What to read and what to watch before you go

     So if you're going to walk the Coast to Coast, you could spend your free time before departure learning  to identify the guillemots and kittiwakes on the cliffs near St Bees, OR you could read up on the dismal history of lead mining in Swaledale.
     If that's what interests you, go for it but there's a lot to be learned from fiction as well. Good local fiction and film is not only entertaining but read or viewed ethnographically yields clues to local habits and thinking. You, (if you're not British) are not the target audience.  It's a private, national conversation, full of code words, and inside jokes and things "everyone" is presumed to know.  You are the eavesdropper; listen carefully.  

Books
     A must-read for  anyone who enjoys mysteries is Reginald Hill, a native of Cumbria, whose 24 (?) books featuring detectives Dalziel and Pascoe  are rich in local color and accents. 
     "Aye, what fettle?"
     "I've got my lads up the dale." 
     "It'll be thirsty work tramping around them fells. Is there owt I owt to know?"
                                                                                         ( a pastiche from On Beulah Heights. )  

     Then of course, there's the Brontes. 

      Books that I'm saving to take along but which my walking partner has already read and endorses:
Journey Through Britain by John Hillaby
      Mr Hillaby walked across England the other way, the long way, from southwest to northeast and wrote entertainingly about it. (Originally published in 1968, you can get it on Amazon used for one cent plus $3.99 shipping.   How do they do that?)
The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane 
       Another account of long distance walking that elicits superlatives in reviews. 
 The Natural Navigator: The Rediscovered Art of Letting Nature Be Your Guide by Tristan Gooley         
       This looks like hard-going, but finding one's way is much on our minds these day 

TV  
     There are a handful  TV programs set in areas along the C2C  available on YouTube. Check out these: 
Dalziel and Pascoe   
      The series was adapted for TV by BBC and full 90 minute episodes are available, although in my humble opion, the BBC Dalziel is not old enough, nor fat enough and hs accent has been watered down.  And Pascoe's wife, Ellie, is way too cute and perky. A little perky goes a long, long ways.   
Heartbeat   
      A young constable from London and his wife, a doctor, experience life in a Yorkshire village. Hour long dramas that wrap up neatly, of the heartwarming variety. Worth a look.
All Creatures Great and Small 
      It's actually not so much about the woolly and mooing creatures as it is the people and life in Yorkshire in the middle of the last century. Accents are so thick that subtitles would be useful. The sweep of the Yorkshire landscape and the slate houses have a starring role. Personally, watching folks pull on their wellies  to walk through the farmyard muck, I began to wonder about the farm B&B's where we're planning to sleep on our C2C walk. 
 Last of the Summer Wine  
      Apparently a comedy. A bunch of old codgers playing silly buggers 
Emmerdale 
    A soap opera set in a fictional village in the Yorkshire dales. Among the many story lines: a couple set to open a B&B. He wants to style it a boutique hotel because he doesn't want to deal with grubby walkers who don't respect the furniture.  She says it's the walkers who'll pay the bills. But then she gets killed somehow by someone because someone was cheating on her sister...or maybe that was someone else.  

Film
     Withnail and I is referred to as a "cult film" from the 80's.  The definition of "cult film" seems to be that a small circle of people loved it and most people thought it was awful.    We got Withnail from Netflix and we watched it, with a sort of horror, right through to the end only because it was filmed around Bampton and Shap and lives on there in local legend.  The Crown and Mitre in Bampton, where entirely by coincidence, we will be staying, claims proud proximity to a phone box shown in the movie.  It's a sort of shrine to Withnail, I gather.  
There are a few clever lines in the film, but none of the characters are at all likable: not the young, aspiring actors who go "on holiday by accident" in a decrepit farm house nearby,  not the pathetic, aging, gay uncle who joins them and not the stoned-out drug pusher who crashes their apartment in their absence. 
     Full disclosure: family members who ought to know have declared I have no sense of humor.  But really, what is pleasant about watching people swill enough liquor to fill a bathtub,  behave offensively and drive drunk? 
    You do get to watch the rain come down in unending torrents, which is realistic perhaps, but not an encouraging spectacle for prospective walkers. 

     By the way, kittiwakes look like seagulls to me and guillemots are black with a white spot on the wing and amazing red feet.