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Never let dreams die on your pillow. As a retired American of 63 years, I returned to my former British life to fulfill a 50-year-old dream - to hike “end-to-end” - from the southwest tip of England to the northeast tip of Scotland.

Then, for reasons I can hardly explain, I returned a year later and hiked back.

In doing these hikes, I also stepped through my own life, and rediscovered Britain after a 40-year absence. So these pages tell a personal story alongside a hiking one. This isn't just a travel guide, but nostalgic entertainment - when reading it, think of yourself in a leather armchair in front of a winter fire, sipping at the red wine of my youth, and perhaps enjoying the bouquet of your own.

Who knows, my story may also fulfill another purpose:

“Reminding one another of the dream that each of us aspires to may be enough for us to set each other free” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry).

The box above describes my trip in purely hiking terms.

In more personal terms, I hassled with accommodation challenges, witnessed dogs and a dogfight, sampled British plumbing, cheeses and pubs, fought battles with Internet providers and boot suppliers, talked to cows and sheep, recalled my digs as a student, reflected on my mother-in-law’s hemorrhoids, rediscovered Charles Darwin and cucumber sandwiches, experienced lime pickle and a “reverse buffet”, shared a Scottish youth hostel room with two Spanish ladies, squelched through manure and a sewage plant, waved to Scottish Hell’s Angels and spent an evening with the Hikers from Hull, suffered the dollar exchange rate - and a really gross blister - and made friends with the memorable but imaginary Arthur Bourke-Stewart.

While the labor of the hike often preoccupied me, I was sometimes able to explore my inner thoughts.  As Oscar Wilde said,

“We don’t receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

The towns and villages that I stayed at are listed here, along with mileage and time information. Actual establishment names, prices, and my quality ratings are given on the webpages for each day. The map above shows my approximate routes. 

But to closely follow this hike on a map . . . requires a higher quality map than I can provide here.  Ordnance Survey provides free maps on-line.  I can't reproduce them, but you can view them.  Insert a place name at their Get-a-map site, and go from there. Then use the + to - snake for zoom control.

Google Earth is also a great resource, offering free aerial and satellite photographs. They're sometimes so clear that I've been able to see specific benches where I rested. After you've installed Google Earth, go to the top left of the screen and paste this entry in the "fly to" box:
        50 03 57N  5 42 49W.
Or, heck, just insert
        Land's End
and choose the one in Sennen, Cornwall, UK.

Once you see Land's End on Google Earth, you can scroll anywhere, zoom in and out, and even tilt the earth for a perspective view. My northbound route started by heading east out of the Land's End visitor center. Unfortunately, not all parts of the country are pictured at as good a resolution.
   
Use these maps when trying to follow the routes described in my daily journals later (northbound and southbound), where I provide an account of the hike with frequent mentions of roads, trails, villages and other landmarks. You won't always be able to follow my route exactly with these maps and photographs, but you'll get a pretty good feel for it.

There's a tongue-in-cheek thread also running through this website. I've observed - and exhaustively used - roadside benches for nearly two thousand miles in Britain, and they're a distinctly diverse bunch. My Benches of Britain photo collection is spread across a number of the Southbound pages which I hope will bring chuckles. The first of them is day S25, where you'll find links to the others.

© Daryl May 2007 and 2008.