Alternative Routes

Wainwright laid the foundations for the best long distance walk in Britain, but even he did not prescribe the route; he suggested one particular way of walking coast to coast across England, but always suggested that people should find their own variations, as long as they did not trespass upon private land.

Over time, new routes have become open to walkers, new fells and new areas of open land; the Countryside Rights of Way Act of 2000 being the most significant of these in recent years. This has meant that new paths are available to walkers and consequently the Coast to Coast path has many more options than it ever had before. This sections explores some of the more obvious deviations, alterations and diversions that the Coast to Coast walker could consider when planning their route.

Wainwright himself offered some alternatives to the standard route and these are not covered in the route descriptions that follow. The Wainwright guide book covers these as do the better Coast to Coast guide books. We will concentrate on the other alternatives.

Each individual map shown below can be downloaded by clicking on the map thumbnail to the left of the description. The resulting map will only show the route variation, so will need to be used in conjunction with the standard map for that section, so you know where to leave the usual path and where it joins back up again.

You can download a ZIP file of all the maps by clicking the icon to the left. Note: you will need a program like Winzip to extract the maps from the ZIP file.

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