A Walking Holiday Laced with Trains by Tansy Hepton

‘Swaledale and Sheep All photos by Pete Belsey who retains copyright’.

June 2025

The intercity “high-speed” train from Wakefield was a come down from Japan’s Shinkansen. It may have had a sloping nose but was running 20 minutes late and its toilet was out of order and smelly. In Leeds, we were just in time to catch the modest 2 carriage local train heading out to one of England’s most famous routes – Settle to Carlisle – with views and history unfolding mile by mile.

Tansy with novelty train snack

The last time I was in the car park of Kirkby Stephen station it was to see my train departing, leaving me with a long taxi ride to get to an interview in Leeds. It left me asking two questions: why do UK trains only leave on time when you need them to be late and why is a station built two miles out of town?

British geography dictates where many towns are built, often on rivers, canals or natural harbours, but railways came later to the party. Some towns were lucky enough to be directly on the new railway routes, others had to make do with a nearby station that they could claim as their own; Kirkby Stephen is one of these (Bodmin Parkway being another).

Kirkby Stephen town square hadn’t changed in the 9 years since we said goodbye to walking companions who were pressing on with Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk. We had spent 8 magnificent days getting there, starting from St Bees and crossing the high fells of the Lake District and the beginnings of the North Pennines. Now we’d finally returned, with a different group of friends, to complete the walk, staying in a mixture of pubs and B&B’s, with the lovely luggage transfer people moving our bags on every day.

Although the biggest of the hills were behind us, we still had 110 miles to walk over 9 days, starting with a 1,300 ft (400m) climb up to Nine Standards Rigg. The history of this set of tall drystone cairns of differing shapes and sizes is not known, although there are records of cairns existing here going back at least 500 years. The current ones look too well made to be old, but winds and snow will take their toll on anything built on this exposed ridge.

Nine Standards Rigg

From here, we dropped down into Swaledale, a land of green, grey and white – fields and trees with the freshness of spring, the criss-cross patterns of dry stone walls and the sheep, so many sheep. The hedges are bursting with hawthorn blossom and the verges crammed with buttercups, dandelions and cow parsley. We squeeze through the narrow breaks in the walls, known locally as “fat ladies’ stiles” – not a problem for us, at least as long as we take our daypacks off first.

Swaledale finishes at Richmond where the river widens and the tower of the ruined castle dominates the town. Here French restaurants and award-winning pie shops sit around the cobbled market square and our sweat-stained clothes feel more out of place.

The 25 miles across the Vale of Mowbray doesn’t have the chocolate-box beauty of the dales, nor the bleak beauty of the moors, but is a true slice of rural England, with farms, woods, tracks and villages. The dry spring has made our walking easier, but has left the soil in the fields cracked and hard. This is land where transport fits: we cross the east coast main-line rail track and watch the trains blur past beneath us; stand on the lesser-used Middlesbrough line and imitate train horns to scare the photographer; and dash across the six lanes of the busy A19.

And then it’s the North York Moors. With my Cornish roots I feel at home here, although it’s mostly bilberry amongst the heather, rather than gorse. We have a punishingly long 19-mile day, 5 miles of it along the now-abandoned Rosedale railway track built by Irish navvies (named for the navigation routes they built – canals, railways and roads) in the 1850’s to take iron ore from the moorland mines to Middlesbrough. We stoke up our energy with lunch at the remote Lion Inn on Blakey Ridge and then have the treat of a ridge walk looking down into the isolated and wonderfully named Great Fry Up Dale. We commit to returning and finding a B&B there – one that lives up to the promise of its name!

Great Fry Up Dale

 Our final 2 days are gentler, and we are beginning to feel demob happy. There is more evidence of long history here, including the hollowed out paving stones of a pack horse trail, a pair of mythical fertility stones (we persuaded one of our number to take the slide and await the results with interest!) and a damp dark one-room hermitage dating from 1790. We stop for lunch at Grosmont station, part of the heritage line that operates between Pickering and Whitby. Sadly the steam trains are not running because of fire risk from the dry weather, but we enjoy the 1950’s style – and the more modern coffee and cake.

The last few miles are along the coast, tall cliffs of boulder clay and Jurassic shale, gulls catching the wind and the smell of the sea. Robin Hoods Bay is a narrow arrowhead of roofs pointing to the slipway and the beach. We dip our toes into the North Sea to prove we have really crossed from Coast to Coast, and celebrate with National Trust tea and scones, followed by beer and Whitby crab salads.

Our return home is by bus to Scarborough and train to Huddersfield, bookending the trip and giving me (just about) the right to post Amanda another guest blog.

 Thank you so much to Tansy for sharing such a great walk and to Pete for his great illustrative photography. Also of note is her skill at cunningly including so many train references. I know she would have gladly 'Departed from Redruth Station' but living in Yorkshire it would have made it quite a trek! I would love to do that walk one day but for now I recently enjoyed reading David Nicholls' You are Here. He is a great walker though says he doesn't enjoy it, it is just something he has to do...

Next blog will also be a walking one, a bit nearer to home, on a section of the Tamara Way.