TRAVELING IN STYLE : WALK THIS WAY : By Foot Through Wordsworth Country, Across Verdant Valleys, Past Drowned Towns and Industrial Ruins--It’s England’s Coast-to-Coast Wainwright Path

IF YOU WANT TO WALK ACROSS ENGLAND, from one side to the other, you can do it the short way, as the Romans did, following the still discernible line of Hadrian’s Wall across the neck of the British land mass, just below the Scottish border. If you’re in no particular hurry, though, and want to take the scenic route, you’ll trek instead between St. Bee’s Head on the Irish Sea and Robin Hood’s Bay on the North Sea, 190 miles of prime pedestrian miles across the very collarbone of England. Do this and you’ll be doing the Wainwright Way.

Traversing England on foot, it must quickly be said, is an entirely reasonable project. Unless you’re super-fit (or off your head or a bit of both), you wouldn’t want to stride the whole distance in six straight days--about what it would take--in the teeth of an English winter. But in good weather, cut into bite-sized portions of a day or two or three, the trek can be sheer pleasure--and can even be “collected” a bit at a time, over a period of months or even years.

The Wainwright Way--known prosaically as “the Coast-to-Coast,” or simply as “the Wainwright” (since time and usage tend to wear down names as well as footpaths)--is called that in honor of the man who conceived it, mapped it, drew it, wrote about it, captured it between hard covers. Alfred Wainwright, a retired town hall accountant and passionate lover of England’s northern hills, was the nearest thing to a pioneer that a well-charted countryside can have. When he died two years ago, a reclusive octogenarian in the Lake District town of Kendal, he left an invaluable legacy of minutely chronicled hill walks in his more than 40 books, two of them dealing with the coast-to-coast itinerary.

In charting the route that bears his name, Wainwright’s intention was straightforward enough: to pick an unbroken line of footpaths, from one side of England to the other, entirely along existing rights of way and on a course unsullied by industrial development. In England, none of these conditions, especially the last, is as easily met as you might imagine. Even at the outset, on the Cumbrian coast on England’s western flank, we are uncomfortably near the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, in whose vicinity the residents will not eat locally caught fish for fear of absorbing radiation. This is the very antithesis of the rural seclusion to which the Wainwright heart (and soles) were tending. Still, the Sellafield plant is the nearest thing to a taint for the next 150 miles due east, right up until you stand poised on the scarp of the Cleveland Hills looking north toward the terrible tangle of industrial Middlesborough.

For about two-thirds of its length, the Wainwright runs inside the boundaries of three of Britain’s national parks: the Lake District, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors. Wainwright asserted that his walk was best done from lakes to moors--that is, from west to east, from Irish to North sea. His argument was that since the route lies on a lateral axis, the natural sequence is from left to right, as in reading the lines on a page. Going the other way, he reasoned, was “abnormal, like going against the grain.” Those who agree with Wainwright bolster their case by pointing out that it’s better to have the prevailing weather, which comes from the Irish Sea, at your back rather than in your face. The east-to-westers counter that it is far more sensible to get your legs acclimatized to the walk on the less-rigorous gradients of the Moors and the Dales, so that you are in fine fettle for the splendidly hilly Cumbrian climax of the journey.

Shortly before Wainwright’s death, I visited him in his Kendal house. Sitting in the living room, where the grandfather clock sounded like the most garrulous presence for whole minutes on end, I put to him my preference for the latter route. He looked back at me, still sharp through his half-blindness and, after a long pause, said: “Aye, well that’s your business, i’ntit?”

WALKING IS THE MOST POPULAR LEISURE PURSUIT INBritain. Fully one-fifth of the population is said to take a recreational walk of a mile or more every week. At least 50 long-distance footpaths lace up and down the nation, many of them officially designated by the government’s Countryside Commission. In plain terms, this means that there is money available for their upkeep--and much money it takes, considering the thousands of feet that tread the paths each month.

The first such path to win government protection, in 1965, was the Pennine Way, a 260-mile stretch right up the backbone of the country, from Edale, southwest of Sheffield, to Kirk Yetholm, just across the border into Scotland. (Wainwright also wrote the definitive guide to this route.) Other paths soon followed--the Ridgeway, along the timeless old tracks of the Wessex Downs; the Offa’s Dyke Path, all the way along the Welsh border; the South West Peninsular Path, around the toe of Cornwell, and many more.

Despite petitions by lovers of the Wainwright, though, it has not, thus far, been added to the official register. Perhaps that’s just as well. I’ve walked the Wainwright myself, in bits and pieces, over the past several years--some bits and pieces more than once. And while I’ve found that, as might be expected, it isn’t as smartly maintained or signposted as some other paths, its very lack of official sanction gives it a certain outsider’s charm and a sense of specialness. It is also less crowded than most other paths, since there is no “official” guide to it--another boon to the walker seeking rural peace and quiet.

THE FORMIDABLE BLUFF OF ST. BEE’S HEAD, THE most westerly point of northern England, is a massive and impressive headland, four miles of steep red sandstone honeycombed with the nests of sea birds. It has been called “the stub of England.” From here, the Wainwright leads inland, almost immediately entering the Lake District, the jewel of the English uplands.

“Words,” writes Wainwright, “are woefully inadequate to describe the bewitching loveliness of the section of the route from High Stile to Haystacks.” At 2,644 feet, High Stile is the highest of the three peaks of the Buttermere Fells. (A fell is a high barren moor.) Passing between this peak and the hills called Haystacks, the walker views a fantastic succession of elevations. This may be but a tiny parcel of land in the top left-hand corner of a tiny country, but it gives the impression of grandeur reclining into infinity.

Wainwright used to talk of the Lakeland fells in terms that some men use to describe women. He was possessed by their forms, their curves, their contours, their moods, their beckoning quality. He admitted that he did not know how his first wife had managed to live with his obsession for 30 years.

As for the most famous town in the region, Grasmere, where William Wordsworth was born, it is no longer the rustic haven the poet celebrated. It has become the victim of its own renown and a travesty of its old self, with wave after wave of tour buses lolling and lurching their massive frames between the dry stone walls of roads fashioned for horse and cart. Wainwright was a great one for complaining about how overuse was threatening the very texture of the Lake District--though it’s hard to take his complaints too seriously since his best-selling guidebooks were themselves an agent of its popularizing.

IN DRAMATIC CONTRAST TO GRASMERE IS THE VILLAGE of Mardale, a day’s walk east of Wordsworth’s birthplace through striking Cumbrian hills. Mardale’s best days, it might be said, are behind it--so far behind it that, most of the time, it lies beneath some 20 or 30 feet of water in what is now Haweswater Reservoir. When Haweswater was created in the late 1930s to provide water for some of the large industrial towns of Lancashire, Mardale was evacuated, its buildings were blown up and the remaining timbers were carted away so that they wouldn’t clog the outlet valves. When the dam was built, the headwaters collected and rose, inch by inch for two years, until the whole of the valley floor was transformed into a lake bed.

Once, as I passed this way during a drought, I saw the results of the whole artificial process reversed: The remains of the village, which at the time of its demise had stood virtually unaltered for two centuries, poked tantalizingly into view. With the water fallen like a great slow shawl around it, an enormous section of the field system was revealed, the stone walls still perfect around the small dead fields. The view was dominated by two larger piles of stones, one of which was the church, the other a pub called the Dun Bull; and through the scene a stream still ran beneath the Tudor packhorse bridge along its grassless indent, just as it does when the reservoir is full.

Village or no village, high water or low, this is perhaps the most memorable spot of the entire Wainwright Way, its isolation in the valley head made all the more intense by the imagined echoes of its drowned community.

KELD, GUNNERSIDE, SWALEDALE, ARKENGARTHDALE, Reeth; the names announce the Yorkshire Dales, and a landscape of another kind. (This, indeed, is the brilliance of the Wainwright: As one moves across the vertical strata of the hill ranges, the shifts of scenery are sudden and bewildering, constant only in the restlessness of their pattern. The environment seems to change its very voice once, twice, three times a day.)

Some of the Dales are lovely, with rolling limestone hills and gentle valleys ( dale derives from the Norse word for “valley”), covered in a patchwork of moors and pastures, scattered with clumps of beech and oak woods. In the reach between Keld and Reeth, though, you are suddenly surrounded by the dead presences of the region’s worked-out lead mines. All that’s left of what was once an important industry are these chimneys and sheds and roofless engine houses around the seams of pits with such names as Old Gang Mine, Surrender Bridge and North Hush. The very names sound as if they belong to fallen places.

Here, there is spoil and debris on every side. For the past few days, nature has been blowing her own trumpet with all the wind in her lungs, bragging with huge skies or steepling summits. Now it’s man’s turn to show what he can conjure onto the earth’s surface, and the lessons are unlovely. I said at the outset that one aim of the Wainwright is to skirt industrial sites. Perhaps this is the point at which it most nearly fails. As with Mardale, there is what I can only describe as spectral clamor about the place, a colossal sense of activity laid low by time and circumstance.

BY THE TIME THE WALKER AND THE WAINWRIGHT remerge into the present, past Reeth, we are beyond the route’s halfway point. The stretch between Reeth and Richmond was a particular favorite of Wainwright’s. “The scenery is of a particularly high quality,” he writes in his reserved manner, “with the Swale the dominant feature and lovely everywhere.” The Swale, which has been called “the best of English rivers,” is no less than idyllic along much of its course, a swirling dark current with close, softly sculpted banks tufted with grass and shrubs.

The Swale is fed by streams from the Pennine Mountains, and soon the Wainwright crosses the Pennine Way. Next comes the Vale of York, or Mowbray, a flat patchwork quilt of rich fields set between the Pennines and the Cleveland Hills. This is farmland, farmland and more farmland, negotiated tortuously with the unavoidable use of paved roads, the only ones we must tread for the entire 190 miles.

Wainwright talks of the sluggish River Wiske here, “condemned to meander aimlessly and hopelessly around the countryside, in a vain search for a contour that would give it an objective,” and there can be no doubting that he feels an acute personal sympathy with its situation.

Then the path climbs up, over the sudden bulk of the Cleveland Hills. This compact but dramatic range is like a line of seaside cliffs lacking the sea. In place of the rolling tide is an enormous view of the industrial muddle that is Middlesborough, with the beaklike summit of Roseberry Topping rising to the east. The escarpment descends to the last sustained theme of the walk--the barren heather slopes of the North York Moors.

On down the home stretch by way of the small railway town of Grosmont, the Wainwright crosses the final rolls of moorlands before the sea. For the walker, there is a moment of the purest elation when the skeletal ruin of Whitby Abbey rears into view on the high cliff ramparts of the town. It announces the sea, the east coast of England, the end of the route, the job well-done. Only an inconsiderable handful of miles remain now to the steep scatter of houses in Robin Hood’s Bay, the Wainwright’s conclusion. That great gaping-walled abbey, its last prayers exhaled several centuries ago, is the final landmark of the walk, and the sudden sight of it is as evocative and unequivocal as the sound of a sailor crying “Land!” at the end of a long voyage.

I put it in roughly these terms to Alfred Wainwright that day in his front room at Kendal. He replied, without irony, I swear, above the ticking of the grandfather clock: “Oh. So you didn’t enjoy the walk then.”

GUIDEBOOK

Walking the Wainwright Way

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Great Britain is 44. Local area codes are given below. If dialing from within Britain, dial 0 before the area code. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of .65 pounds to the dollar. Rates are per person for one night unless otherwise noted, and include meals as indicated.

Getting there: United Airlines, American Airlines, Virgin Atlantic Airways and British Airways have daily nonstop flights between Los Angeles and London. More convenient to the Wainwright Way, though, is Manchester; British Airways flies there nonstop from LAX five times a week, and there are numerous daily flights between London and Manchester on British Airways (and two a day on Manx Airlines).

Where to stay: White Moss Hotel, Rydal Water, Grasmere, Cumbria, telephone (5394) 35-295. Rate: $122, including breakfast and five-course dinner. Kings’ Arms Hotel, Market Street, Kirkby Stephen, Cumbria, tel. (7583) 71-378. Rates: $70-$80 for two, including breakfast. Howe Villa, Whitcliffe Mill, Richmond, North Yorkshire, tel. (748) 850-055. Rate: $77 including cocktail, dinner and breakfast. Saxonville Hotel, Ladysmith Avenue, Whitby, North Yorkshire (947) 602-631. Rates: $58-$65 including dinner and breakfast. Youth hostels along and near the Wainwright Way offer overnight dormitory accommodations to walkers of all ages, alone or in groups, for $5-$6 a night. You must be an international member of a Youth Hostel Assn. For information, contact YHA, Trevelyan House, 8 St. Stephen’s Hill, St. Albans, Herts AL1 2DY, tel. (727) 55-215.

Recommended reading: There are two guides to the coast-to-coast walk by Alfred Wainwright: “A Coast-to-Coast Walk,” a pocket-sized book with detailed route directions and diagrams, published in a reproduction of Wainwright’s own hand (Michael Joseph, about $12.50) and “Wainwright’s Coast-to-Coast Walk” (Michael Joseph, about $19.50), a more general account of the route, with color photographs, are widely available at British bookshops, but may also be ordered in Los Angeles from the Traveler’s Bookcase, (213) 655-0575; import prices will be higher than those listed above.

For further information: A brochure entitled “Walking in Britain,” is available from the British Tourist Authority, 350 S. Figueroa St., Suite 450, Los Angeles, 90071; (213) 628-3528. The BTA can also provide general tourism information, maps, etc.