Gibraltar Point to Skegness and return

Gibraltar Point is at the North West extremity of The Wash, where the coast (that has been heading in a north-easterly direction) turns to head north towards Skegness. It's only about 14 miles as the crow flies from here to the Norfolk Coast on the opposite side of  The Wash, around Hunstanton and Holme-next-the-Sea, but it would probably take  abput 2 hours to drive around between the two places, and it has taken us a very long time to walk around this mostly very isolated section of coast path, often separated from the sea by miles of marsh. Indeed, at the time of writing (September 2025) we have not actually completed the walk around The Wash ; it isn't possible to walk the whole way without a substantial diversion from the coast, because there is no bridge over the Steeping River, just to the south of Gilraltar Point, and we also currently have to walk from Leverton Pumping Station (Wrangle Sea Bank) to Friskney Eaudyke, the official end point to the south of Gibraltar Point. 

To be honest, I don’t think I knew where Gibraltar Point was until we started planning our walk on this section of the coast path, but yet the name was familiar to me. I think that this is because it features in the Shipping Forecast, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at the start and end of broadcasting each day; in the forecast for inland waters, Gibraltar Point marks the boundary of areas stretching to Whitby and to North Foreland (which is in Kent). As with many of the Shipping Forecast locations, Gibraltar Point feels pretty remote, but it is only 3 miles from Skegness!

It took us well over an hour and a half to drive from home, perhaps not terribly sensible for a shortish day walk, but we wanted a break from decorating and wanted to get back to the Lincolnshire Section of the King Charles III England Coast Path - but we have been away a lot in the last couple of months and didn’t want another overnight stay. We parked at the car park nearest to the visitor centre (TF556581) and paid our £5 for parking. We’d been alerted by a note on the Lincolnshire Wildlife Trust’s website that the parking payment machines here only take cash, so we used some £1 coins from the stash we have in the car; this stash topped up is increasingly difficult because we use cash so infrequently. There’s actually a note on the machine to say that you can pay by card in the Visitor Centre, but we discovered later that their card machine wasn’t working!

After making use of the visitor centre’s toilets, we set off walking, taking a path towards the coast across vegetated marshland, though most of the plants had flowered earlier in the summer. When the coast path was signposted to the left, that was where we went, heading north on a generally well signposted path that headed north through the dunes. It was clear the we were some distance from the sea, though we had occasional glimpses to it, and to an offshore windfarm. We climbed up to a viewpoint for a better view, then continued. The coastal strip between Gibraltar Point and Skegness consists of two parallel lines of dunes (unimaginatively known as the ‘west dunes’ and the ‘east dunes’), with salt marsh in between. Beyond the east dunes there’s the beach and the sea, while our path was meandering its way along the west dunes, with colourful vegetation, including sea buckthorn.

Our path left the west dunes and descended to the salt marsh (possibly to avoid Seacroft Golf Course) and followed along the edge of this. It's a curious landscape, with the large flat expanse of marsh, with  red-coloured vegetation (sea lavender?) but the line of dunes to the east meaning that the sea is not visible. The marsh obviously floods from time to time, but today it was dry and cracked, and the vegetation was mostly dried up. A few other people were about, with the flat marsh providing a good place for dogs to exercise.

For some time we’d been able to see a white house, apparently on its own, up in the dunes to our left, however, just past a row of posts across the salt marsh, our route climbed up to a road, where we discovered that the white house is the first of a row of des res properties along Seacroft Esplanade. The houses are big and presumably have sea views from their upper floors, and I think they back onto the golf course. They also have very long front drives, so much so that a Post Office van was driving up the drives to deliver post rather than parking on the road. Unsurprisingly, there are also residential homes and sheltered housing along here. 

Towards the southern end of Seacroft Esplanade, a group of people were gathering by their parked cars, but who were they? I’d have said they were walkers, but they had too much equipment; for now we had to abandon the question as a mystery. A delightful path on the right took us through a wooded area of dunes, and back to salt marsh, which we followed along the edge of as previously, now in the company of rather more others, presumably because we were closer to the centre of Skegness. Indeed, when we reached the end of this strip of salt marsh the route took us throughout Skegness's Princes Parade car park then onto the promenade.

Our attention had been drawn skywards by two things. The first was an enormous kite, and as we walked along the promenade we passed the man who was flying this, though the base was anchored. He explained that it has been flying higher, but he'd replaced the tail with a heavier one, then the wind had dropped [and the tail had been changed again by the time we passed it on our return walk]. There was another kite, in the shape of a fish, that hadn't got off the ground at all. The second object reaching to the sky was a narrow tower with a clock tower at the top. As we got closer, we saw a spinning disk of seats rising up the tower;  this is the new (and very scary-looking) "Big Ben Tower" ride. 

As seasoned long-distance footpath walkers, we’re used to the culture shock of passing from the solitude of a country path to the hustle and bustle of a seaside resort. We first encountered this at the end of the Offa’s Dyke Path in Prestatyn, and the central section of Skegness's promenade, which we were approaching, is certainly quite a change from Gibraltar Point. The area around the Pleasure Beach and the Clock Tower (built in 1898 to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee - and now dwarfed by the Big Ben Tower) was busy and very noisy.  The Pier was a little quieter, and we stopped for lunch, sitting on a bench on the Pier with a good view along the beach to the north. However, it would have been difficult to even attempt to recreate the photos of my mother and her family from the 1920s and 1930s, as we'd done last time we were here.  The pier is also a lot shorter than it was, though there seem to be plans to rebuild the rest of it.

After lunch we retraced our steps to Gibralter Point, returning to the salt marsh rather sooner rather than walking past all the houses on Seacroft Esplanade. Then, in the Gibraltar Point nature reserve, a man stopped us to point out some of the wildlife, and we took a path to a viewpoint slightly closer to the coast where we fell into conversation with a man and his wife who visit once a year. Finally, we passed the visitor centre and walked on down to the Steeping River (at the time we visited a rather muddy creek) and the Wash Observation Point at Lill's Hut. As we have come to expect around here, the view is of saltmarsh rather than the sea! We stopped at the Visitor Centre for a welcome cup of tea, then had a good journey home.

Following leg (anticlockwise)