Horden to Seaham

It had rained heavily in the night, but the weather forecast for today had been good, so we were somewhat disappointed to discover it still raining when we were ready to leave the cottage this morning. We stalled for about an hour but, in the light of the modified forecast which said that the probability of rain would decrease markedly mid-morning, we left the cottage a bit before 10am. It wasn't a long drive from the cottage to Horden, and the driving route that Apple Maps sent us on used some of the same back streets through the former colliery village that we had used on foot when walking to the bus stop yesterday.  The Limekiln Gill car park is rather further down the access road than shown on the OS map, around NZ454408 (just keep driving towards the beach and the car park is where the road ends). 

It was still raining as we parked the car, changed into walking boots, and said "hello" to a professional dog walker, one of whose dogs was distinctly nervous. We'd climbed some distance back up the access road before I realised that I'd left my walking poles in the car, so Richard kindly went back for them. We turned off the road onto a relatively flat field which we walked across in heading back to the coast, and then past a rather nice large sculpture of a little tern. 

We continued along a relatively flat stretch of coastal walking before encountering the first of a number of denes that came in quick succession. The rain had stopped, so we took our over-trousers off, then promptly regretted it: The rain may have stopped but the ground was muddy and a short descent at the top end of Blackhills Gill was distinctly challenging. If I'd still had my over-trousers on, I'd definitely have gone down on my bottom! Later steep descents had steps to help us and  there was no more rain; it also got warmer as the day progressed. We got quite warm as we meandered our way around the Horden Grasslands Nature reserve, so the waterproof jackets came off too.

We passed a couple more sculptures on the approach to Warren House Gill, with the two wings of the "Horden Butterfly" framing the descent, with the two wings bearing contrasting poetry that reflects the area's transformation from eyesore to its current state. The left-hand wing bears the words "Sanderling seeking, butterflies spreading" while the right-hand wing says "A wind that carries memories of coal". Steps helped with the descent and ascent, then there was about a mile of relatively level coastal walking to Fox Holes Dene, which we essentially walked around - all the way to the railway and back. On the northern side of the dene we joined a surfaced path which had come out of the village of Easington Colliery, just inland. Easington was well known for its coal mining so,  again, the transformation from a landscape spoiled by coal waste to the current lovely wooded landscape leading to a delightful section of coast was amazing. There were benches regularly spaced along the path and when we were nearly back at the coast, we stopped at one for lunch.

Back on the coast, we were now walking towards Shippersea Point, with attractive views to coves, stacks and cliffs. We really could have been in the middle of nowhere, not just a mile north-east of the site of a colliery. We walked close to the railway for a while, being passed by one of the chuggy two-carriage trains that link the villages on this section of coast and also by one of the occasional inter-city trains heading from London to Sunderland. 

We were aware from the map that we would soon have a section of walking on the other side of the railway, but the shading and the diamonds marking the long-distance footpath on the map obscured the contours and we were also unaware how beautiful it would be. The path descended steeply into Hawthorn Dene, passing under a railway viaduct. There was noise from a group of young people ahead of us, down by Hawthorn Burn. When we reached them, their leaders told the group to stand to one side as we passed, but I felt rather self-conscious, old and unfit as we walked past and  was worried that I'd struggle to climb back out of the dene faster than a group of teenagers. I needn't have worried; they stopped so often than we soon pulled ahead.  After climbing out of the dene, we took a path still on the non-coastal  side of the railway, until the point where we could get across the line on a bridge, and out onto Chourdon Point. 

In the distance, we could see the lighthouse on the outer harbour wall at Seaham, but we still had some way to go.  There were a number of other walkers about and a choice of paths; we opted for a less major one closer to the coast but after a short distance it looped back to join the route that those in the know were using.  The approach to Nose's point was definitely not as we'd implied from  the map; there is no need to loop around to the left.  Nose's Point was once the site of heavy industry (the Dawdon Colliery was here). Now there is a real contrast between the buildings of Dawdon (a suburb of Seaham) to the north and a lovely beach to the south, with magnesian limestone cliffs and stacks.

All too soon we were approaching the centre of Seaham. We passed the harbour, initially built in 1828 to transport goods from local industries, and later extended and deepened to cope with the large volume of coal produced in the area. It has a rather complicated structure, with a series of locks, but wasn't exactly busy. We left the coastal path and headed into the town (historically called "Seaham Harbour", which is confusing). We were aiming for a train in about 45 minutes, but we'd realised that we could get advance purchase tickets if we bought them online, so we wanted somewhere to sit down to do battle with the Trainline on our phones. We found a Greggs in the Byron Place Shopping Centre (named after Lord Byron who was briefly married to the local landowner's daughter) and drank tea while buying train tickets to Horden; with my Senior Railcard, mine only cost just over £1!