Easington Colliery to Hartlepool

[nigheandonn]

The guesthouse in Horden was very nice - I won't say that I was surprised by it, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if it had been a very different sort of place. All the same, walking up into Peterlee to Wetherspoons and getting thoroughly lost for the first time on the trip, I couldn't help thinking that this was possibly the strangest place I'd ever been on my holidays!

This bit of coast had been a problem for a while - Seaham to Hartlepool was just a bit too far for a day, especially since if I had an odd free day in Newcastle it would probably be because there was something on in the evening, and there wasn't an obvious point to break off early. So I'd been quite pleased with the brainwave of doing it over two short winter days, and even more pleased to discover that I could get accommodation halfway through like a proper long distance walk, rather than the out and back Newcastle-based trips that had covered everything from Cresswell to Seaham.

My first task in the morning was to head back up to where I'd left the coast the night before - I could tell now that I should have left it one path further down, at Warren House Gill, but that hadn't been at all clear on the map. It was a faintly drizzly morning without being really wet, but since I was expecting mud again I had my waterproof trousers on from the start, to the amusement of two men going to their allotment.

It was very hazy, but that couldn't stop the coast and the sea being stunning - layer after layer of tiny cliff points, until they faded into the distance.

Shore at Horden

An odd dip ahead of me looked at first like a lake, until it formed itself out of the mist into just a field.

Misty dip

Before long I was quite glad that I hadn't been walking down to the south end of Horden at the end of the day before, as the original plan had been - the path led way down into Warren House Gill and along towards to the shore, and then a steep pull up at the other side, and went on like that for a while, far more energetic than the day before.

The shore was a weird place, a great flat sweep of alien black, stunning but uncanny, until you got closer to the sea and realised that the final edge was a perfectly normal stony beach.

Alien beach

A little bit further on, at the top of another down and up, there was artwork with the same contrast, half sanderling and half 'a wind that carries memories of coal'.

Sanderling art

Blackhills Gill was a great gash ahead, standing out in bracken brown rather than damp green and faded yellow, and the path led more or less to the edge before turning inland to find a way down.

Blackhills Gill

Possibly the worst of the steep pulls up the other side finally led onto flat clifftop for a while, along to the Little Tern sculpture above Castle Eden Dene. Seen from the other side there's more of it, but I really liked the way it seemed to be nesting in the long grass from the far side.

Little Tern

Castle Eden Dene was an even broader dip, a flat reedy place which opens out into a long valley behind, crossed by another viaduct, and which surprised me by just how open it was. A long string of brightly coloured ramblers were coming out of the valley as I passed through, but until then I seemed to have been the only person walking without a dog, and I'd been meeting a lovely mixture - a big black one which took a great interest in me (according to its owner it was wondering why I didn't have any dog with me), one even muddier than me which didn't want to go home, an even bigger black one, and then one so tiny it hardly had legs at all, in among a series of others.

Castle Eden Dene

This did look like a lovely place to go for a walk, but not today.

Castle Eden viaduct

I had a feeling after this that the vegetation had changed - less plain rough grass and more gorse and brambles - but there didn't seem to be any particular reason for it. After a while there was also my old friend of the East Lothian coast, the baked bean bush - which I think is really called Sea Buckthorn!

Baked bean bush

I stopped for lunch at the steps down to the beach at Blackhall, where there was a bench, and a few brave families out exploring.

Blackhill shore

The path was still well above the shore, but the cliffs did seem to be getting lower and more uneven in places, and the next sweep of tiny points all seemed to have lost their noses.

Cliffs with no noses

Civilisation (after a fashion) was now appearing again, in the form of the caravan park at Crimdon, but the path still had a lot of wiggling to do to get to it - almost back on itself along a long valley which was eventually crossed by steps in and out, and then along the edge of a field containing a Very Large Cow, and then around another dip to the park itself.

Caravan park

I don't think I get caravans - I mean, I can see the point of an actual caravan which you take wherever you want to go, and I can see the point of a holiday chalet which different people can use for a week or two at a time, but I can't see much attraction in buying a flimsy sort of fake house and propping it up in among a thousand others exactly the same, and I definitely can't see why the result should be called a caravan. But no one's asking me to have one, and I'm not in charge of their name, so never mind.

Crimdon beach itself was completely different from anything that had come before, a great sweep of sand with only dunes behind. Even here, though, there was the sense of having lost everything that once made the coast, because it had been a very popular holiday spot in the days when people stayed closer to home.

Crimdon beach

This was the end of County Durham, and the end of the coast path booklet, but there was still a path to follow on towards Hartlepool - more or less.

Signpost

Having disentangled myself from the beck and the detritus of recent flooding, and discovered the path not at all where the map said it was, it then led me on across that other coastal classic, a golf course - always a slightly nervewracking experience.

Crimdon Beck

The path was fairly clear as far as the clubhouse, with occasional marker posts, even if there didn't seem to be any good reason why I couldn't have been on a better path round the edge of the course, but from there it vanished on the ground - the map seemed to show it continuing along a track, but the only track in sight was going in entirely the wrong direction from the clubhouse to the road. A helpful man sorted me out and told me just to keep walking in the same straight line, and there were odd traces of path again, but not much.

He'd said I could either go out the right hand corner or out the left hand corner to the coast, but only the right was marked on the map and that was where the path led, with a clear exit, so I stuck to it rather than trying to find a way round the golfers to a path I wasn't sure was there.

The path was quite clear from here, but very much industrial wasteland - a straight line with a solid tall fence on one side and nothing but the concrete posts of one on the other, with only the distant sea and old pier to cheer things up.

Industrial wasteland

It was just after here that things got a bit too exciting - I was quite happily going along with the fence still on my right but open ground on the left, following not only a public footpath sign but an England Coast Path sign, when I came to a bit of fencing ahead of me. With my way blocked ahead and to the right I went left, where I ended up in open space again in what seemed to be a storage are for building materials, but with no obvious way to go. Getting onto a mound took me through some deep and sticky building site mud, but showed a possible gap in a fence ahead to the left - that turned out to be only a complicated triangular bit, and I was now well inside a 'keep out' building side fence, without ever having knowingly gone in!

Given the mud and long walk behind me, and with the fence built into mounds of sand, under seemed the best way to go - I'm not sure I've ever tested the cat theory that I can go wherever my head can before, but it worked, and I was free and on the beach - and right next to the old pier, which was definitely a bonus.

Old Pier

I kept to the beach for a while, but when I saw a footpath sign up above I decided to go up and find out where I should have been - across another bit of wasteland, and then to a park leading to the start of the houses on the headland.

With the light fading it seemed to make more sense to leave the headland for the next morning, though, so I finished off with just a long main road walk into Hartlepool, past a roundabout covered in alien eggs, and eventually down to Trincomalee and the centre of town.

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[ChrisW]

I could read these all day mate, even though "it's grim up north" as my old mate from London would say, it's beautifully grim, more people should holiday there to get some money going around the economy..I'll be doing a bit when I get home That alien beach is worth a day out on its own

[johnkaysleftleg]

Shame the tide was in or you could have detoured to the caves at Blackhall (the village I grew up in),

Blackhall Rocks by Anthony Young, on Flickr

As for the Alien beach as you no doubt know it's the left over from the coal industry, it's not the most weird beach on the Durham coast however with Chemical Beach at Seaham (you got a shot of the sea stack poking up) winning hands down, it's so alien in fact that Ridley Scott used it for some prison planet scenes in an Alien movie.

My Chemical Romance by Anthony Young, on Flickr

From Pillar to Post by Anthony Young, on Flickr

Golden Glow by Anthony Young, on Flickr

[nigheandonn]

I know I missed a lot on the beaches by sticking to the path, but they just weren't very tempting at the time! The booklet never told me about caves, though.

Your pictures make me so hungry for light - you can see I had nothing except that grey grey grey, although my photos still wouldn't look anything like yours anyway

[nigheandonn]

ChrisW: I love the north, and I don't think doing this that I've found the industrial bits of Northumberland and County Durham less interesting than the 'pretty' bits (although I suppose I wouldn't want them to go on forever) - it all makes up one whole, and I like the changes.

I love the idea of you among your amazing mountains pining for the grim north, though!

[ChrisW]

I love the idea of you among your amazing mountains pining for the grim north, though!

I can't help it mate....it's in the blood