The South of the North

I know that our bodies were made to thrive only in pure air, and the scenes in which pure air is found.

in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

In the year before I stopped teaching, when I was trying to get my head around whether I could be an effective solo walker, I stayed with a good friend near Pitlochry and did a series of mountain walks to see how, on my own, I got on. Three years later I’m going back to Scotland, this time without the tiny hire car, but instead with a train ticket to the grand northern capital of Auld Reekie, and another home a week later from the border town of Berwick, at the mouth of the river Tweed, just on the English side of the border.

In between the two lie 130km of coastline, with various paths to choose from. Initially my route takes me along the John Muir Way, the coast-to-coast cycle and walking path that commemorates the great conservationist and ‘father of national parks’ in America. We walked a section of this trail back in 2019 as part of our Land’s End to John O’Groats journey, further west around Linlithgow and Falkirk. This time I’m walking eastwards, from Edinburgh (via a detour up to Arthur’s Seat to take a view) along the JMW to Muir’s birthplace of Dunbar. An official link path then deposits me at the start of the next named trail, Berwickshire Coastal Path, which I follow down to its eponymous county town, where I finish.

Route-finding I hope won’t present me with too many difficulties; the most complicated part of the planning turned out to be finding accommodation options. In the end I have elected to spend three nights at an AirBnB in Dunbar, using the coastal bus services to port me to the start and end of a couple of the days. Then it was a matter of trying to dovetail a decent chunk of walking with the bus stops, and bus stop exigencies have resulted in less satisfactorily even days’ distances: a paltry 17km on Tuesday, and a monstrous 27km on Wednesday… a day when the first bus doesn’t deposit me at the beginning of the route until 10.30am. I might have to resort to a taxi to make an earlier start.

I am taking walking boots (new footbeds have worked a treat and compeed will stay firmly at the bottom of my pack), a hat and gloves and full wets, since I am anticipating showery conditions, with some chilly days and quite a bit of bright breeze. Odd to think that this time last year I had to take a break from my walk to Aberdovey due to heat exhaustion. Oh, I am looking forward to the vistas of salt water: first the mighty Firth of Forth, then the chilly North Sea, and finally the looping estuary of the great salmon river Tweed. Looking forward also to some company: dinner with a friend on the first night, and being joined part way through Saturday’s walk by others. I am looking forward to sea cliffs, and sea birds, and early autumn beaches. And looking forward to seven days of walking, come rain, come shine.

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