Harry Mead lends his support to the campaign to upgrade the status of the Coast to Coast walk - but wants it done immediately

LET us not tread delicately; the terrain calls for our firmest footsteps. After all, Wainwright’s Coast to Coast Walk traverses some of England’s grandest landscapes.

So let us state clearly at once: the 192-mile trek is the nation’s most popular long distance walk. The Pennine Way used to hold that distinction, but, within probably little more than a decade of its creation in 1973, the Coast to Coast walk eclipsed it.

Ask anyone at Keld, where the two walks cross. And, certainly, no other walk attracts either the number of overseas visitors, or draws them from so many countries.

My wife provided B&B on the Coast to Coast Walk for 17 years and her visitors spanned the globe, from Iceland to Australia. For the biggest group, Americans, Wainwright’s Coast to Coast is one of few attractions that tempts them away from their familiar honeyspots.

The walk links three national parks – Lakes, Dales, Moors – with agreeable-enough countryside in between. So why isn’t it already among the 15 official national long distance trails, some of which – Peddars Way, or Glyndwr’s Way, for instance – remain stubbornly low-profile? In a word: resentment.

Darlington and Stockton Times:
The coast to coast route

Creating an official long distance walk requires committees. Lots of them. And reports – lots of those too.

Having alighted on a broad idea, a committee must select, investigate, and draw up a “draft” route. Once published this will be revised. Local authorities and others will make an input. Economic, social and environmental impacts will be assessed. The process will take years, even decades.

Alfred Wainwright’s method was different. Having spotted that necklace of national parks, a bullseye target for a national trail, yet overlooked by every official agency, he set out with his maps. Just a year or two later he published his guidebook.

There was no fanfare. My copy came to me like this. On a shopping trip to York my wife and I went our separate ways. When we met for lunch my wife announced: “I’ve got a present for you.” On the table she placed Wainwright’s A Coast to Coast Walk – the first I had heard of it.

An admirer of Wainwright from almost his earliest Lakeland days, I soon wrote to the great man. I expressed my pleasure that my beloved North York Moors had received “the Wainwright treatment”, with its northern escarpment, the backdrop to my home, described as “the finest section of our marathon outside Lakeland”.

I thanked him, too, for his timely protest against the planned flooding of Farndale with a reservoir. “Unbelievable,” his guide said. “You simply can’t credit it, can you?”

He wrote back kindly, thanking me for publicity I had given his book and adding: “I was really very impressed with the Cleveland escarpment and the heather moors beyond, much more so than I expected. Indeed, I have since been back for another long look at that area. I like it a lot. (Why bother coming to Lakeland?)”

He also revealed he had bought paintings of the moors by Lewis Creighton, who specialised in heather scenes with sheep. One of his purchases was “a huge specially-commissioned mural of the head of Rosedale…how well the artist captures the atmosphere of the moors”.

Wainwright’s walk swiftly captured more than my imagination. Soon it supported a major linear industry – B&Bs, luggage-transport services, pubs otherwise facing decline. The money pumped into these circulated elsewhere in the local economy. No study was needed to confirm that effect.

Darlington and Stockton Times: Robin Hood's Bay
The final stop on the Coast To Coast route, Robin Hood's Bay

The walk’s instant success should have seen it quickly elevated to “national” status, which would have aided its maintenance. Since 2007 that has been the aim of the Wainwright Society (I’m not a member).

But, apart from providing an occasional footpath sign, the official countryside agencies have studiously turned their backs on Wainwright’s inspired creation. It’s not their brainchild, so they’ve wanted nothing to do with it.

Now, Richmond’s Tory MP, Rishi Sunak, has lent his support to the campaign for national status. Very welcome. But how does he see matters proceeding? “Part one is to build strong local support, and the second stage will be to try and convince people in power to commission a scoping study.” This would “examine the route and detail if it will work.”

We’re back in the miasma of committees and reports again. Mr Sunak admits it will “not be a quick victory.” He is prepared for the quest to wait in the queue behind Natural England’s present plan to develop an England Coast Path. Though much of this already exists in routes such as the Cleveland Way and the South West Coast Path, the project is not due to be completed until 2020 – the usual snail’s pace.

By then it could be too late for Wainwright’s Coast to Coast to win its ‘national’ accolade. Its North York Moors section, so highly-praised by Wainwright, is suffering badly. As I’ve noted in these pages, its northern fringe is becoming urbanised. With what was a walkers’ café unobtrusively grafted into the hillside now a much more obvious restaurant, augmented with camping pods, Carlton Bank, pristine moorland when Wainwright visited, is overdeveloped. An industrial park also scars the view from here, and there’s more development in prospect on the plain.

Worse, near the walk’s coastal climax, “the world’s largest potash mine” is due to

spring up. It will smack Coast to Coasters in the face as they emerge from the intimate valley of Little Beck, hailed by Wainwright as “a place of bewitching beauty… a glimpse of heaven for nerve-frayed town dwellers”.

For those drafting Mr Sunak’s “scoping study”, the massive intrusion of the potash mine at a critical stage in the walk is bound to, well, loom large.

Explaining how he chose his route, Wainwright himself emphasised that nowhere along his selected line “was there an industrial blemish”. Keeping it that way, and protecting the walk’s setting along the Cleveland Hills, could well prove vital to the walk achieving national status.

To head off the blight that could rule it out, the walk should be designated without delay. It’s been Britain’s premier long distance trail for more than 30 years. What further justification is needed?