Berwickshire Coastal Path

There’s a lot of cliff-top walking, on characteristic red sandstone cliffs as well as harder igneous rocks around St Abbs Head. The geology that the route traverses means there are some steep ascents and descents, though nothing was beyond a somewhat unfit 60 year old! There are pretty villages and harbours and plenty of wildlife: birds, seals and wildflowers. The small town of Eyemouth, with its bustling harbour is about halfway along the route. Berwick-upon-Tweed, at the southern end of the route, has some notable architectural features, in particular its medieval town walls, its Elizabethan ramparts and Britain's earliest barracks buildings. I suppose you’d expect a fair amount of fortification for a town that has changed hands more times than any other in the world apart from Jerusalem (or so we were told at an exhibition at Berwick’s Main Guard). However attention in Berwick is inevitably drawn to its bridges over the River Tweed, with the glorious estuary underneath.

We walked the Berwickshire Coastal Path in July 2018, in the middle of a heat wave and drought that was affecting much of the northern hemisphere. It was fortunate on several levels that we had decided to on this occasion return to our former practice of booking the holiday with one of the walking holiday companies. The company we selected was Shepherds Walks Holidays, who we had not booked with before but we’d heard good things about them and they didn’t disappoint – it’s significant that they clearly have local knowledge, of both the accommodation and the route. The package included two night’s accommodation in Berwick-upon-Tweed (one night at the start of the holiday and one at the end), transport from Berwick to Coldingham (with our driver being the company’s owner Jon), and accommodation in Coldingham Bay and Marshall Meadows. This led to rather varied lengths of walking days, but none of them were overlong, in the heat that worked out well as we were able to take things gently, and we found plenty to do in or around Berwick on a free afternoon following the shortest day of walking.

One of the reasons we used a walking holiday company on this occasion was that I had arranged to speak at a meeting in Lancaster on my way to Berwick, meaning I arrived with laptop and smart clothes – not great if we’d carried everything ourselves. There were all sorts of problems on the railway network, but I had a relatively straightforward journey from Lancaster via Carlisle and Newcastle upon Tyne to Berwick. Richard was not so fortunate on his journey from Norfolk; he got to Peterborough on time but his train was substantially delayed there and reached Berwick more than four hours late!

Shepherds Walks Holidays provided us with the Harvey strip map for the Berwickshire and Northumberland Coastal Paths and also with a Garmin GPS Unit on loan. Call me old-fashioned, but I still like to have a proper OS map (though I now have a subscription to the online OS maps, which is also very useful). On this occasion we already had the relevant OS Explorer sheet (Sheet 346: Berwick-upon-Tweed) which we also carried with us. Fortunately the whole route is on one sheet; less fortunately the route of the Berwickshire Coastal Path is only shown between Coldingham and Berwick-upon-Tweed and it is also worth noting that, typically for Scotland (with its different rights of access), there isn’t even a footpath shown where we were walking. The signposting of the route is a bit patchy (with generic Coastal Path signs, not specific ones for the Berwickshire Coastal Path) but this didn’t cause many problems, partly because, in particular when you remember that we log routes on Richard’s iPad as we walk, we were carrying a wide range of maps and devices with which to find our route.

When we had reached Berwick-upon-Tweed upon completing the Northumberland Coast Path in August 2015 we had realised that we had not (quite) reached the Scottish Border, but we had also realised that we’d reached Scotland on our meanderings from Lands End, by way of St Cuthbert’s Way. However the Berwickshire Coastal Path has taken us over the border in a more useful way. It is not much use to us that Cockburnspath is the end point of the Southern Upland Way; much as it is a path that we’d like to walk (Helen and Tom have completed it), it is probably too difficult for us. However there is a link path from Cockburnspath just up the coast to Dunbar, where the John Muir Way starts, and the John Muir Way crosses the West Highland Way to the north of Glasgow. That lot would get us to Fort William, if that is what we want to do.

For more detail of the walk, follow the links starting with the first leg of the path.

Our photographs of this walk are here.