The Wending Way starts on wet sand at the lowest tide of the month and finishes 190 miles later on a summit that spends half the year inside cloud. Between the two it climbs slowly, through four kinds of country, and asks almost nothing of you but time.
The Way opens at Saltmarsh Point on the lowest tide of the month, because the first six miles are under water at any other time. You walk the tide line north with the sea on your left for three days, and the only climbing is over the dunes at Blackstone Sands.
Hollin Wood is fifty-eight miles of pine and birch on a slope you barely notice. The path is soft, the light is green, and the mist that sits in the trees most mornings is the same cloud you will be standing inside two chapters from now.
Above the tree line the Way becomes a single track through heather and peat, ninety-four miles of it, with one tree, two bothies and no shop. This is the longest chapter and the one people come back for. Carry water; the moor keeps its own.
Hollin Fell is inside cloud roughly half the days of the year, and the Way is designed for that: the summit cairn is the end, not the view. If the cloud lifts you will see the shore you started from. If it does not, you will have walked into the weather you watched from the woods.
Four chapters, sixteen walking days, one climb. Each can be walked on its own; the Way is only the Way if you take them in order.
Start typing in Wending Sans here
Click the line and type. The Way speaks in one typeface, at two sizes: very large, and very small.
Heather
#AA8289 · 22%, 72%
Nothing is photographed from the path. Every picture on the Way is taken from where the path is going, or from where it has been.
