Coldingham Bay to Marshall Meadows

We woke early to another glorious morning and opened the curtains of our room at St Vedas to a lovely view of the beach. The day was somewhat on the warm side for walking, though we’ve known worse. There were not the substantial climbs and descents that we had to the west of St Abbs Head yesterday, but there were a fair number of smaller ups and downs. Thankfully the walk was not that long, though 11.5 miles is somewhat further than the 9.5 miles that had been advertised in the Shepherds Walks’ information pack.

Following a health scare earlier in the year, I have been trying to reduce the saturated fat in my diet. This is easy when I’m at home in Norfolk or in my weekday residence in Sherington. However it is quite challenging when travelling. At one of the places I’d stayed in Lancaster, on my circuitous route to this holiday, I’d ended up with Eggs Benedict – this is one of the breakfasts I enjoy, but hollandaise sauce is not great for the purposes of my diet! However, it’s not a strict diet and it has had the benefit of allowing me to really enjoy the food that I no longer eat regularly. This morning I allowed myself part of a cooked breakfast, including bacon, and it was delicious. Over breakfast we talked with the owners who used to be farmers, originally in Leicestershire, until foot and mouth caused them to diversify. They moved to Coldingham where they initially farmed as well as running St Vedas Hotel, then their son built up the adjacent Surf Shop and Surf School, which seems to be the main focus of the business now. The “hotel” is really a B&B not a hotel (they don’t serve evening meals), but it is comfortable enough, with a glorious location and friendly owners.

We left St Vedas soon after 9am and stopped to don sun-cream at a bench very close to the hotel. We then went down to the beach to take some photographs, before leaving on a path past the Beach Café (also owned by the same family as own St Vedas Hotel). We climbed up towards Milldown Point then immediately descended again to a pretty little cove, saying hello to a couple with an Old English Sheepdog. We climbed again to Yellow Craig Head then descended again to a lovely “strand” where a couple with a black labrador were wild camping.

Our route back to the cliff top was not initially clear, but Richard (in charge of the map) noticed that we needed to head slightly inland through the wooded Fleur’s Dean before ascending up Hallydown Dean. It wasn’t a difficult climb and we were soon back on top of the cliff. We were now quite close to the holiday park (aka caravan park) to the north of Eyemouth, but the cliffs we were next to were attractive, with colourful wild flowers and lots of birdlife. We walked around the edge of the holiday village, stopping (though not at the first bench we came to, because that had just been painted!) for our two-hourly suncream donning and sock-changing event.

As we passed Eyemouth Fort we noticed that the lifeboat was out, close to a gig, though whether on a training exercise or a real “shout” I don’t know. Soon afterwards the lifeboat headed back into the inner harbour, at impressive speed, though we were left speculating that if most boats went at that speed so close to land, they would be told off! We stopped at the Co-Op in Eyemouth for lunch provisions and stopped to eat a peach. Then our attention was drawn to the “Widows and Bairns” sculpture, one of four such sculptures in this section of coast commemorating the hurricane of 14th October 1881 which devastated the fishing fleet, leading to the deaths of 189 fishermen. Poignantly, the sculptures show not the men but the 93 women left as widows and the 267 children left without fathers.

The path along the coast undulates, and ahead of us we could see the East coast main line and the A1 looping around towards the coast, with the hamlet of Cowdrait (part of the village of Burnmouth) nestling close to the shore. This looked like a good place to stop for a break, perhaps with an ice cream. However, it was distinctly warm and the path was increasingly overgrown, so our progress was slow and it proved necessary to stop for more suncream and a change of socks before we started our descent.

We emerged from the overgrown path at the upper end of Burnmouth. According to the map, there is a pub somewhere near here but it wasn’t obvious and it didn’t seem worth wasting time and energy on the offchance of finding it, so we started the steep descent towards the pretty little Burnmouth Harbour. More houses came into view, mostly former fisherman’s cottages. When we reached the harbour we discovered another of the “Widows and Bairns” sculptures, with many fewer women and children depicted, but none the less poignant for this.

We walked along the road to Cowdrait. It was delightfully peaceful, but with a distinct shortage of ice-cream vans or shops. As Richard pointed out, there isn’t a huge amount of passing trade! Inevitably, after the long descent to the hamlets down here near Burnmouth Harbour, we eventually had to climb again. We climbed up between the houses and eventually reached a sheep field. Here the sign pointed straight across the field and we followed that direction, realising over the other side that we had gone too far to the left. We walked around the field to the right place and back along the track on the other side of the fence.

The next section of today’s walk was perhaps the least enjoyable of the whole of the Berwickshire Coastal Path, though this conclusion may have been biased as result of the heat. The railway was to our right and the coast to our left and we initially had pleasant enough views, in particular back the way we had come. However a narrow ridge of land appeared between the path and the sea, meaning that the view of the coast was taken from us. This section appears to be a nature reserve and shortly after a sign to “Peregrines and the Bothy”, the good views reappeared, in particularly a view over red sandstone cliffs to the ruins of the bothy down by the sea beneath us.

Eventually we reached a fence at right angles to our direction of travel; this is essentially the Scotland/England border. We photographed the border sign by the railway track, then walked along the fence before crossing from Scotland to England at the path’s border crossing. Amusingly, whilst we’d been working through a broad but unkempt nature reserve in Scotland, in England we were on a mowed strip of grass between two fences.

We walked around a collection of mobile homes (part of the Marshall Meadows Caravan Park) and reached a junction of paths by the railway. We left the Coastal Path here and took a small road bridge over the railway and slightly inland towards the Marshall Meadows Country House Hotel where we were staying. “Marshall Meadows” is a rather curious name and apparently refers to land give to the Marshall of Berwick upon Tweed in exchange for his protection of the people of Berwick in the early 17th Century when James VI of Scotland also became king of England. The house was built in 1780 and was privately owned by various members of the great and good of Berwick-upon-Tweed until 1986, with the exception of a period during the Second World War when it was a nursing home. It has been a hotel since 1986, though the current owners, the Hester family, only took over in 2011.

We had been warned that there was an “event” in the grounds of the hotel this afternoon, and it was in full swing, so we decided not to take the path through the grounds but rather to walk around to the proper entrance. We were warmly welcomed and directed to Room 6 which is obviously one of the hotel’s smaller rooms and somewhat warm, with excellent views of the grounds and therefore of the event! However the hotel is generally rather tasteful and well proportioned and things improved following tea and home-made shortbread in the lounge, and a bath. We wandered out into the grounds to investigate the “event”, a family “festival” organised by the owners of local holiday villages (which, the owner of the hotel told us) is what you are meant to call caravan parks of the ilk that’s a million miles from the one down at the coast at Marshall Meadows – here the residents want peace and quiet whilst the attendees at the “event” were clearly the partying sort.