Hartlepool (Marina to Golf Club)

After a cold start, the weather forecast for today was the most promising of the whole week, and it was indeed a dry and sunny day. However, I hadn't slept well so didn't feel up to a long walk. In addition, we had a delayed start, to enable me to complete a work task I had foolishly promised for this morning; Richard went shopping while I did this. So it was 11.10 before we were parked at the transport interchange at Hartlepool Station, chosen for its relative closeness to the point we had got to yesterday, its relatively modest parking charge (£2.50) and the fact that we stood a reasonable chance of returning somewhere nearby by public transport. It was also not too far to walk back to the point we'd reached yesterday, close to Hartlepool Marina (more specifically, near Slake Terrace and the Tees and Hartlepool Yacht Club) There were good views to HMS Trincomalee at the National Museum of the Royal Navy. 

We continued along Slake Terrace and over the entrance to the Marina, then turned left along its northern edge. More good views to HMS Trincomalee! From the end of the Marina, we crossed a car park and turned right onto the A179, Marina Way. We continued north on the pavement by the main road then, at the point the A179 turned left at a roundabout, we continued straight ahead on the A1048 towards the Headland.  It wasn't exactly picturesque; the docks were to our right and to the left were housing estates. The good news is that we were passed by lots of buses, so there would be an easy way of getting back to the town centre.  We turned right at a junction and continued onto the Headland itself, passing an old Carnegie Library on the left and still with docks on the right. Eventually, we reached the picturesque old part of the Headland, with the 12th Century St Hilda's Church up on a hill and the town walls above the harbour, backed by a row of multi-coloured properties, 

We passed the entrance to the Victoria Harbour, with a lighthouse at the end of the breakwater that I didn't recognise as a lighthouse because it now has a radar beacon on top of it! We walked along to a longer breakwater; there were seats along the front here that would have given us somewhere to sit for lunch, but we actually descended to a lower promenade by the paddling pool, close to the site of the former outdoor swimming pool which was destroyed in a storm in 1953. We returned to the upper promenade and continued past the Heugh Lighthouse and Heugh Gun Battery, which saw action in the Bombardment of the Hartlepools in December 1914. We walked past the Town Moor, with its Beacon, and continued, now heading north-west.

There was a lovely beach on our right-hand side, but not too long ago there would have been industry on the land to our left.  That seems to have largely gone now though  Spion Cop Cemetery (named after the Battle of Spion Cop) is still there, though no longer accepting new burials and now managed as a nature reserve.  We were on a good modern path, though after passing the cemetery our onward route suddenly became unclear. There is a large new Persimmon housing development ("Marine Point" being built and we weren't sure whether we were meant to go in front of or behind two rows of houses; the correct answer is "in front", but inevitably that is not what we did to start with! Then, at the end of these houses, we'd expected to go slightly inland, but the developers were doing something just where we wanted to walk, so we took the pragmatic approach and walked down an unsurfaced slope and back up the other side. Other walkers had taken slightly different routes, including just continuing straight ahead, somewhat closer to the shore, and we all ended up in the same point.

It turns out that the houses are being built on the former site of the Hartlepool Magnesia Works, where magnesium oxide (used, among other things, to line steel furnaces) was produced by reacting dolomite with sea water. There was a tall chimney here which has been demolished, but "Steetley Pier", built to pipe sea water to the site, remains. It looks dilapidated, though it turns out that the gap in it was produced deliberately to prevent access. The future of the pier seems uncertain; it looks as if there had been plans to demolish it, but locals love it, and it is certainly photogenic.

As we continued, it felt as if we'd left Hartlepool behind and had lovely views of the beach and the sea. We headed slightly inland and followed a narrow path along the edge of the greens of a golf course, and at the clubhouse we decided that it was time to call it a day, assuming there would be easy access inland to somewhere we could catch a bus to. This was sort of true...a man appeared from the clubhouse and when we explained our plans, rather grumpily said that they would let us out to their car park (yes, you have to go through a locked gate), but what we should have done is take a path some distance back which would bring us out further up the access road. So we got out, but this is not an official route! We walked up the access road, eventually passing the gate where the path we should have taken emerges, and after wallking through a tunnel under the railway, found ourselves in a residential area - I think this is the area known as Hart Station.