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hornsea

Trans Pennine Trail: The Long, Winding Goodbye

Aug 30th, 2011
by Mikeachim.
4 comments

It’s midnight, and I’m looking up at a signpost.

The best way to see England is on foot. (The second best way? Ask Sustrans). It’s a country designed to fit your feet, whether via the National Trail network or by those enticing mystery dashed lines you see winding their way into the trees at the fringes of your Ordnance Survey Landranger. You’re not meant to go from A to B – you’re supposed to dabble with the rest of the alphabet. This is why English people of a certain age will argue until they’re blue in the face about the ‘quickest route’ for a stranger to get somewhere. What they really mean is their favourite route – and everyone has a different one, because England can accomodate that.

At midnight on the 23rd of August I’m in Hornsea, my childhood home on East Yorkshire’s coastline. I’ve wandered along the sea-front, tweeting fitfully and plucking at memories, until I’ve reached the Marine Hotel and a sheer concrete wall to the upper promenade I clearly remember being too nervous to climb, which I can now scale by jumping, grabbing the rail and pulling myself up. (It’s such a contrast that I feel I have someone else’s memory). The clouds are low enough to turn to mist, fogging the streetlights and giving the ruinous amusement arcades the look of a heavily anti-aliased Pripyat.

Then I’m at the end of the old railway line, the one that connected Hornsea with Hull until Doctor Beeching swung his axe. The disused train station is long gone, and replaced with an enormous paved compass, pointing westwards – specifically, at Southport, on the other side of the country.

I walk the first mile of it.

From here, the Trail winds over the Wolds and down towards Sheffield, splitting in either direction to provide secondary routes for the weekend-tripper (one of which is up to York, via the whole Solar System)….

…and finally, on the main route, reaching Southport on the west coast, 20 miles north of Liverpool.

When Barbara of Hole In The Donut Travels came to York a few months back, I was startled to learn she hadn’t arrived via London. Because all too often, that’s the England visitors see. I’m not knocking London (it’s a fascinating place) but it’s not a synonym for England. The England I love best, that gets me scanning maps with what I can only describe as geographic lust, is that of hill and dale and moor and backwater trail – and the best ways to find these are by taking the great trans-England walking routes so beloved by folk like Wainwright (who even devised his own coast to coast walk)…

Striding along these great Ways isn’t just an effective method for seeing (and feeling) England – it’s also a great way to say goodbye to it. Since my plans revolve around seeing the rest of the world, a couple of final, epic walks sometime soon are an attractive prospect.

And the symbolism of starting the last of them from my childhood home?

Irresistible.

Further reading:

  • Walking Britain: tons of ideas here, complete with detailed breakdowns of walks and some (sadly quite small) photos of what you can expect to see.
  • It is absolutely impossible to read this book and not have twitchy feet. That’s you warned.
Images: rofanator, vikellis, karenwithak, steves71.

England’s East Coast: Jacket Required

Oct 26th, 2010
by Mikeachim.
12 comments

I love how warm and inviting the seafront at Hornsea gets this time of year.

I always come away thinking “next time, I’ll bring a deck-chair. Really get comfortable, you know?”.

And maybe go for a paddle! That would be just lovely.

Hornsea, Askance

Nov 27th, 2009
by Mikeachim.
1 comment

NotVeryAmusingAmusements

Hi. I’m a 38 year old man, living at home with his mum.

(Until she’s recovered from her recent surgery. Probably returning to York this time next week).

Walking through town last night, I squinted until everything was blurry – until it was 1998 again, the last time I lived here. I listened to someone explaining the finer points of making up a rollie. I watched as the side of the church cracked open, spilling buttery light and rosy-cheeked young urchins onto the street (and since my eyes were half-shut I couldn’t see their cigarettes or cans of lager). I squinted at the rebranded kebab shop until its name changed back.

The streets looked too wide – explained by the fact that they’ve recently been widened – and the same shops are constantly in flux while others endure as fixed points in time and space. The latter are a marvel. For every safe, sensible attempt at yet another bakery or grocery store there’s something so wildly nichey that it couldn’t even survive in York (a city that has a shop selling Christmas decorations all year round). At an inaccessible end of the roundabout near St Nicholas’s Church there’s a Fung Shui shop. It’s a shop that sells Fung Shui. In East Yorkshire. To Yorkshire people. And yet somehow it’s survived for at least the last half-decade. I’m fascinated by this Shackleton-like feat of endurance, flying in the face of every commercial law I know. I want to know more. There’s obviously a story there.

Even if I squinted, the boarded-up Amusements along the sea-front stubbornly remained shut. I dimly remember going in Dave’s (above) – distinctly remember walking through the doors, but nothing else, as if I’ve had that memory surgically removed by someone desperately covering their tracks and/or hiding just how bad it was in there. All the amusement arcades are derelict buildings waiting to have their roles reimagined – even the mighty Pastimes. There’s a hint of Pripiat about the place, except it’s not radioactivity, it’s apathy.

Squinting goes some way to hiding all that. But squinting is dishonest, and so very 1998; it reminds me to who I used to be when I’d rather concentrate on who I am now. Also, squinting gives you frown-lines. Being English, I already have enough of them.

So while I’m back here, I’ll open my eyes and see what happens.

Image: the repairman

Nithering

Sep 4th, 2009
by Mikeachim.
8 comments

Hornsea – the Bahamas of England’s east coast.

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Some folk say Hornsea can be gloomy, dank and bitterly cold. They’re fools.

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Growing up as a child, I used to look out of my window and watch the sun come out in all its radiant rosy-fingered beauty.

What fascinated me was that it always came out at a great distance. Over Hornsea, the grey skies were permanently locked and bolted.

When I asked my parents what this was all about, they told me to be grateful we had enough coal to survive the winter. Happy memories.

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Today, thanks to global warming, Hornsea is enjoying a kind of rennaissance, particularly with the establishment of a high-profile “boot-camp” for the British Antarctic Survey, and a residential building-boom resulting from the ground thawing enough to be diggable for the first time since the last Ice Age.

It’s a town that has everything. It’s true what they say: when you’ve been to Hornsea, you’ve visited the ends of the earth.

It gives me a warm glow to think of it.

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