Christopher Somerville

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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The Isle of Stronsay sails on the eastern edge of the archipelago of Orkney, a long island flattened on a sea that glinted like black obsidian this sunny morning. Sandstone farmsteads lay low, straddling the island’s low green ridges.

Two great skuas were bullying a gannet, trying to make it disgorge the fish it had just caught, as we steamed into Stronsay. Formalities at Whitehall harbour are at a minimum – you just walk off the ferry, collect your hire cycle and head off along the straight and narrow island roads. Brown and black cattle glanced at us through their long eyelashes as they munched a salad of grass, buttercups and clover.

Down on the rugged east coast the cliffs stepped seaward, footed on dark plates of sandstone. Fulmars eyed us from their nests in cracks and crevices of the rocks above slit-like inlets where a copper-coloured sea rose, hissed and fell away. There was a salt edge to the wind, and a great sense of being far from anywhere on a wide sea.

The path rounded the Vat of Kirbuster, a deep dark chasm of a blowhole, the entrance spanned by a sway-backed rock arch, its layered walls spattered with white blooms of sea campion. Beyond rose the green-capped rock stacks of Two Castles, where early Christian hermits somehow contrived to eke out existence in absolute solitude.

We crossed a stream trickling down through a rushy grassland bright with yellow cross-shaped flowers of tormentil, tiny white eyebright and the stout purple-pink heads of northern marsh orchids. At Carlin Geo a disgorged pellet of feathers, bones and two webbed feet lay on the grass, while a great black-backed gull on the rocks below snapped its beak in satisfied remembrance of this grisly feast.

The green promontory of Lamb Head curved seawards, its neck guarded by the stone-built round base of a Pictish broch, a defensive tower perhaps two thousand years old. In the centre a stone slab had been slid aside from a square-mouthed entrance, revealing a pitch-black chamber below.

Beyond in the Bay of Houseby, the beach of orange kelp and flat rocks seemed to writhe and undulate. It was a mighty haul-out of grey seals, shifting their blubberous bodies towards the water and watching us with solemn round eyes. As we followed the flicker of a wheatear’s white rump inland, a mournful hooting like a convocation of tuneful foghorns broke out behind us – the tideline singing of Stronsay’s seals.

Start: Vat of Kirbuster parking place, Isle of Stronsay, Orkney, KW17 2AG (OS ref HY 681241)

Getting there: Car or passenger ferry from Kirkwall to Whitehall harbour, Stronsay (orkneyferries.co.uk). Bike (free) from Ebenezer Stores, Whitehall (01857-616339); head south on B9060 to Kirbuster parking (signed).
Taxi – 01857-616335.

Walk (7½ miles, easy/moderate, OS Explorer 465): From info board head east on track to coast. Right/south along cliffs for 4 miles to Bay of Houseby. At The Pow (677221), right/inland up concrete farm track. Follow road for nearly 1½ miles past Mid House (670228), South Schoolhouse (668232), Eastbank (672237) and Roadside (675241) to T-junction at Everbay (673246). Right (‘Vat of Kirbuster’); in 600m, right (679250) to start.

Conditions: Unguarded cliff-top paths, beach, quiet lanes

Lunch/Accommodation: Stronsay Hotel, Whitehall (01857-616213, stronsayhotelorkney.com); Storehouse B&B (01857-616263), Stronsay Fishmart (01856-616401)

Tea/cakes/info: Craftship Enterprise Café & Craft shop, Mallet on B9060 between Whitehall and Kirbuster (01857-616249, craftshipenterprise.co.uk)

Info: visitorkney.com; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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We’d plotted the tides as well as we could, so it was a relief to descend New Quay’s steep streets to the harbour and find the beach section of the Wales Coast Path still passable. We skirted the slippery rock promontory that makes a barrier to walkers at high tide, and went on round the classic curve of sand that rims New Quay Bay.

Looking back from the far point, the prospect of New Quay was of parallel streets running across the lower slopes of a fine green hill. Those straight horizontal streets were once interleaved with ropewalks where cables for ships were laid and braided. The days are long gone when the little town on the southern curve of Cardigan Bay was a ship-building centre and a bustling port; these days it’s the holidaymakers who bring life and colour to these streets.

Pale grey cliffs banded with extravagantly squeezed and distorted strata formed a backdrop to the beach. Tiny fingernails of fractured shells paved the sand. Beyond the headland a stream trickled out of the woods, and we sat by the stepping stones to watch pied wagtails flitting and hovering above the water to snatch their insect feast mid-air.

Halfway along the stony beach of Little Quay Bay we found steps leading up from the shore. A glance back at the kayak paddlers in the shallows, and we climbed a shady lane through the woods. In a garden at the top lay a venerable railway carriage, now with a second lease of life as a summerhouse.

The Wales Coast Path ran through steep pastures with the sea sighing low on our left hand. Jackdaws swooped and played over the slopes, and in the woodland sections speckled wood butterflies basked on the path with open wings, milk chocolate in colour with pale lemon spots.

Ahead the great curve of Cardigan Bay was clouded and hazy, the distant finger of the Lleyn Peninsula lying on the sea like a bar of mist. Down in the cleft of Oernant a stream came sparkling down through falls and spillways it had carved in the rocks, Clumps of pink thrift and white sea campion danced alongside in the sharp wind.

Down to cross stream clefts by wooden bridges; up again to breast the next brackeny hill. Finally a view from a summit gate over Aberaeron, planned shipbuilding and trading port, laid out in Georgian elegance around its harbour on a grey stone shore. We dropped down the hill and crunched over the pebbles, making for a well-earned cup of tea.

Start: Church Road car park, New Quay, Ceredigion SA45 9PB (OS ref SN 387599)

Getting there: Bus T5 (Cardigan-Aberystwyth)
Road – New Quay is signed off A487 (Aberystwyth-Cardigan) between Llanarth and Plwmp.

Walk (6½ miles, moderate coast path, OS Explorer 198): Down Church Street to the harbour. If high tide means beach impassable, continue up Glanmor Terrace road to B4342 (388597). Left; in ¼ mile left down Brongwyn Lane (390596) to shore. If beach passable – walk round curve of New Quay Bay to the far point (405599). Continue along beach for 400m to Cei Bach road end (409597). Up steps; right up road; just past caravan park, left up drive (409595, ‘Coast Path’/CP. In 100m, left before farm building: through gate (‘CP’): follow well-marked CP along coast to Aberaeron.
Return by bus T5.

Lunch/Accommodation: Harbour Master Hotel, Pencei, Aberaeron, Ceredigion SA46 0BT (01545-570755, harbour-master.com) – stylish, friendly, bustling place.

Info: Aberaeron TIC (01545-570602, discoverceredigion.co.uk); visitwales.com; walescoastpath.gov.uk; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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Neat, self-contained and well provided, the little country town of Epworth stands on the clay hump of the Isle of Axholme in the north-west corner of Lincolnshire. Epworth is only a hundred feet above sea level, but descending the slight slope into the flat lands west of the town feels like launching oneself from a comfortable haven into a vast gold and green sea of corn and root crops.

When Cornelis Vermuyden and his Flemish engineers drained the great fens and swamps around Axholme in the 1620s, the locals hated it. The ‘thick, fatt water’ of the winter floods, full of river silt, declined to a ‘thin, hungry, starveing water’, and the marshmen lost the reed cutting, wildfowling and common grazing that constituted their living. What replaced the floody fens was some of the best arable farmland in the country.

Ranks of tall hedge poplars made verticals in the horizontal landscape as we walked the boundaries of barley and beet fields. A detour round the perimeter of Epworth Turbary nature reserve gave a glimpse into the vanished landscape – bog pools, silver birch thickets, dragonflies and sedgy grazing where locals would cut peat to dry for their fires.

Beside a long straight drive road beyond the Turbary we saw a pile of lunch bags embellished with Polish brand names. At the far side of the field their owners bent and straightened among lines of sugar beet and lettuces, calling to each other in high voices like birds.

From this regulated, highly productive landscape we turned east along the green leafy paths of Haxey Turbary, another nature reserve. Beyond on a ridge stood the houses of Haxey, the setting for a January frolic called the ‘Haxey Hood’. A couple of hundred muddy persons push and shove for hours, trying to force the Hood – a stuffed leather tube – into one or other of the village pubs. This scene of cheerful mayhem has been enacted each Twelfth Night since who knows when – certainly for hundreds of years.

I can’t image John Wesley would have approved of the Haxey Hood with its drinking, profanities and raucous behaviour. The handsome brick-built old rectory where the founder of the Methodist movement grew up with his brother Charles stands at the southern edge of Epworth; a landmark to aim at as we crossed a golden river of corn to journey’s end on the banks of Axholme.

Start: Church Street car park, Epworth, Lincs DN9 1ER (OS ref SE 784039)

Getting there: Bus 291, 399 (Doncaster-Scunthorpe)
Road: Epworth is on A161 Gainsborough road (M180, Jct 2)

Walk (12 miles, easy, OS Explorer 280): Pass Willows Beauty Salon to cross Market Place by Red Lion Inn. Up Queen Street, then Blow Row to cross A161 (781033). Lane opposite (fingerpost/FP) past cemetery. In 500m dogleg left/right (776034) along field edges, under old railway (772034) and on. In another ¾ mile, at corner of Turbary Road, cross road to gate of Epworth Turbary Reserve (758036); walk circuit of reserve and hides, back to gate.

Right along road. In ½ mile, left (747038, FP bridleway) down drove road. In ½ mile, tarmac ends at Harvest Farm entrance on left (746029); in another ½ mile, left at split oak on left (744019, unwaymarked) along path in tunnel of trees. In 200m, past metal barrier and sun. In 700m pass another metal barrier by Lupine Woods field centre (753018) and on along dirt road.

In 500m pass Fir Tree Lodge on left; in 100m, right (758014, FP, yellow arrows/YAs) along field edges past Haslams Farm (756009) to T-junction (758005). Left (FP) to cross road at Cherry Orchard Farm (766004) and on to road in Haxey (771002). Left; just before A161, left (772003) along Axholme Line local nature reserve railway path. In 1⅓ miles cross Burnham Beck with fancy guard rails; pass metal barrier, and turn right (772025) on field path. In 100m fork right, following Restricted Byway for 700m to cross A161 (780022).

Down road opposite past phone box, in 100m fork left past Walnut Farm. On along track for 700m, passing Holy Well (785021) to left bend (787021); north on field track for ¾ mile to road (786035, opposite Wesley’s Old Rectory). Left; right along Albion Hill, right at Red Lion to car park.

Refreshments: Red Lion, Epworth (01427-872208, redlionepworth.co.uk)

Accommodation: Double Tree by Hilton, Ermine St, Broughton, Lincs DN20 0AQ (01652-650770, doubletree3.hilton.com – comfortable golf hotel.

Epworth Old Rectory: 01427-872268, epwortholdrectory.org.uk

Info: visitlincolnshire.com; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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Flamborough Head, a great chalk thumb poking out from the Yorkshire coast into the North Sea, is a windy and lonely place. The resident seabirds don’t mind; they swoop and wheel around the narrow cliff ledges of the headland, bringing food back to their precarious roosts and contributing a certain metallic fishy whiff to this walk.

St Oswald’s Church stands in the fishing village of Flamborough at the heart of the headland. It contains several memorials to fishermen and lifeboat men, and a wonderful carousel of paintings by local amateur artist Alfred Cracroft honouring the men and women of Flamborough whose work in services from the Home Guard and the WAAF to the Royal Observer Corps and nursing helped to win the Second World War.

Church Lane leads to a grassy path running to the southern cliffs of the headland. The view curved away south past Bridlington’s chalk cliffs and the fast-eroding East Yorkshire coastline to the faint double hummock of Spurn Head on the horizon.

We followed the cliff path past cornfields where skylarks spiralled and sang, through forests of grasses and thistles, with fishing boats cutting the glittering sea to our right. At South Landing the Flamborough lifeboat, a big orange rib, was away from its home shed for repairs. ‘Scraped its bottom rescuing a fellow stuck in a cave,’ explained the volunteer on duty.

Flamborough Head is a treacherous place, a magnet for swirling tides and cross currents that eat caves and arches out of the chalk cliffs. As we rounded the easterly nose of the headland a great shrieking and gibbering of seabirds, along with a fishy stench, arose from their favoured nesting cliffs on the north side.

It’s a staggering sight and sound, so many seabirds in one place. Cormorants and gulls occupied the lower rocks; sharp-billed guillemots and black-coated razorbills with smart white markings lined the middle ledges, and kittiwakes wheeled round the upper storeys of the cliffs with their incessant ‘ee-wake! ee-wake!’

Along at North Landing lay the cobles Prosperity and Summer Rose, fishing boats with pointed bows and stems, a designed unchanged for over 1,000 years. Just beyond we turned inland for Flamborough, blown by wind, burned by sun and with the echoing calls of the kittiwakes still in our ears.

Start: Two Brothers memorial, Tower Street, Flamborough, Nr Bridlington, N. Yorks YO15 1PD (OS ref TA 227706)

Getting there: Bus 14 from Bridlington
Road – Flamborough (B1255) is signposted from A165/A1038 in Bridlington.

Walk (9¼ miles, easy, OS Explorer 301): South down Tower Street to St Oswald’s Church (226702). Through churchyard to south gate; right along Church Lane; in 150m, round right bend. In 100m, left (226700) down Beacon Farm drive to cliffs (225693). Left, and follow cliff path/’Headland Way’ for 500m to South Landing (231693). At lighthouse sculpture 200m beyond (233693), fork right (‘Flamborough Head’, yellow arrow/YA) for 2½ miles to Flamborough Head. Pass in front of lighthouse (255706); pass green with benches; at cresset, follow path (YA) along cliff-tops. In 2½ miles pass Thornwick Bay café (232723); in another ½ mile, left on North Cliff (224726, fingerpost, YA) on path south for 1 mile to T-junction (226710). Left (‘Flamborough’) to road at Craikwell (227708); right to Two Brothers memorial.

Conditions: Several flights of uneven steps; unguarded cliff edges.

Lunch: Seabirds Inn, Tower Street, Flamborough (01262-850242, theseabirds.com)

Accommodation: Premier Inn, Albion Terrace, Bridlington YO15 2PJ (01262-411642; premierinn.com)

Info: Bridlington TIC (01482-391634); yorkshire.com; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk

Yorkshire Coast Path by Andrew Vine (safehavenbooks.co.uk)

First published in: The Times Click here to view a map for this walk in a new window

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The nuns of Holystone Priory must have been a tough and determined bunch, to have maintained their prayerful community through all the hard times, Border battles, reivers’ raids and lack of funds associated with the Northumbrian borderlands of the wild Middle Ages.

There is a faint whisper of their presence in the little 12th-century (but much restored) Church of St Mary, and a breath of their holy spirit on the still waters of Lady’s Well, just north of the hamlet of Holystone. Legend has St Ninian, stern pioneer of Christianity in these parts, baptising three thousand sinners in the well around 500 AD. Today the waters still dimple and run, and the brook below the well is lined with beautiful monkey flowers, gold with orange-spotted nether lips.

We followed a lane through forestry, looking for the red squirrels that inhabit these trees. Bog myrtle in the verges released a churchy incense smell as we crushed the leaves between finger and thumb.

A scramble of a path up through the pinewoods of Cat Law brought us out into the heather uplands of Daw’s Moss. Within the walls of a cross-shaped plantation stood the Pedlar’s Stone, mysteriously named and never explained.

At lonely Craig Farm in the valley below, the massively strong structure of a bastle formed part of the farm buildings. A bastle was a fortified farmhouse, its stone walls five feet thick. With the animals locked in the vaulted basement below, the ladder pulled up and the family barricaded behind tiny windows, a farmer living here four hundred years ago could hope to hold out against the reivers – buccaneers who made their own laws and rustled cattle as a day-to-day business.

From Craig Farm our way led east across trackless moor where curlews bubbled their melancholy warning cries. We passed the Five Kings, a line of rough and rugged standing stones (four in number – one’s now a gatepost elsewhere), and came down to Dueshill Farm.

The farmer went bouncing across the pastures on a quad painted up like a racing car. The sheep ran bleating towards the field gate, and an old hand of a sheepdog kept the whole show together, now bullying, now coaxing – a masterful display of crowd control.

Start: Forestry Commission car park, Holystone, near Rothbury NE65 7AX (OS ref NT 951026)

Getting there: Holystone is signed from B6341 between Elsdon and Thropton

Walk (7 miles, strenuous, OS Explorer OL16, OL42): Right along road. In ¾ mile, beside Forestry Commission ‘Holystone Common’ sign (941020), fork left past barrier along forest track. In 500m track curves left (purple arrow/PA) to cross Holystone Burn (934013). In 250m, hairpin back left up track (933012). In 200m pass PA post on left; in 100m, right (935011, unmarked) up bank, then rough path south through trees to stile and gate at top by MoD notice (935010). Ahead with wall on left for 500m to road at Pedlar’s Stone walled copse (934005).

Ahead down road to Craig Farm. At farm entrance, left (938999, fingerpost ‘Dueshill 2½’) over stile. Follow grassy track into valley, aiming for far right corner of field with conifer plantation beyond. Over gate (943995, waymark post/WP); in 100m right across Keenshaw Burn; in 100m recross (footbridge). Follow edge of plantation (WPs). In 400m leave corner of plantation (948995), bearing a little left away from fence on right for 700m over rough ground (faint track), aiming for right hand corner of plantation ahead.

At MoD notice at corner (954999), ahead, keeping close to fence and trees on left. In 200m, cross stile at angle of fence (956000, yellow arrow/YA). Keep same direction for 150m through wood, picking your way over fallen timber, to MoD notice at far side (957001, stile). Ahead, keeping uphill of Five Kings standing stones, to left corner of plantation wall (958002, YA). Half left to gate (959003, YA) and on. At WP bear half left and follow fence downhill, keeping it on your right, to left corner of plantation below (959006).

Through gate (YA); ahead (YAs) for 350m to join farm road (960009). Left to Dueshill Farm. At gates (960013), through gate, across dip, through next gate with shed ahead. Left; through field gate (YA); right up field edge. At top of plantation, right over stile (960016, YA); left down fence. In 100m at edge of trees, ahead for 700m, crossing 2 stiles (YAs) to road (958023). Left into Holystone.

Conditions: A tough walk, reasonably well waymarked on faint tracks. For experienced self-guiding ramblers, properly equipped and clad.

Refreshments: Picnic

Accommodation: Coquetvale Hotel, Station Road, Rothbury NE65 7QH (01669-622900, coquetvale.co.uk) – modernised former railway hotel
Info: visitnorthumberland.com; satmap.com; ramblers.org.uk