"Are yous coastacoastin' ?" an old man on a village street asked us our first morning out, turning the trail into a verb. The old guy was very astute. The trail is definitively, legitimately, a verb if ever there was one.
Coastacoastin' following the hand drawn maps in the Stedman book is like a scavenger hunt. First we're looking for a kissing gate. Found it? Then walk till you come to a creek. Etc. And In that manner we walked along the cliffs over the Irish Sea and turned inland to climb Dent Hill.
It was a rare convergence of clear weather and a mountaintop. Walking up the hill, I felt the globe turning beneath my feet and the world spread out below us. All the little towns we had walked through were laid out like on a map, and beyond them the sea and the Isle of Man and the coast of Scotland. If the hill had been a little higher and I squinted, maybe I could have seen Iceland and the US behind it.
Then we turned our backs, and started walking eastward to the North Sea.
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