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ML & E on St Cuthbert’s WayML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
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A 7-day adventure by mary louise Read more

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  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    121121

    Day 1 Tweedbank to St Boswell’s, 15 km

    May 11 in Scotland ⋅ ☁️ 18 °C

    This trip may or may not have text. But I think I can manage to post photos - at the very least to provide evidence of the absolutely spectacular weather here. St Cuthbert’s Way is a 100 km walk in the Scottish Borders. We have broken it up into shortish sections so we can spread it out over a week.

    After an excellent weekend with E’s daughter Grace in Edinburgh, we took a late morning train to Tweedbank and then followed a fantastic path along the River Tweed for a couple of kilometres to get to the official start of St Cuthbert’s Way in Melrose. That first riverside path gave us a good idea of what was to come as almost everyone we met stopped to chat - the man with the little black dog called Dora, the couple from Bath, the people walking a ridgeback who was trying to make friends with a cow.

    Melrose is small and beautiful and built around the ruins of an abbey. Lots of people, fancy shops, and an excellent sandwich place! The first significant turn of the trip comes a few hundred meters from the town centre and takes you off the road and onto a proper path between fields. We missed it. Two men doing some kind of work out of truck put us right, saying we were not the first who had walked right by.

    Once off the road, the path went up and up and up. Over a saddle between two of 3 Eildon Hills, alongside thicket after thicket of gorse. I know it’s considered invasive but you couldn’t really say it was anything but glorious today. Amazing views back over Melrose. So much birdsong - but my battery was too low to use Merlin to identify them.

    Then down the back side of the hills and into a beech wood with huge trees that must be a few hundred years old. Always incredible to think of what they’ve lived through and seen.

    Then a stile with a dog gate! Quick chat with a man with a wet Brittany spaniel covered in mud and a massive blond lurcher. A longer chat with two women who’d turned right on one path as we went straight on another and then came across us again from a totally different direction. There are a lot of paths!

    One small village on route, then more yellow as we walked past fields of rapeseed. Eventually we ended up walking along the River Tweed again, first quite high up and then later down by the banks. It’s fast and gravelly and clear.

    The last few kilometres followed the river on a beautifully maintained path through big swaths of what I think were wild leeks. And then up a big hill to St Boswell’s where we are staying in an inn that might be the only place in town. We are trying very hard not to think about how outrageous the prices are here. I would have to think hard about walking here on my own now without a tent.

    Just spent some time reading about tomorrow’s walk. The distance remains a mystery! Some people say 13 km - others say 24! We are hoping for something in the middle, so we might have time to visit famous ruined abbey #2 when we get to Jedburgh. So far E’s back is holding up, the slightly wonky knee that I got on my last day in Spain is doing ok, our packs feel fine, and the weather is predicted to stay remarkable.    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    1111

    Day 2 St Boswell’s to Jedburgh, 20 km

    May 12 in Scotland ⋅ ☀️ 19 °C

    Another brilliant day. Perfect weather, easy walking, kind people, a Roman road, an excellent cafe lunch with decent coffee, and spectacular views of the river and yesterday’s three big hills, new yellow fields and more gorse.

    We both had a less than perfect sleep last night. But we were up at 7 to get breakfast by 7:30 - typical hot British breakfast, which I almost never want, even a pared down vegetarian version, and especially not first thing in the morning! Despite our early start we did not get going until after 9. A few hundred meters in, we met an older woman waiting for a bus , with much of the usual discussion about walking. We were standing in a kind of square, across from a street sign that said “Jenny Moore’s Road.” We asked if she knew who Jenny Moore was. She said she thought she was a teacher - the first woman teacher? But, then: “who were you asking about.?Jenny Moore? No!!!” And she started laughing. “She was a witch!!!”

    After the village , which is full of houses made from a gorgeous red stone, we walked alongside a golf course, then along the river bank for a few kilometers. An even nicer river walk than yesterday, the path was open, and the bank was close by. Saw lots of ducks and a few men fishing for salmon. The path comes up away from the river at Maxton. Sweet church, cheerful yellow fields. We felt like we were walking through an episode of Escape to the Country.

    Many, many, many benches over the first part of the day. We availed ourselves of a couple. But when we wanted to stop for lunch there were none to be seen. And posters warning about ticks make the ground a less attractive option - just like at home. We eventually found a downed beech tree in the shade.

    That was lunch #1 - typical packed lunch: sandwich, a bag of crisps, 2 cookies, one apple. Second lunch came later in the afternoon - halloumi and hot honey and arugula flatbread, Leicester cheese and pickle (chutney) in a pita. Perfect. E had burdock and dandelion “pop, which turned out to be upscale Dr Pepper! The cafe was part of a complex that has craft workshops, a store, and a huge playground. Seemed like a place people go for a day out.

    Back in the woods we took the risk of an unconfirmed shortcut that crossed the garden of a huge estate belonging to, we learned, the Earl of Lothian. The woman who told us about the lord and his property also told us the shortcut would work!

    After crossing a suspension bridge over the Earl’s river (!), there was more riverside path, more allium-filled woods, and then we turned off the St Cuthbert’s Way to walk about 4 km into Jedburgh. We’re staying in a fantastic and big B&B - or maybe it’s an inn? Super friendly, low key owner. She and the woman we met by the river know each other because their kids used to go to swimming lessons together.

    Jedburgh’s the home of ruined abbey #2 and a castle and a house that Mary Queen of Scots stayed in at some point while she was ill. None of which we were able to visit.

    The evening involved grocery shopping for tomorrow night in case we don’t get to Morebattle (what a name!) before the shop closes. The Coop (grocery store) here was not entirely out of food but the shelves looked like early days of the pandemic. I have no idea why.

    Today was about 20 km with the walk into Jedburgh. It felt like enough with the sun. Tomorrow is shorter - we finally saw a guidebook and could find out - and should be about 16 km.

    I’ve been counting border terriers. The current total is 5. I forgot to count the border collies. Lots of ducks and herons and terns ( I think) and very noisy crows, and unidentified songbirds. The odd rabbit. Sheep and cows - including a herd of black cows being led by a white cow in some kind of race across a field and back!    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    21

    Day 3 Jedburgh to Morebattle, 16 km

    May 13 in Scotland ⋅ ☀️ 14 °C

    After last month in Portugal, where it rained every day for more than a week, I am never not going to bring all the rain things on a trip. So, on yet another spectacularly sunny spring day, I was carrying rain jacket and rain pants , a very very light rain skirt (that makes a great ground sheet ), waterproof gloves (that are almost impossible to get on if your hands are already wet), and an umbrella. I figure that carrying these currently unnecessary things makes me at least partly responsible for the very, very good weather.

    Despite our best efforts to order a more modest breakfast this morning, we still ended up with way too much food. Fruit and yoghurt to start. And then “avocado toast” came with scrambled eggs (plural!) on toast with half an avocado on the side, along with sautéed mushrooms and some cooked cherry tomatoes. Fruit and yoghurt would have been fine. it is hard to say no to breakfast when you have already paid for it, but, really, it does slow us (weigh us) down!

    On the way out of the dining room, we talked for a minute with a man who was there on his own, clearly a walker. He is on day 12 of what will be a 100 day walk that he has been planning for two years. He started in Fort William and is walking back home to Germany. Epic!

    We loved the B&B and certainly did not speed out of our room. We left, again, a little after 9 o’clock. The first ladies of the day were twins (we thought) who told us the correct pronunciation of Yetholm — yetum — where we go tomorrow.

    The morning started with us retracing a bit of the route we walked yesterday, through the suburbs of Jedburgh onto a small - but busy at 9 am - country road. Then we veered off onto another long distance route called the Borders Abbeys Way, which took us past more of the ancient trees and fields of sheep until we regained the St Cuthbert’s Way.

    Then an easy walk, with a couple of big hills, through woods and along the edges of fields. Huge agricultural fields. Big agricultural equipment. Lots of barley doing its wave thing in the wind. Cows and calves. Many many flowers. We stopped twice - once on a bench by a river and once on the grass beside a crumbling castle — ancestral seat of the Kers.

    We didn’t see many people today. A couple passed us when we were sitting on the bench, and we saw two women whom we had met in St Boswell’s. It seems like most people were going all the way to Yetholm today. We were very happy to be stopping earlier. The village we are staying in, Morebattle, is super small with not many places to stay. But, if we had all been here on Saturday this week, we could have stayed in the reopening local hotel, which has been bought and will be operated by the community. Very cool. There is also a fantastic community shop in the village. Open every single day. Run by paid managers, but staffed by volunteers.

    We are staying in an exceptional Airbnb. It is a flat at the back of someone’s house, at the bottom of a lane, beside a creek. The owner and her son are upstairs. Incredible view, very quiet, and we are hoping there will be good stars. It’s 9:20 and still not even close to getting dark yet.

    Tomorrow we can dawdle even more in the morning because we only have 11 km to go, and we can’t really go to the place where we will be staying before 2 PM. Very big hill on route, and I think we stay up high for the whole time.

    Such a great way to spend a day!    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    211

    Day 4 Morebattle to Yetholm, 11 km

    May 15 in Scotland ⋅ ☁️ 11 °C

    Today feels like we are on holiday during our holiday. We had a late, made-by-us breakfast, so it was manageable! Didn’t leave the flat until about 10:45. Another quick stop at the community shop, and we were finally on our way around 11:05.

    The first greeting of the day was from a woman gardening: where ye off to today? You doing the whole way, are you? A woman a bit further on, after the usual walking questions, told us we were lucky to get Mark Carney for PM. He did a good job at the Bank of England, she said. I’m guessing she is not a Labour supporter. She also made me wonder how many people in small Canadian towns would know who the current governor of the Bank of Canada is (E had to remind me) or if the UK had recently had an election!

    As soon as we left the village we were passed by a man, a woman and a man, and another man within the first few minutes, all with full packs. So, I thought we would be seeing people all day, but we did not! Just two people whom we saw up ahead at one point, but then they disappeared. They reappeared later from the opposite direction while we were eating lunch. And that was pretty much it until just before the village this afternoon.

    On the road, the distance between Morebattle and Yetholm is 4 miles to the northeast. The path we followed starts southwest for about a mile and then goes northeast over 3 or 4 big open tops and takes 6.7 miles to get from one village to the other. The hills aren’t huge — but the climbing went on for about an hour and a half, up one, over a bit, up another. It was overcast and windy but a perfect temperature for walking! I kept my jacket and gloves on all day and kept my hood up for a lot of it. Lots of very steep downs that had my knees talking back at me.

    Once you are at the top, the whole view to the south and east is the Cheviot hills. They span the border, with the ones on the English side in Northumberland National Park, land of Vera! (A favourite British mystery series - book and tv.)

    (For the zooming peregrines - I think these are the hills where Alan - I’m forgetting his last name, but he’s the wonderful writer who goes to Spain every fall — walks his dog.)

    A quick lunch in between two stone walls, out of the wind. And then down to the road and into Yetholm. We chatted with a man working on his huge allotment. He’d done a masters degree at Guelph many years ago and goes back to Canada regularly.

    Tonight’s room is excellent. There was lemon cake waiting for us under a glass dome. Teas and cookies. Oat milk in tiny packages, which I have never seen before. Fast phone chargers! An already-warm towel rack. I love everything in the house - the furniture, the floors, the stairs, and, especially, the curtains. At home no one has curtains any more. These almost make me want to learn to sew.

    Dinner at a pub in Kirk Yetholm, the nextdoor village, about 10 minutes away. It’s where the Penine Way path ends and where the Scottish National Trail begins. We also cross through it tomorrow. Everyone else having dinner had their St Cuthberts Way guidebook on their table with them. We don’t have one, though it would be fun to know more about where we are walking. We google things every so often instead. While we were up on the tops today I was also missing a paper map - though it would have been impossible to open, it was so windy.

    Very nice to have such a short day! Tomorrow will be 20 km through the hills to Wooler, which I think is a bigger town.    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    2

    Day 5 Yetholm to Wooler, 21 km

    May 16 in Scotland ⋅ ☀️ 12 °C

    An excellent walk today. Sunny but not too hot. Hills, but not too many and mostly done by lunchtime. Friendly people, but not too many of them either. Dry feet on ground that is usually wet (good for us, not for the planet). A shady lunch place. A rewilding project of some sort. And more great views.

    We crossed the border into England this morning. Different pound notes, different accents, different rules about access to the countryside (Scotland’s are more permissive). A lot of the path on the English side was through Northumberland National Park. It seemed like there were lots of places where they’d planted trees. And one carefully fenced off hillside had more varied vegetation than anything we’ve seen. A biodiversity project? Normally the hills are bare of everything but grass, kept in check by sheep. How long ago were there trees here? The fenced off hillside was covered in saplings. Just one side of one hill but a very cool intervention. I want to see it in ten ten years.

    We had our first close up cow encounter this morning. A group of about 20 cows and calves were huddled around a stile we had to go over. Rule #1 for walking near cows - don’t get between them and their calves. Easier said than done. There had been a few people in front of us, and we figured they’d gone through okay. Then two women walking towards us (one wearing a Canada sweater from her sister in Ottawa) told us they just tried to give the cows a wide berth. As we got closer, a few of the cows just stared, some of the calves ran away, and we talked nicely to them. Stressy but fine. You don’t want to end up in a story in the Guardian!

    After a stunning morning it was hard to imagine that the afternoon could be better, but it was! Spectacular views, and great paths. No asphalt. Big colour contrasts- green and yellow against the blue sky. There was just one climb that took us up to moorland. Heather as far as you could see. And then really pleasant walking across the moor for a while before the long descent down to the town. Of course you see it ages before you get there! The last 2 or 3 kilometres were as annoying as they usually are.

    We spend a lot of time making up stories about the walkers off in the distance. Today the joke was - given how slow we are going - that we would catch up to the couple way ahead of us on the moor and to the young person who had passed us hours before, whom we thought we could maybe see in the distance. And the bigger joke was that we did. E very pleased to be able to return to its rightful owner a little tube of Carmex that had been dropped on the path. We are still feeling bad for the person whose prescription glasses were lying on the path a few days ago.

    Once we got to Wooler we had a beer in the pub where we are staying. The room is not fancy but the price is much closer to what we are used to (£75). And then we got a pizza across the street for supper, half of which will be tomorrow’s lunch.

    Tomorrow’s the last full day. 19 km to Fenwick and then either 2 (via a small road) or 5 (following the St Cuthberts way and then backtracking a bit) more kilometres to tomorrow’s accommodation, which is not on the route.    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way
    13

    Day 6 Wooler to Beal-ish, 20 km

    May 17 in England ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C

    The walk started a bit later than we might have liked. We had to wait until 8:30 for breakfast. But that meant we got to go for a proper coffee at Wooler’s little espresso bar that was already busy at 7:30 on a Saturday morning!

    The breakfast room was on the second (to us, first to them) floor of the pub. There was a surprising number of people there. It had been a very quiet night; I had assumed - quite wrongly - that we were the only overnight guests!

    We were out the door by 9:15 for a pleasant walk out of Wooler. Past the lawn bowling club and a brand new playground under construction. Lots of people walking dogs. A woman with two whippets wearing coats made out of flannel fabric for kids’ pyjamas.

    One big hill at the start gave good views back over the town. There was a bit of leapfrog with two women we’d been seeing since Yetholm. And then, a while later, we met a woman who was walking up the path towards us. “Oh, “she said, “you’ve confirmed we are going the right way!” We talked for a bit, established that she was American and we are Canadian - “we are so so sorry….” Very nice not to be reading much news here.

    We walked with her back down towards her husband. He seemed perturbed that she’d gone back to check their direction. “I was trying to call you! My map is working!!!”

    Lots of yellow fields and stone walls, which feel different than the ones in Yorkshire . Less precise, maybe? Lots of skylarks (we learned from the Merlin app). Something that smelled really bad (in an extremely beautiful place) and drew a gazillion talking crows.

    Great bench stop across from a house that offered water to walkers. Apparently there used to be a carved wooden statue of St Cuthbert beside the bench, but it was not there today. We are seeing signs everywhere warning (including on a fence at that spot) about damage from Storm Arwen, which happened in 2021. Someone yesterday told us his power was out for days and that the damage in Northumberland had been huge, “but the storm didn’t even make the papers! If it had been in London…” Maybe the statue was damaged in the storm?

    The big deal today was “St Cuthberts cave,” where his body was carried by monks in 875 to escape Norse invaders at Lindisfarne - or - where he himself lived as an anchorite (a word we just looked up, which refers to a particular kind of religious hermit… the Wikipedia entry has a surprising gender angle), before he moved to Lindisfarne. It was a fairly open cave, an open space under an overhang. Pretty big. Easy to stand up in. Lots of people there, including a group barbecuing hamburgers - despite many signs prohibiting fires and barbecues. We took a look but did not stay long.

    And then we were up and over two smaller hills and then a view of the sea — and of the Holy Isle (Lindisfarne). Everyone really does call it that!

    The walk down to the village of Fenwick and the road was way easier than yesterday’s descent. At the bottom: a little coffee shop that just opened two weeks ago! I took the risk of a late (4 pm, we’ll soon see how that works out!) flat white. E was wiser with a decaf americano and a very cute container of honey-flavoured ice cream. One of the two owners was a retired college teacher turned coffee roaster.

    We had two choices after coffee and 18 km. Stick to the path, which goes about 4 more km to the causeway and sands where we will cross to Lindisfarne tomorrow, and then walk another 3km inland along a road to the inn where we are staying tonight. Or walk 3 km up a quiet lane directly to the inn. We took option B. Tomorrow we will probably just walk the three km along the road to join the causeway. But if we are keen, we could backtrack to the coffee shop and then do the bit of the path that we missed today.

    We are staying in what must be an old coaching inn that is currently right on the A1, a busy road that runs north/south. Nothing near but a gas station and a bus stop. The pub at dinner was full of people we have been seeing for the past few days. There was some hobbling, and there were sunburns. The pub had a separate room for people with dogs!    Read more

  • mary louise adamsML & E on St Cuthbert’s Way

    Day 7 Beal to Lindisfarne, 7 km

    May 18 in England ⋅ 🌬 12 °C

    Short walk for our last day, but it was something! We didn’t bother going back to Fenwick to pick up the actual St Cuthbert’s Way path, and set out from the inn to walk directly to the causeway - E said St Cuthbert would have done the same.

    We left around 10:30, so we could cross to the island when the tide was well out. By 11:30 we had put on all our accessible layers (it was chilly even before our feet got wet) and taken off our shoes and had started on the 4 km route across the mud and sand to Lindisfarne. The path is dead straight, marked by tall poles sunk into the mud. Sometimes we were walking on sand, sometimes in squelchy mud, and sometimes through water. It seemed like boots outnumbered bare feet in the prints on the sand. We - or maybe I should just say I - had been trepidatious. Mostly about potential indecipherable squishiness and how cold the water would be. But the mud was only sometimes squishy and not terrible, and the water was not as cold as I had thought it would be. It took about an hour to cross, and we only started getting really cold about 3/4 of the way across. There lots of other people out there. including people walking long-haired dogs. That must have fun to clean up!

    On the other side we put our shoes back on to walk another few hundred metres, and we were done. There was no end marker as there often is, but there was a good coffee shop with decent scones and eventually the inn where we are staying.

    The Holy Isle is tiny and beautiful and has great stories - St Cuthbert’s being just one of them. On a bank holiday weekend it was packed! The big draws are the ruins of a medieval priory and a castle. We visited the first, but not the latter - it’s perched on a rock a kilometer from the village and we were too cold to walk out there. Today was the first truly overcast day of our trip! It was about 11 degrees and really windy.

    The priory was huge. A monastery started in the 7thC, was abandoned in the 9thC because of Viking raids, and then eventually the monks came back, and a church was built in the mid-1100s (note passive voice - I’m not sure by whom), the priory expanded, there were wars between England and Scotland that meant the priory had to be fortified, etc. All of this led to the 13th century floor plan that we see in ruins today. In a corner of a grassy lawn that was, apparently, behind the kitchen and where farming activities would have taken place, was a fantastic statue of St Cuthbert. Really amazing. It was a highlight of the day.

    We wandered around and did proper tourist things, like visiting the priory museum and tasting mead! Later, we went downstairs to the pub for a pint and fish and chips for dinner.

    After dinner we walked over to see what it looks like by the causeway when the tide is out. The path we followed was underwater - but, more impressively, so was about a third of the causeway - the road that comes to the island. So, today if you were here after the end of the “safe crossing” time (posted everywhere) of 5:45, you were here for the night!

    Tomorrow we have to get a taxi to get the train. Earliest possible time is 10:15 because of the tides!

    I had thought I would keep walking north up the coast on my own after E goes back to Edinburgh tomorrow. There are several long coastal paths, and I had planned to go 5 days, from here to North Berwick, a fantastic town about half an hour by train east of Edinburgh. But I decided to change plans, go back to Edinburgh too, and then do my walks from there - maybe from Edinburgh to North Berwick or further along to Dunbar on the John Muir Way (he was born northwest of Edinburgh), partly to cut back on the accommodation bill, and also to take advantage of the city more.

    This has been a great walk! I knew it would have good scenery but it went beyond my expectations there. People asked us today what our favourite part was and I think it was the weather. It was so magically good.

    This would be an excellent walk for someone new to long distance paths. Not too hard but challenging enough. And beautiful. I think most people do it in 6 days. Many do it in 5. We took 7, which was perfect for us. Biggest challenge here is the cost and limited accommodation in some places.

    Tomorrow we’ll meet Grace and Holly the dog in Berwick-upon-Tweed, drink good coffee, walk on top of the city walls and around the town and then take the train back to Scotland.

    We are here for another week!

    Thanks for reading.    Read more

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