemot comes to breed. Crowning North Head stands St Bees Lighthouse: a beacon has burned on this spot since 1718, and the present tower of 1822 throws the highest cliff-top light in all England, a hundred metres and more above the sea.
For the Coast to Coaster, this headland is the starting gun — the last of the land before a nation's width of fell, dale and moor. Stand a moment and take the measure of it: the sea at your back, the mountains still hidden inland, and the whole long walk laid out only in your imagination. Here is what to look for.
First, down on the beach below South Head, find the water's edge and the great starting ritual: dip a boot in the Irish Sea and choose a single pebble to carry across the country. Second, look closely at the rock, that deep, iron-red sandstone, laid down in desert conditions hundreds of millions of years ago and quarried to build half the churches and farms of this coast.
Third, watch the cliff faces in spring and summer, when the ledges swarm with guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars — and scan the lower rocks for the black guillemot, small and dark with a bright white wing-patch and startling red legs. Fourth, seek out the descent to Fleswick Bay, the secret shingle cove between the two heads, its beach scattered with polished pebbles and semi-precious stones.
Fifth, walk up to the lighthouse on North Head — and go carefully, for this is a soft, actively eroding coast where the clifftop path is occasionally re-routed inland. Check the current National Trail map before you set off, and always keep well back from any crumbling edge. There is a quiet ceremony to this place that binds the whole walk together.
Down on the shingle, walkers gather at the start of their journey, wet a boot in the Irish Sea, and stoop to pick a pebble from the beach — nothing special to look at, just a stone that fits the hand. That pebble rides in a pocket or a pack for the entire crossing of northern England, over the Lakeland fells, across the Yorkshire Dales, over the North York Moors.
And then, days later, on the far side of the country at Robin Hood's Bay, its bearer walks down to the North Sea and throws it in — one small stone carried from sea to sea, and a whole nation walked between the two. From here the trail turns inland and sets its face toward the mountains.
Ahead lie the green fells and high passes of the Lake District, and in time the slate country of Honister, where England's last working slate mine cuts into the flank of the pass. Take one last look back at the sea. You may not see it again until the other coast. Walk safe.
