The big breakfast

With the Coast to Coast behind us, we promised ourselves a full English on the morning of departure. It's been almost three weeks of muesli and fresh fruit first thing. As we're not walking we can indulge, though with these two pesky early risers, I don't get a lie in. I'll have to wait until I get home for that little beauty.
I pitch up to breakfast sporting the t-shirt we all wore at Uncle Mick's 70th birthday party. He's completely taken aback and chuffed to bits.

After our slap-up feast it's time to say goodbye. Uncles Paddy and Mick are returning to London via their cousin Molly in Manchester and I'll mooch around Whitby for a while before heading home. So there they go, the Bog Cotton Boys, off on another safari.

It feels a bit like waving off my two new Dads. We've been thrown together so intimately these past few weeks. I feel so glad that I had the time to spare, not to mention the good sense to say 'yes' to the adventure. 
Of course, none of it would have happened without Mick's singular approach to organisation, booking hostels before Paddy and I had given the itinerary so much as a cursory glance. Mick's an asset in any hostel, too, hale and hearty at all times, even 6am.
Paddy's pronouncements on 'that bloody Wainwright' have kept us laughing – not to mention the pantomime that ensues when he grapples with his gear – but all he needs to help him forget the pain is a meaty conversation about abbeys. Fortunately the Coast to Coast turned out to be peppered with monastic gems.
And like the good younger brothers they are, they proved to be terribly tolerant of me, whether I was being a bossy boots or a crack-of-dawn curmudgeon. 
Dear Uncles, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

The end is nigh

So here we are on the final day of our Coast to Coast walking adventure. Two uncles, one niece and a 192-mile challenge we have trekked over, driven back and forth along and negotiated every curve ball it has thrown at us. There's a giddy atmosphere in the car this morning and the uncles are singing and laughing their way through Jimmy Durante musical comedy routines from their childhood.  I love it.

Of course the last few days would not have been the same without the company of our German-Irish new best friend, Hauke, and we all feel it would be fitting to start and finish this last day together. Hauke tells us about the chatty little nine-year-old boy in his B&B and how his parents don't want him to go to Ireland and kiss the Blarney Stone in case it makes him even more chatty.  Pad says, 'And when did you kiss the Blarney Stone, Hauke?'

The day begins in Littlebeck Woods. They're like a stage set for A Midsummer Night's Dream with dappled sunlight filtering through the trees, waterfalls and this hollowed out rock called The Hermitage. We all sit inside and sing Swing Low Sweet Chariot. 

We bring forward our elevenses to 10.30am as we arrive at the most scenic little cafe, Midge Hall, set by a waterfall, Falling Foss. The owners rescued the place a few years ago and it's now a must-do on the trail (though several Coast to Coasters have already passed by and not stopped in – how could they?).



The path opens out onto our last stretch of moorland and we're pinned to it by the fierce sun. It's a huge relief when a cloud passes over and we can whip off our hats to cool down. The promised bog is as dry as a bone.
There's the sea and Whitby Abbey in the distance (somewhere near Pad and Mick's fingers).

We're quite weary now and it's strange to think that tomorrow we won't be walking. We're all clearly thinking differently about the experience, however.

Hauke says, 'I don't want it to end.' 

Paddy says, 'I just want it to end.'

We stop for lunch in the Hare & Hounds in Hawsker, the final village before the clifftop walk round to Robin Hood's Bay. Paddy's toenails have been bugging him so he borrows Hauke's pocket knife and clips them.

I do my classic leg reviver.

We walk on through a holiday trailer park that would normally look like a prison camp but in the bright sunshine looks colourful and fun.

It's a three-mile stretch along the cliff...

...but it feels like an age before Robin Hood's Bay finally reveals itself. Here's the Robin Hood's Bay boys.

We walk down the steep road to the shore. 'I'm glad I cut my toenails,' says Pad.
There's a throng of day trippers in flip-flops and the odd tired and emotional type in walking boots around the sea front. We throw off our boots, dig out our pebbles from the Irish Sea and cast them into the North Sea.

Then someone gets the beers in at the Wainwright Bar of the Bay Hotel and we pose under The End plaque.

Once we've showered we drive back for a last supper with Hauke at the Bay Hotel. He's heard there's a folk club on tonight and has brought his tin whistle. We go along after dinner but after our 12-mile day in the hot sun I think we're just too exhausted to enter into the spirit. Plus there's one last hill to climb – up the steep road to the car park. 

Just Esk and we'll follow

All three of us are venturing out again on the Coast to Coast meets Walking with Uncles odyssey and it's the penultimate day of our 17. As we pass the Church of the English Martyrs, Paddy remarks, 'I'm now beginning to regard myself as one of them.' Of course, he's not, he's doing really well, particularly with the muesli and fresh fruit regime I've got him on every morning. Just look at the muscles coming on in those legs.

Our route today follows the Esk and it's a lush and leafy contrast to the moorland of the past few days. We follow a centuries-old 'paved pannier' trail, created specifically for packhorses and their muleteers. The stones are worn down with hundreds of years of tramping.

It brings us out at Egton Bridge, the village the Reformation missed, and the birthplace of the Blessed Nicholas Postgate. He was a 17th century Catholic priest who carried on Masses and religious rites in secret, on the moors, and who was eventually betrayed and executed, aged 82. There are relics in the church here and this wonderful window, too.

The route takes in lots of points of social and historical interest, from an old Toll House by the Esk, to this donkey sanctuary with a donation box on the gate. 'If my friend Hilary were here she'd put a fiver in that box,' I say.

In Grosmont we find steam trains, a toytown-style station and trainspotters galore. We have a momentary lapse in the world of simple sedentary pleasures at the Old School cafe – lemon drizzle cake, lattes and views of the North York Moors Railway's steam trains chugging by.

It's just as well, for the next leg is the Coast to Coast's 'ultimate' hill (yesterday we had its penultimate), and it's a tough trek up an endless 33 degree tarmac road. I pass the time by checking emails on my phone.

Then it's over the final moor for me and the Bog Cotton Boys, along a busy road with views of Whitby Abbey (just above the car in the picture below) and we arrive in Littlebeck, typical of the villages in the valleys here. 

But no pub, sadly, so we say cheerio to Hauke and head back to Whitby. I think it'll be an Italian tonight. We need plenty of ballast for the final day.  

Stoned with Betty and Ralph

Uncles and niece all together again today – Mick having rested his wounded limbs – and here we are leaving our hostel (no, really).

We start off at the Lion Inn this morning and we're back to our gang of four, as Hauke appears out of the pub enthusing over the fabulous food he'd eaten there the night before and the 15th century bedrooms. We're feeling none too chipper after our evening of sloppy hostel cooking and a night of seven-in-a-room sleeping. 

This route is waymarked by stone crosses that may date back as far as the 11th century when Christianity first became widespread. They all have names. This one's called Fat Betty and you're supposed to leave a sweet, and take one. Nothing on offer looks particularly appetising and all I have is a Malteser, but I leave it anyway.

This is one of the rare ones that still has a cross on top. It's called Ralph.

We arrive at an isolated hut, Trough House it's called on the map, with a stone bench on one side and guess what time it is… 11am. So coffee and biscuits are taken to the sound of hammering inside. Closer investigation reveals a couple zhushing up the interior with ceiling drapes, so that the Scarborough landowner's grouse shooting guests don't have to look at anything so uncouth as a bare barn roof. We should have known from the preponderance of grouse butts. 'Could be worse places to be,' says the man on the job. 'Looking out on t'moor on a sunny day.'

It's six miles to the end of this section along the old Whitby Road that runs along the top of the Rigg (ridge) above Glaisdale and Fryup valleys (yes, I kid you not, though the name probably has more to do with friars than a full English).
'You know, if you'd said a few weeks ago that I had to walk another six miles, it would have seemed impossible,' declares Paddy. 'Now I think, is that all?'
As Mick and I are succumbing to aches and pains (my bunions are giving my gyp and I can't walk without a pad, or a knee bandage) Paddy is getting stronger and fitter. We've told him that when he gets home he has a window of opportunity to continue the good work – 'more of a yawning abyss,' he said the other day, but now it actually looks achievable. On the bright side for me, my farmer's tan is coming along nicely.

Back in Whitby we descend from the Abbey's lofty heights to the town centre and manage to find refuge from the teeming masses in a brilliant little Costa Rican restaurant. After a quick glance over the wall at floodlit Whitby Abbey on the way back...
...we're all tucked up by 9.30pm, as per usual. Don't know how I'm going to cope with re-entry.

The rail thing

So we leave the mill hostel in Osmotherley and head over to where we left off yesterday. 

It's just me and Pad today. Mick is resting his leg, which took a beating yesterday, not to mention the rest of his body. We have to drop my car off at the end and it's a tortuous journey, along tiny country lanes with completely inadequate signposting. With two passengers certain about their own navigational skills, poor Paddy in the driving seat is caught between a rock and a hard place. We don't set off until 10.30am and first up is a steep climb to the top of a hill. Pad does well, and we get to the top in half an hour, where Hauke is dawdling about taking notes and pictures and sort of waiting for us. 

I'd find it tough, doing all these walks alone, as Hauke does, chatting to people briefly, who then move on because you've stopped to take notes or coordinates. Whereas we always seem to be glad of a little rest, or elevenses, and so our paces dovetail perfectly. As does our humour. Pad decides to put away his poles, because, 'I won't be needing them any more.' 'Do you want to jog on, then?' teases Hauke.

We come to a stone with a carved message underneath a pointing hand. Pad thinks it's something to do with Jesus. 'No, you've got a one-track mind,' says Hauke. 'It means this way to....' Hard to believe he's not Irish.

There's another stone with a carved face. I can't resist mimicking the expression but I don't quite pull it off.

Pad has brought along The Medieval Messenger, a book he found on one of his abbey visits. We all get the giggles as he reads aloud the lonely hearts ads. 

And so it goes, we join a track created from a disused railway that originally transported iron from these moors to Teeside. We spend an hour talking about etymology, including derivations of the word cleft and their various meanings – cleave, cloven etc. Later Pad muses, 'I wonder why a clove is called a clove.' 'Let it go,' says Hauke.

We find another idyllic lunch spot, though we've been warned of adders and ticks around these parts. But the only animals we see are the ubiquitous sheep, up here sounding quite strangulated with their baahs, and happy grouse who have escaped murder on the moors (dozens of grouse butts up here). Their cry reminds me of a child's wind-up toy. Or an Aussie saying G'day G'day G'day.

There are more beautiful windows onto the lush valleys below, but this time we're deeper into the moor so the belt of purple heather is that much thicker.

These boxes of pellets have us wondering. If one side is normal food, what do [the sheep] get on the other? The day's special, perhaps, or cake when it's their birthday? 

At one point we meet a large group of students with a couple of older leaders. Duke of Edinburgh goings on, I reckon. There's one boy and girl dawdling at the back, holding hands. A D-of-E romance.

After walking miles along the railway track the end, the Lion Inn, is finally in sight. 

Time for one last photo of Pad looking like David Attenborough ready to take on his next gorilla.

We drive to Whitby and can't believe our eyes when we get to the hostel. It's right next to Whitby Abbey. In fact, the hostel building was originally the Abbey guesthouse. My room is top left, sharing with a couple of Spanish girls and a mum and her young daughters. 

View from the room over Whitby. 

We do a whistlestop tour (free to hostel residents)...

...then have drinks by the hostel's conservatory with the Abbey in the background. The hostel's perimeter wall has bits of Abbey wedged in between the stones. This is the life.