walking

Lindisfarne and Bamburgh, Northumberland

Day one Circular walk of Lindisfarne (4 miles)
Day two Budle Bay to Bamburgh to (5 miles)

The first swallows are swooping round the headland as I follow the coast path along the western side of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. There are ringed plovers on the beach and a couple of grey seals bobbing out at sea. A barefoot guy is splashing along the tidal Pilgrim’s Way, an ancient post-marked path across shining sands. Lindisfarne is only accessible when receding tides uncover this path and the curving causeway road nearby.

The original 62 miles of Northumberland coast path, which opened 20 years ago, bypassed the island, so I’ve been looking forward to walking this stretch of the England coast path, which opened two years ago.

Very few of us will walk the full 2,700 miles of the King Charles III England coast path, which was inaugurated in March, but a four-mile stroll around Holy Island is an adventure in itself, a shifting landscape of wader-foraged mudflats, dunes, beaches, whinstone cliffs and a reedy blue-and-gold lough.

Waymarked posts lead through grassy sand dunes, freckled with cowslips. Skylarks and stonechats clack and chirrup, while courting lapwings tumble over the fields. Gertrude Jekyll’s little walled garden, on the hillside facing the clifftop castle, is bright with marigolds and purple rock cress.

Edward Hudson, founder of Country Life magazine, bought Lindisfarne Castle in 1901 and hired architect Edwin Lutyens to turn it into a home. Inside the craggy fortress, there are four-postered bedrooms and an elegant drawing room in the old gunpowder store. From the ramparts, a telescope shows the seal colony near two obelisks guiding boats into Holy Island harbour.

Just over the fields are the red sandstone arches of Lindisfarne Priory; these ruins date from the 12th century but a monastery was founded here by Saint Aidan in Northumbria’s seventh-century heyday. I walk past stacks of lobster pots to visit the museum with its carved stone crosses and fossil rosaries. Nearby Pilgrims Coffee offers fancy brews and fresh focaccia.

A stream of cars crosses Lindisfarne causeway, but you can arrive instead on bus 477 from Berwick-upon-Tweed (Mon-Sat in school holidays; otherwise Wed-Sat). A bus ticket gets you 10% off at the castle and 20% off at the priory. With good transport links, Berwick makes an excellent base for exploring this end of the coast path.

Getting off bus X18 at Budle Bay campsite the next day, I continue walking south towards Bamburgh. The original coast path runs inland from Lindisfarne, but there are now 10 miles of seasonally sensitive coastal access, open in June and July, plus this short new year-round path on the south-eastern edge of Budle Bay.

Wading birds forage in the mudflats and miles of moss-green salt marsh. Past ruined lime kilns and coconut-scented gorse, I cross cliffs into dunes, where a grasshopper warbler whirrs among roses and honeysuckle. The Walled Garden cafe, opposite St Aidan’s church, serves huge crab sandwiches with lemon and herbs. Nearby, the Norman keep of Bamburgh Castle has towered for nearly 900 years over the wide yellow sands.

Transport for this trip was provided by LNER. The nearest mainline station to Lindisfarne is Berwick-upon-Tweed. The Walls B&B (doubles from £130 B&B) overlooks the Tweed, or there is a YHA hostel next door (private rooms from £57)
Phoebe Taplin

Around the Wash, Norfolk and Lincolnshire

From King’s Lynn
To Sutton Bridge
Distance 15 miles

Isolation is claimed to be one of the latest trends in luxury travel. If true, then the stretch of the King Charles path around the Wash must be the most extravagant pleasure you can enjoy in England.

For hours I traversed a landscape of no people. No walkers, no workers, no houses, no cars, no noise except the shrill cry of redshank and the babble of skylarks drifting on the wind. If you’re weary of chatter and conflict, this undeniably desolate walk is for you. Every view of vast horizontals of green, brown and blue could be the cover for an album entitled Nowhere.

I set out from King’s Lynn, one of England’s most vibrant ports in the 13th century, which retains a wealth of medieval buildings. The coast path around the Wash, England’s biggest natural bay, requires excursions inland to cross the rivers that feed the largest multiple estuary system in Britain. Several miles can be sliced from the King’s Lynn section by taking the ferry across the Great Ouse from the old port to West Lynn.

I find no sign of life at the bottom of Ferry Lane, only a mysterious notice: “If you require the ferry please make yourself seen BEFORE the time NOT AFTER”. After 15 minutes pondering its meaning, I spot a small boat crossing the turbulent brown water.

I’m ferryman Ben’s only passenger and he’s convinced I’ll be cold in my shorts. “No shelter out there,” he warns. It’s a blustery May day, and I head up the western bank of the river.

The Ouse sparkles silver and blue, but there is only a distant line of bronze representing the retreating North Sea. The sea views are underwhelming yet the effect is rather like being at sea, the seabank a kind of ship, ushering us between the vast prairie fields of the reclaimed Fens on one side and epic salt marshes on the other.

Most of this 15-mile stretch between King’s Lynn and Sutton Bridge borders the Wash. The south-eastern corner of this national nature reserve was first recognised as a precious home for stupendous flocks of wintering wildfowl and breeding waders by Sir Peter Scott, the 20th-century conservationist and artist who helped found the World Wide Fund for Nature.

He would be delighted by the wealth of little and great white egrets along the seabank, and it is only birds I have for company (I encounter just three walkers all day). I eat my packed lunch in the shelter of a stunted hawthorn – notices warn walkers there are no toilets, cafes or public transport on this section.

The grand liminal arena of the Wash, where land and sea blur into one, plays tricks on distances and perspectives. Faraway trees pop up like a mirage above the blue horizon. For a while I entertain myself with “ship or tractor?” when spying a distant machine. I see both.

I pass a mysterious island, identified on the map as the Outer Trial Bank, a test to see if more land might be wrenched from the sea. When I follow the path inland again alongside the River Nene, and pass the old lighthouse where Scott once lived, it is like returning to land after a sea voyage.

Other stretches of the coast path are unquestionably more scenic, but there’s something glorious and trance-like about walking for so long in such space and solitude. On the bus back to King’s Lynn, I glow from this unique experience.

Accommodation is limited around the Wash, but King’s Lynn is a good option, with day walks either side (Hunstanton to King’s Lynn is 17 miles with buses to get you out/back). The Bank House (doubles from £165 B&B) is in the historic old town
Patrick Barkham

The west Somerset coast

From Minehead
To St Audries Bay
Distance 11 miles

Minehead may be the birthplace of the science fiction writer Arthur C Clarke, but it’s a coastal, rather than cosmic, odyssey I’m beginning here, walking 11 miles east to St Audries Bay.

Despite this being one of Somerset’s most well-trodden stretches of coast, few tackle it in one go; tides dictate when beach paths are passable, and return journeys rely on a public transport system that doesn’t yet stretch to moonbuses, so many visitors opt for circular hikes instead. Until now I’ve done the same, but the opening of the England coast path has inspired me to pull on my walking boots and lace together the sections I’ve skipped.

It’s not a propitious start. Coastal erosion has forced a 1½-mile diversion leaving Minehead. Instead of clamouring gannets and the rush of waves, I’m trailed by the rumble of engines as the route follows the A39. It’s not far to Dunster, however, where the soundtrack switches to lawnmowers and willow warblers, and I’m soon at the beach.

Clattering shingle underfoot, I’m buffeted along to the village of Blue Anchor, with its huddle of beach chalets. Along the promenade, I meet angler Steve, who’s hoping for dogfish or conger.

“Will you eat them,” I ask?

“I’m soft,” he smiles. “I throw them back. If I want fish, I go to the chippy.”

From here on, the path gets steeper and prettier, detouring around the headland through woods trimmed with blossom and birdsong. Midweek, the trail is quiet, despite the herds of caravans corralled in adjacent fields.

Approaching Watchet, the path spills on to the grassy earthworks of Daw’s Castle, a clifftop fortress founded by King Alfred to stave off Viking raiders. Fossil hunting is another long tradition along this coast, and when I stop at the town’s Market House Museum, I’m transfixed by a huge ammonite, found on a nearby beach a century and a half ago.

It’s market day in Watchet, and the trail leads past a rainbow of striped awnings to East Quay, the town’s social enterprise arts hub. In its cafe I order a charred sweetcorn and courgette salad and a cheese scone almost as gargantuan as that ammonite.

I’d like to visit East Quay’s art gallery and Watchet’s boat museum, but time and tide wait for no woman along this shoreline. Two hours before low tide, the route across neighbouring Helwell Bay is passable, but I’m cautious as I step over rocks and slippery kelp, mesmerised by the swirling mud and serrated shoreline below my boots as I play seaweedy hopscotch.

Leaving the beach near Doniford Farm Park, the trail winds through a maze of caravans then out into fields before dropping into St Audries Bay. I feel the waterfall here before I see it, its icy spray a reminder not to linger.

Retracing my steps to Doniford Halt, a request stop on the West Somerset Railway, I arrive just in time to flag down a steam train to take me back to Minehead. As we puff along, the landscape I have walked is rewound through the window. There are better coastlines in England for swimming than these estuarine bays, but as a tidal immersion on foot this walk has been stellar.

Train from Doniford Halt to Minehead is £17.50 one-way (west-somerset-railway.co.uk). Doubles at the Foxes hotel in Minehead from £120 B&B
Rhiannon Batten

Chichester harbour, Hampshire and West Sussex

From Prinsted
To West Wittering
Distance 16½ miles

Wild, windswept wetlands stretch to the horizon. Human figures are outnumbered by birds. Church spires and thatched roofs signpost scattered settlements. Can this really be the crowded south coast of England?

My boyfriend and I are walking part of a 35-mile stretch of the King Charles III England coast path, linking South Hayling in Hampshire to East Head in West Sussex, which opened in February. This section includes Chichester harbour, a protected estuary with open water and sheltered inlets, reedbeds, salt marshes, mudflats, shingle banks, sand dunes and a wooded shoreline.

We join the path at pretty Prinsted, after coffee (and directions) from the Southbourne farm shop. We set off east around Chidham peninsula, trying to spot the birds pictured on the information boards. Tens of thousands of wading birds and waterfowl spend the winter here, and in summer it’s a breeding ground for threatened species of seabirds and waders. Early April may not be peak time for birdwatching, but we still see a plethora of gulls and ducks, plus oystercatchers, curlews and a kestrel.

After rounding the peninsula and making our way up the other side, the day’s destination comes into sight across the water. Bosham, a cluster of buildings crowding up to the quayside, looks close enough to touch, but the winding coastal path is deceptive, and we still have a way to go (8½ miles in total).

We are glad to reach the Millstream, a 31-room hotel made from converted cottages, set in a lovely garden. Our room is in a tiny thatched cottage, reached by a little bridge over the stream.

Bosham (pronounced “Bozzum”) is ancient – believed to predate the Romans. Some think this is where King Canute tried to turn back the tide. King Harold II is depicted in the Bayeux tapestry praying at Bosham church, and the manor is recorded in the Domesday Book as one of the wealthiest in England. We visit the Saxon church and see the plaque to Canute’s eight-year-old daughter, who is said to have drowned and been buried here.

More cheerfully, we stop for a pint at the ivy-clad Berkeley Arms before dinner at the harbourside Anchor Bleu. The latter, family-run inn has been welcoming weary travellers since 1741 and has a daily changing, seafood-heavy chalkboard menu. The inspired kelp, samphire and seaweed “seacakes” mean that vegetarians don’t miss out, either.

The next morning, we walk across the harbour (a walkway appears at low tide) and continue south for a couple of miles. The wind is howling and it’s hard going – thankfully the route is flat and the formerly muddy tracks are now smooth paths. Areas along the trail that previously flooded at high tide have boardwalks above the water level, made from recycled bottles, and the paths are designed to be easily “rolled back” in the event of coastal erosion.

We battle the wind to the water’s edge and wave down the ferryman on the far shore. For hundreds of years, travellers have taken the Itchenor Ferry (AKA the Itchy Bosom) across the Chichester Channel to save them a 13-mile detour by foot. Today, the ferry also operates as a taxi service for people going to and from their boats, and on our crossing a bonus spin up the channel to pick up a couple of sailors is included in our £3.50 fare.

We disembark at West Itchenor and stop for coffee and cake at the Quarterdeck Cafe in the bustling boatyard. From here, it’s a six-mile shoreline stroll to the dunes at East Head spit, and the adjacent sandy beach at West Wittering. We are no longer alone – the car park is packed – but the beach is so vast, we don’t mind sharing.

Southbourne station is within walking distance of the start of the walk and Chichester station is a bus ride from the end. Accommodation was provided by the Millstream hotel (doubles from £200 B&B)
Rachel Dixon

The Fylde coast, Lancashire

From St Annes-on-the-Sea
To Freckleton
Distance 11½ miles

Two avocets dip their scimitar beaks into the lagoon. An egret hops on to the bank. A herd of cattle wade knee-deep. In the hazy light it might be a remote outpost on the Pampas. But it is Lancashire, and Preston is just around the corner.

Some walks exhilarate partly because your expectations are quite low. I imagined the coast from St Annes-on-the-Sea to Freckleton to be suburban seaside, with the occasional moment of peace, beauty or wildness perhaps. But it is all of this and more.

I have a few childhood memories of St Annes from visiting my grandad. It still has a 1970s atmosphere: quietish, residential, conservative. Local businesses are sprucing up frontages and gardens for the coming season. A litter-picking campaign has set up shop near the pier.

We walk on the sandy beach until it segues into a greener area, with dunes on the left and salt marsh on the right. The path between is busy with dog walkers and families enjoying the morning sun. Groups of nordic walkers speed past. Two detectorists bleep below the prom. On Fairhaven Lake the pedalos and boats are out.

Soon we come to Lytham, smart and gentrified. We buy coffees from a kiosk on the front before strolling along the Mussel Tank Memorial to visit the free museum inside the windmill. The birdlife is already good – oystercatchers, curlews, herons – and it only gets better as we leave built-up areas behind and stride out on to the edges of the Ribble Estuary national nature reserve – also designated a site of special scientific interest, a European special protection area and international Ramsar wetland site.

Why all the titles? Because this estuarial Eden happens to be the most important site in the UK for wintering wildfowl, supporting more than a quarter of a million ducks, geese, swans and wading birds; it’s internationally important for 16 species of wintering visitors. Spring isn’t bad, either. I’ve remembered my binoculars. As well as the wondrous avocets, we see and/or hear redshanks, skylarks, linnets, sedge warblers, shelducks, goldfinches, swallows, peewits, kestrels – and hares.

I have brought a hat, too, which is lucky. Coast walks are great – you can proceed without navigating or having to look down – but there’s not much cover. As we approach Warton airbase, the path follows a causeway. We have passed lots of benches (and loos), but here we sit on the grass to enjoy a picnic and birdsong.

The Lancashire coast is known for resorts rather than beaches, nature, cliffs or birdlife. The towns are famous; the bits in between overlooked. The King Charles III England coast path could alter this, which would be a good thing; it will spread visitors out, perhaps explode a few cliches. The Lancs littoral turns out to be as generous with fresh air, flora and fauna as it is with fun and frolics.

The Lancashire section isn’t fully open or waymarked, but work is afoot and Cicerone has published a guide and map. The 68 bus runs between Blackpool and Preston, stopping at St Annes, Lytham and Freckleton. The stretch between Freckleton and Preston is best done by bus as the path is forced on to a main road. Trains connect Blackpool, St Annes-on-the-Sea, Lytham and Preston. The Rooms Lytham has doubles from £110

Fans claim the brutal thriller from MobLand writer is as good as Homeland

New episodes of a ‘ gripping’ spy thriller fans say is just as good as Homeland are coming soon.

The Agency made its debut near the end of 2024 and is finally returning with new episodes. According to its synopsis, the series follows Martian, a covert CIA agent ordered to abandon his undercover life and return to London Station.

When the love he left behind reappears, romance reignites. He soon finds that she is in trouble and he will do anything to try to save her, even past the point of treachery. The only way out is deeper in. A knife-edge Martian must walk if he is to save love, life, and his mission.

Boasting a stellar cast, the line-up includes X-Men actor Michael Fassbender as Martian. He is joined by The Last of Us actor Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, The Crown’s Dominic West, and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville to name a few.

Billed as a fresh take on the critically acclaimed hit French drama Le Bureau des Légendes (The Bureau), it was co-created by award winning writer Jez Butterworth who also penned all episodes of crime drama MobLand.

It is now confirmed that Season 2 will arrive on June 21. Its first season is streaming now for viewers to catch up on Paramount+. The service can be accessed either via its own dedicated app, or via an add-on subscription through the Prime Video platform.

An explosive new trailer was also released by the streamer ahead of the second season’s release. It looks to crank up both the tension and action on offer as Fassbender’s character embarks on a dangerous and desperate mission.

The Agency comes approved from notable audiences. In an interview a few months after it was made available, Lauren Cohan who plays Maggie in The Walking Dead and its spin-off, gave it her backing.

Asked for her own streaming recommendations at the time she admitted: “I’m also watching The Agency with Michael Fassbender and it’s on Paramount Plus. It’s great, it’s, it’s a really good show.”

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Plenty of viewers agree with the actor as one fan dubbed The Agency “bold, intense and gripping.” While another went so far as to claim that it is “as good as Homeland”.

Someone else posted online: The Agency is a must watch for anyone a fan of spy thrillers. First of all, the cast is absolutely amazing. It stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffery Wright, Richard Gere and Katherine Waterston. That cast right there is reason enough to give this a try and on top of that it’s a really good show too.”

One advised that it is perhaps not one for a casual viewing and would need some concentration. They said: “This is one of the better new shows so far this year. The Agency is a show where you can’t be playing on your phone, cooking dinner or doing something else, it requires your undivided attention. It’s a show that never gets stale. I can’t remember ever being bored, even for one episode. I loved every second of every episode.”

Another fan agreed by adding: “The writing is spectacular and brought to life by several A-listers. This is not a series you can watch while playing games on your phone. The series develops multiple, complex plots, many of which come together in later episodes and some that are well developed (and brutal at times).”

While some noted there is a slow build-up of tension as it begins, that doesn’t mean people make way through all episodes at record pace. One person said: “This is a great series – amazing performances from all the cast The special effects are great and the dialogue is spot on, hopefully there will be a second season. I binged it in one day.”

The Agency is streaming on Paramount+.

How often do you look down and wonder who created the path your feet are following? Or ask the cause of its curves and dips? Formed over thousands of years, paths form an “internet of feet” – a web of bridleways and hollow ways, drove roads and ridgeways, coffin tracks, pilgrimage trails and city pavements. Whether you’re hiking a National Trail or pottering along a National Trust footpath, there’s a good chance you’re following ancestral steps.

It’s thoughts like these that led me on a journey to track the evolution of British paths for my book, The Path More Travelled. Eleven thousand years ago ice age hunter-gatherers arrived from Europe’s heartlands, moving through the wilderness along broad “routeways”, that later widened to tracks when horses and then wheels were adopted in the bronze age. For more than 2,000 years, traffic moved no faster than the speed of a horse, until the internal combustion engine drove pedestrians off the road just over a century ago.

In search of the capillaries that gave life to every community in Britain, I revisited coast paths, tramped shepherds’ trails and followed the serpentine curls of rivers. Here are a few of my favourite paths that bring history to life.

Sweet Track, Somerset Levels

The hunt for prehistoric paths took me deep into the wetlands of the Somerset Levels, where the Sweet Track was discovered in 1970. Built nearly 6,000 years ago (3806BC) by early farmers who needed access to an island, the collapsed boardwalk was preserved in peat. But a short walk from the Avalon Marshes centre (with an excellent cafe and open-air museum), woodland paths explore Shapwick Heath nature reserve, where a replica section of the Sweet Track teeters through the reeds. Visitors can walk in single file along this narrow, timber causeway and imagine the world of the Neolithic pioneers who colonised Somerset’s reflective waterways long before they were drained and converted to farmland. For modern versions of the Sweet Track, visit the Norfolk Broads and Norfolk coast path, where stilted, planked boardwalks wend their way through reedbeds, salt marshes and swamp woodland known locally as alder carr.

Street of the Dead, Iona

Writing this book led me to the far west of Scotland and the tiny island of Iona, where, after decades of tramping Britain’s paths, I walked for the first time along Sràid nam Marbh, the Street of the Dead. Across Britain, coffin roads, or corpse ways, were used by remote communities to convey their dead to cemeteries. Iona’s is no more than a few hundred metres in length, and most of it takes the form of a narrow, kinking lane leading from the ancient landing beach of Port nam Mairtear (Martyr’s Bay) to the site of a monastery founded in 563. Along this ancient road came the bodies of great Gaelic lords, bound for burial close to the monastery. For many, it’s a “thin place”, where the space between this world and the next narrows. You pass the ruins of an Augustinian nunnery established in around 1200, and the MacLean’s Cross, whose intricately carved floral and animal motifs and outstretched Christ captivated pilgrims. Then the abbey appears and the Street of the Dead, angling across the grass, the final section a short avenue of red granite slabs, sunken by the weight of time into the turf of the abbey precinct. There are very few roads in Britain where you can place your feet on to slabs that have been trodden by so many generations.

Bure Valley Path, Norfolk

One of my favourite walks traces the banks of the River Bure between the market town of Aylsham and the railway village of Hoveton. It’s a typical, gentle Norfolk valley of slow meanders, cascading willows, kingfishers and herons. It was like this 100 years ago, when huge timber sailing barges, wherries, used to glide silently upriver to Aylsham’s mills. Close to the river ran a steam railway line linking Hoveton and Aylsham. Today, the nine-mile Bure Valley Path is a shared walking and cycling route that follows the course of the old railway, now relaid as a narrow-gauge steam line, the Bure Valley Railway. Cycling the path is fun, but a superb walk awaits those who take the steam train from Hoveton to Aylsham then walk back towards Hoveton on the Bure Valley Path for about two miles, where a footpath on the left drops down to the waterside church of St Mary’s in Burgh-next-Aylsham. From here, riverside footpaths head downstream past white-painted watermills and old navigation locks while occasional steam locomotives contribute to the sylvan backdrop. At Coltishall, you can rehydrate at The Rising Sun, stroll along Anchor Street where wherries were built, and then return to the Bure Valley Path for the final two miles back to Hoveton. I know of no other walk so closely related to the eras of wind and steam.

The Ridgeway, Hertfordshire to Wiltshire

The Ridgeway runs for 87 miles from Ivinghoe Beacon high in the Chiltern Hills to the prehistoric stone circle at Avebury in deepest Wiltshire. On its rolling heights, you can walk back to the iron age, when formidable hill forts commanded the vales. The ghosts of warrior-farmers can be sensed most powerfully on the western end of the Ridgeway, where the chalky trail climbs past the ramparts of Uffington, whose banks and ditches – once braced with timber and chalk rubble – enclose an area twice the size of a football pitch. Right beside the fort, a 110-metre long white horse gallops across the down, cut deep into the turf during the late bronze age or early iron age. One mile to the west, the Ridgeway passes the chambered long barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy, which once contained the remains of 14 people dated to between 3590 and 3550BC. The Ridgeway’s knack of time travel has long appealed to writers and photographers, from Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies, to Richard Mabey and Fay Godwin, whose book The Oldest Road: The Ridgeway (1975), unravelled the path connecting deep history with a modern national trail.

Holloways, Surrey Hills

A holloway is a sunken path, an old way worn into the land by centuries of feet and hooves. Holloway walls can be almost vertical, cut back to raw rock and roots. Some are like ravines. Others are virtual tunnels, roofed with living trees. Some appear unexpectedly as gentle troughs in the landscape. They occur most dramatically in softer geologies like chalk, sandstone and greensand. Most are just a few minutes’ walk in length, but there are parts of the country where exploration will produce some very enjoyable clusters. There are three modest holloways right beside the White Horse of Uffington on the Ridgeway, cut perhaps in prehistoric times by cattle being moved from their winter quarters in the vale to the summer grasses of the high downs. In Holloway (2012), Robert Macfarlane wrote so poetically of a buried path in the Chideock valley of south Dorset that it’s become a cause of pilgrimage for those of us who look for these places. The Surrey Hills are laced with secretive holloways. Among my favourites are the sunken tracks on the greensand of Leith Hill and farther west, the old holloways of Hascombe Hill and Hydon’s Ball. It’s along these semi-subterranean trackways that you’re most likely to detect the steady plod of Saxon cattle. Or Hobbits.

The Mass Trespass Walk, Derbyshire

The story of countryside access is written in the grit of Kinder Scout, whose frowning sandstone forms the highest point in the Peak District. In April, 1932, an excited gaggle of hikers climbed the footpath from the Derbyshire village of Hayfield up towards the brow of Kinder Scout, where they clashed with squads of gamekeepers intent on preventing public access to the moorland. Legislation followed and today the path up William Clough is described on the National Trust website as the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass Walk. A vigorous eight-mile loop along the crags and back down to Hayfield, it offers the full Pennine repertoire in a single outing, from glittering reservoir to whispering moorland and monumental rocks. It includes Kinder Downfall cascade and a section of the Pennine Way, the earliest of Britain’s national trails. I walked the trail one blustery December day, ambushed by snow flurries and sunshine that spotlit Manchester like spilt crystals on the dark plain. I’ve climbed Kinder from many directions, but this is the route that tells the best story.

Nicholas Crane’s new book, The Path More Travelled, The Secret History of Britain’s Footpaths, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

BAD Bunny looked unrecognizable as an old man at the Met Gala on Monday night.

The 32-year-old star arrived at the event with gray hair, a gray beard and a walking stick – leaving fans completely baffled.

The Puerto Rican rapper, whose real name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, even hobbled up the steps as he posed for photos, leaning into his elderly alter-ego even more.

His skin looked aged, his hands looked older, and the way he walked and moved was that of an 80-year-old.

Fans were entirely divided by the singer’s look, with many flocking to social media to share their thoughts.

“Sorry but no I don’t like it,” said one.

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“Dad bunny,” joked another.

“Why is he an old man?” asked a third.

While a fourth joked: “More like Señor bad bunny lol.”

“Superbowl aged him 60 years lol,” said a fifth.

“Turns out, Bad Bunny was Will Ferrell all along. Well played, Will,” joked a seventh.

But some fans were more complimentary.

“Aging is art,” said one person.

“For me, it was a critique showing that aging can also be beautiful,” added another.

While a third said: “He always brings it!”

And a fourth wrote: “He and Heidi Klum are so good at costumes and entertaining! Love them both!”

Heidi arrived at the event in New York as a living statue in a very bizarre costume, which some fans dubbed as “creepy”.

Heidi transformed herself into a literal sculpture and looked as though she was crafted entirely from marble.

The costume looked like a naked body draped in a fabric, but in sculpture form.

One took to X to say: “She looks a bit scary but this is gorgeous idc.”

“This isn’t Halloween honey,” slammed another.

“This looks more creepy than creative,” penned a third.

But there was much praise too, with one person writing: “Finally someone who understood the assignment Heidi didn’t just wear the theme she became the art. Living marble statue is insane commitment.”

Up here, the river was a mere gurgle; a babbling babe finding its way into the world. A few sheep roamed, a kite wheeled and a spring-clean wind ruffled the tussocks on the barren hills and rippled the pools. It was a stark yet striking beginning. As we followed a brand new fingerpost, skirted Llyn Teifi – the river’s official source – and picked up the fledgling flow, there was a sense great things lay ahead, for us both.

The Teifi rises in Ceredigion’s Cambrian Mountains – the untramped “green desert of Wales” – and pours into Cardigan Bay 75 miles (120km) south-west. It’s one of the longest rivers wholly within Wales and, historically, one of its most significant: the beating heart of the country’s fishing and wool-weaving industries, 12th-century abbeys at either end, Wales’s oldest university en route.

However, those abbeys lie in ruin now, salmon and sewin (brown trout) stocks have plummeted, and the mills are shuttered – though the factory in the village of Dre-fach Felindre now operates as the National Wool Museum. Even the future of Lampeter’s venerable university is uncertain following the decision to end undergraduate teaching there. It’s as if the valley has lost its purpose. So some determined local walkers are giving it a new one.

The Teifi Valley Trail, an 83-mile hike following the river from source to sea, officially launched on 25 April, but has been decades in the making. The idea was born back when Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire came under one authority (Dyfed), said Kay Davis of the Teifi Valley Trail Association (TVTA), when we met in Llanybydder. “Then the three counties separated in 1996 and it went off the boil. A long time later, we thought, wouldn’t it be great if there was a trail? So we got together with others in the area and went from there.”

It has been a grassroots, cooperative effort between members of local Ramblers groups, Walkers are Welcome communities and footpath associations along the valley, working to reopen paths, secure permissions, nail up waymarks and create a guide. Thought has been given to route quality, places to stay and accessibility by public transport.

“One of the main reasons for the trail is to get people with backpacks and boots down here to spend money,” added the TVTA’s James Williams. “We’ve seen the economic effect the coastal paths have; we thought we could have a bit of that as well.” Backpacked and booted, my husband and I were here to give it a go.

There’s certainly something powerful about following a river. Walking from Teifi Pools on our first day, that trickle led us across the moor and through wild, wooded valleys or cwms with the exuberance of youth. It soon took us to Strata Florida, the abbey founded in 1164 by Cistercian monks seeking solitude in nature – not to mention access to the area’s abundant timber, pasture, peat, lead ore and, of course, water. Little remains of the abbey now – a grand arch, some fine medieval tiles, a cottage housing a small but fascinating exhibition. But this was once the Westminster Abbey of Wales, second only in fame to St Davids and much larger than the ruins suggest. Many pilgrims made the journey here.

Most have probably never heard of Strata Florida, and the Teifi Valley continued in this vein: a place of secrets and little-heard stories. These ranged from a buried elephant (behind Tregaron’s handsome Y Talbot Hotel, allegedly) to dry-stone walls built by Napoleonic prisoners of war. Llanddewi Brefi village was full of tales. On the old mountain-crossing drovers’ route, it has a soaring Norman church built on a mound said to have been miraculously raised by St David himself. These days, Llanddewi is better known as the scene of an enormous LSD drugs raid in 1977 or as the home of Little Britain’s “only gay in the village”. “Most here didn’t watch the show, and I didn’t mind it,” said Yvonne Edwards, landlady of Llanddewi’s New Inn, a proper no-frills-and-flagstones pub. “It was just annoying, having Australian journalists ringing in the middle of the night, and people stealing road signs.”

Further down the trail, just outside Llanybydder, we found one of Davis’s hidden gems: a woodland path, long unused, that her Ramblers group worked hard to reopen. “It’s tiny,” she’d told us, “but there’s a presence there, a good presence.” Indeed, it was like a shot of Narnia, a short stretch of moss-covered magic.

Over the following days, we flirted with the river. At times we were high above, peering from gorse-covered hill forts, across slopes of sheep-grazed green or through woods flush with bluebells. At others, we were on its banks, once close enough to glimpse an otter raise its silken head in the swirl. Beyond Llechryd, the path squeezed us through a tree-huddled gorge, the river’s murmurings joined by the gossip of thrushes, tits, blackcaps and wrens.

The general mood was soothing. It was hard to imagine this river roisterous with industry, fizzing with fish, busy with boats – Cardigan, within the Teifi’s tidal reach, was once the second-largest port in Wales. It’s a quieter town these days, and looking good, boosted by the restoration of its castle, which was rescued from ruin a decade ago. The castle hosted the first National Eisteddfod in 1176; in celebration of the 850th anniversary, the 2026 festival is being held at nearby Llantwd.

We stayed in one of the castle’s refined rooms, but still had a few miles to go to reach journey’s end. The trail runs via St Dogmael’s Abbey and climbs high for views across the estuary before dropping to meet it at sweeping Poppit Sands. We washed our boots in the shallows, “our” river now indiscernible, swallowed by the sea.

It was a good walk. And perhaps it wasn’t over? “Early on, we had this idea to create the Celtic Circle,” Davis told me: a 175-mile loop linking the Teifi Valley Trail, a section of Wales Coast Path to Borth, and the Spirit of the Miners route from Borth to Strata Florida. “But we’ll see if we still have the energy after this!”

The trip was supported by Discover Ceredigion, Discover Carmarthenshire and Visit Pembrokeshire. For information, downloadable maps and guidebooks, see the Teifi Valley Trail website. Accommodation includes Y Talbot in Tregaron (doubles from £70), the New Inn in Llanddewi Brefi (doubles from £76), the Cross Hands Hotel in Llanybydder (doubles from £108), Emlyn Hotel in Newcastle Emlyn (doubles from £79) and Cardigan Castle (doubles from £110)