After years of planning we have finally arrived in St. Bees, England, the beginning of our Coast to Coast walk. We flew in this morning from Northern Ireland and as we flew over England, I truly began to understand the size of our undertaking. When you actually see the countryside, it looks an awful lot bigger than on our little maps. Oh my gosh, do we really think we are going to walk across this ENTIRE country. What were we thinking? Okay, remember, this is definitely an adventure.

St. Bee’s is this beautiful little town by the Irish Sea. And, of course, there are wonderful stories about St. Bee. St. Bee is actually a corruption of St. Bega, an Irish princess who fled her native country sometime between the 6th and 7th centuries to avoid an arranged marriage with a Norwegian prince. Doesn’t that sound like the perfect inspiration for an Irish ballad? Landing on England’s northwest coast, St. Bega lived as a hermit and became renowned for her good deeds. Legends grew up around her over the centuries. In the most famous of these, St. Bega approached Lord Egremont to ask for some land for a convent she wished to found. Egremont promised St. Bega all the land covered by snow the next day; which, as it was to be midsummer’s day, was not as generous an offer as it first appeared. Miraculously, however, snow did fall that day and St. Bega was able to build her convent, around which the modern day village of St. Bee’s was founded.

Isn’t that a wonderful story? Here is a picture of the doors of the church built in honor of St. Bega.

We have a beautiful farm house for our B and B tonight. Stonehouse Farm. It is very nice.

All through the countryside, the Hawthorn trees are covered in gorgeous white blossoms. Irish legend is that the fairies live in the Hawthorn trees, so the trees must be treated with great respect. And if you ever find a lone Hawthorn tree, it deserves special respect, as it is sacred ground for the fairies. All these wonderful things I am learning! Here is a fairy sacred lone Hawthorn tree.

As I explained in an earlier post, a Coast to Coast tradition is to dip your feet in the Irish Sea at St. Bees and to pick up a pebble and carry it across the country and throw it in the North Sea at Robin Hood’s Bay. We upped the tradition by bringing a stone from Mukilteo after dipping our toes there. So tonight, the first ever in the history of the world (as far as we know), stone from Mukilteo was thrown into the Irish Sea at St. Bee’s, England. Here are Janet and Coe initiating the Irish Sea with Puget Sound pebbles.

And, of course, we dipped our toes in the Irish Sea. Okay, it is time to walk!

And here are our chosen pebbles to travel with us to the North Sea.

 

God bless,
Coe