WE WERE just shy of two weeks and 200 miles into a walk across northern England, from the Cumbrian seaside town of St Bees on the island’s west coast to Robin Hood’s Bay on the east. A couple more hours and we’d march — or, in my case, limp — across the finish line of the itinerary popularised by the famed rambler and guidebook author Alfred Wainwright in his 1973 A Coast to Coast Walk, a copy of which I had in my back pocket.

The path now led gently down to the headlands above the North Sea, a blue plain stretching towards a horizon flecked by oiler tankers. To our left Whitby Abbey, the setting of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, glowered, as Gothic ruins do.

Twelve days earlier, on our walk down to the beach at St. Bees under sunny skies with our feet fresh and backpacks filled to bursting, we fell into step and conversation with a woman in shorts and sandals. She was the vicar in the ancient Anglican Priory of St Bega whose tower we could see a quarter mile away.