The Unfinished Path
Making the most of it.
The King Charles III England Coast Path does not fully exist yet. This is not a complaint. The trail I’m walking is still being made. Sections are open, sections are pending, sections exist only as dotted lines on a map with a set of negotiations ongoing. It may never be complete because as fast as some sections are open, others will fall into the sea or get flooded. The guidebook I carry contains what it calls bespoke link routes for the gaps. Polite language for the places where you take what’s available and keep moving.
I knew this before I started. My life is a series of littered projects never quite finished. This is, I have come to understand, a pattern of mine (sorry).
One of the things anxiety does - my particular brand of it - is ask the same question on a loop. Why can’t I stick to a path? Why do I begin things and get diverted? Why does the route I planned keep becoming something else, something harder, something that requires more improvisation and forgiveness than I had budgeted for? The anxiety never waits for an answer. Over the past few years it’s become a gnawing blackness that I feel I must deserve somehow as everything I’ve ever loved or wanted is taken away from me.
I came to this walk needing something specific. Not adventure, not achievement, not the satisfaction of mileage logged. I needed peace. The coast, the birds, the sea, the fells doing their ancient indifferent thing on the horizon. I often feel like I’m in hell. I needed the world to narrow to what was immediately in front of me and give anxiety nowhere to get its footing.
For stretches, it works. The Lune Estuary in early morning, flat and silver, herons motionless in the shallows. The limestone at Silverdale, the path climbing through woodland and then opening suddenly onto a view that makes you stop walking. These are the moments the trail delivers and in that moment the anxiety has nothing to grip.
Then the path routes you onto a main road.
North of Morecambe the official coastal path has somehow deposited me onto a busy trunk road - lorries, diesel, a pavement that exists technically rather than practically. The coast is metres away. I walk in noise while the thing you came for sits just out of reach.
I know this feeling. I’ve felt it in contexts that have nothing to do with walking. The sense of being this close to something sustaining - warmth, connection, the simple comfort of being met by another person - and finding it just behind a barrier they won’t let you cross. The path promising one thing and delivering another. You stand on the tarmac and the question starts up again: why does this keep happening? Why is the route never quite what it was supposed to be?
What I’m beginning to realise is that the route is not the problem. It’s incomplete because it is being made and things that are being made are incomplete. And that is the only way anything gets made at all.
I leave the road and find the canal instead - sitting on its embankment above the surrounding land so that you can see the Bay gleaming over the rooftops, birds moving across the water. The indirect route giving back what the direct route took away.
In Carnforth I sit in a tiny cinema with red seats, eat a cheese sandwich and watch Brief Encounter on a loop. A film about love that cannot complete itself, made in secret, at night, in a station chosen because it was far enough from London to be safe from the Luftwaffe. I’m not sure how I feel about Brief Encounter. It’s a great movie but my feelings about it have changed. I buy nothing from the bookshop except a pile of railway pamphlets for my train-mad son - evidence that I was here and thinking of him, that the miles between us were being crossed in small ways even when they couldn’t be crossed in the large one.
The sun comes out. My middle-aged knees have opinions. I ignore them and walk on to Silverdale, and then on again to Arnside, because the path keeps offering and I keep accepting. This perhaps the simplest definition of happiness I can find these days.
Between Arnside and Grange-over-Sands there is a gap that cannot be walked around. The path does not exist. The guidance is simple: take the train. One stop on the Furness Line, across the Kent Viaduct.
I find I am not troubled by this. There is no alternative, which means there is nothing to resist. The train exists. The viaduct exists. You accept the help that is available. You arrive at the other side still on the right path. This too is something I am learning. That accepting help is not the same as giving up.
I have not always been good at this but I am getting better.
The King Charles III England Coast Path circumnavigates England. I started in Chester. I will end in Chester and then hitch a ride back home. Every mile north along this coast, every stage into Cumbria and back south through Northumberland and Yorkshire and East Anglia and round the south coast - all of it is a long arc back to where I began. The trail does not take me somewhere new and leave me there. It brings me home.
I think about this a great deal as I walk. I am walking in a circle and will end up back where I started. The question that sits with me, through the good miles and the bad , through the beaches and the lorries and the canal and the red cinema seats and the ice cream at Arnside pier, is not just where am I going. It is: what will be there when I return?
The people I love most are living their lives somewhere off my path now. My children, growing without me for too many of their days. I miss them terribly. They’re a deep void in my life. The woman I have loved, navigating something I cannot navigate with her. I carry them with me - not as a weight exactly, more as a compass. The reason the direction matters. The reason I am trying to become someone steadier and clearer and more at peace, rather than simply someone who has walked a long way.
I still love them. I want the best for them. That doesn’t change with the miles or their absence or the incomplete sections of path. It is the one thing I am certain of when everything else is dotted lines.
What I hope - for myself, and perhaps for anyone reading this who is also walking something unfinished - is that the diversions don’t take me too far from my chosen route. That the inland detours and the borrowed trains and the bespoke link routes all resolve, eventually, into a path that was worth walking. That space and wisdom, accumulated slowly over years of putting one foot in front of the other, result in something.
I don’t know yet what it is. I don’t know what will be waiting back in Chester when I arrive full circle. Maybe happiness, maybe homelessness. Both are very real possibilities.
But I am not waiting for the path to be finished before I walk it. The path is being made, I am walking it and both of these things are true at the same time. And somewhere in the gap between them - on the beaches, the canal towpaths and tiny cinemas with their impossible love stories - something is being made in me too.
I keep the faith. I’ll keep walking until I find out what it is.
- Adam
