Weather: Fine, cloudy, breezy.
Distance:
13 km (8.1 miles) Total Distance: 3139 miles
Breakfast was good overlooking the Farne Islands though there were no
sign of any seals at this time of year.
I only had tea and cereal because otherwise he wasn’t going to serve me
till 9 o’clock so we agreed I could have a light breakfast earlier.
Parking at Warren Mill was not that
easy. There was no obvious coastal path
route over this next section so I had to keep to the minor roads which were
very quiet on a Sunday morning. I
didn’t want to try getting down to the coast because I feared I may get trapped
trying to get across a river or something and would have to backtrack a long
way. There were no footpaths along the coastal section.
Eventually, I did make it down to the coast via some pretty
poor footpaths where the farmer had ploughed up a field. I decided to try to stick to the coast even
though there was no official footpath here – it did look fairly well trodden.
There were signs up saying it was a nature reserve and it was a pretty
area. I approached some bird reserves
and half expected someone to come out and tell me off. I passed one box where I think the warden was
on the phone but he didn’t seem to mind me being there.
I carried on and just past Granary Point it got much too
marshy to continue so I had to track inland ducking under some barbed wire
fences. The paths were very wet after
weeks of recent heavy rain and the last mile or so was difficult going.
I stopped for the day at the causeway over to
Lindisfarne. Again I was an hour or so
early for a bus so I started to hitch.
One car stopped but they were going north on the A1 so I left them go
knowing that hitching on the A1 itself would be very difficult.
After another 15 minutes, after I had walked
through Beal itself, a very elderly lady in a very small Fiat car stopped and
offered me a lift. She had just been to a church service on Lindisfarne. She was so far forward in her seat that she
has to virtually turn backward to talk to me in the passenger seat – this was
pretty worrying as every time she did this the car would veer all over the
road. Again she took me out of her way
and all the way back to Warren Mill where she stopped in the middle of the road
and switched off the engine. I
eventually made my excuses and got away.
Some time later after I had changed my boots I headed for the A1 and I
met her again trying to get across the A1 in the small car. I headed south before I had a chance of
seeing her having an accident and blaming myself for it
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