I travelled every mile of the UK coastline. These were my five favourite places

Telegraph

06-06-2025

It started at Cape Wrath lighthouse. I had just spent 55 days walking 1,000 miles up the spine of Britain, but was already thinking about my next adventure. The coastline was calling.
After a year of preparation, I was back at the lighthouse, with a plan to travel anti-clockwise around my island home, by foot, by bus, by train and even by hitch-hiking, to understand its current challenges and opportunities, but also to reconnect with my inner islander.
I walked around 2,000 miles of it, as I have found that it is only by moving at walking pace, and not driving at 20 times that rate, that I start to really notice and understand things.
It is strange that we call it a coast line at all, as that confers on it a linear and permanent quality, when it's not. It runs for 11,000 tortuous miles of dynamic geological activity, where the south-eastern bit is sinking into its own clay and the north-western bit still rising, freed of the weight of the last ice age; some parts, such as Holderness in Yorkshire, are eroding at up to two metres a year, whilst others, like Hoylake Beach, are watching the sea recede beyond miles of new sand.
For an island nation, we ought to cherish our coastline. Sadly, that's not always the case. Much of what is happening is beyond our control, such as sea level rise, erosion, warming waters and the twice-daily tide that wraps itself around the island and races across the mudflats.
But much of what is happening is also down to us: the lifeless sea beds below salmon farms, sewage discharge, polluted rivers pouring out into the sea and the endless pearl necklace of discarded plastic – an average of 170 pieces per 100 metres of coastline – that comment sadly about the way we choose to live.
Yet for all these problems, I found a determined army of scientists, activists, fieldworkers and volunteers working to remedy them; I found beach-cleaning schemes wherever I went, groups planting new sea grass and seeding native oysters and people simply determined not to accept that the decline of nature is a one-way street.
Whilst I was shocked at the decline of so many of our coastal communities – a phenomenon brought about by a combination of technology, Beeching's axing of the railway branch lines and the dawning of cheap air travel – I was also struck by the opportunities that the internet, and working from home, might give to people who want to stay there and earn sufficient money.
Studies show that health outcomes should be, on a-like-for-like basis, better in coastal communities than their equivalent inland, but they are not. Right now, some of the worst deprivation in Britain lies in our coastal towns, and the low pay and seasonal nature of the available jobs remains a real problem. Above all, these communities need to be far more involved in making their own decisions.
A low point came in my own south-eastern corner of the country, where the beautiful Langstone Harbour just to the east of Portsmouth, where sewage releases have had devastating consequences to the wildlife.
Southern Water has been fined £90 million for these 6,971 discharges, but the money won't bring back what is lost, and it will take years to reverse the damage done.
It was a journey of highs and lows, of idiots and heroes, of peace and drama. By the time I had taken my boots off for the last time at Dunnet Head 18 months later, I was fully back in love with the coast again, and with my status as an islander.
I was staggered by the beauty of our coast and, it has to be said, by the delight of my three constant travelling companions: the sound of the surf, the cry of the gulls and the thought of the next ice cream.
The sheer variety of the UK's coastal habitat is astonishing. Circumnavigate our coast and you will encounter machair (fertile low-lying grassy plains), salt flats, estuaries, shingle and lagoons and towering, storm-battered cliffs.
Places I had never been before and discovered for the first time linger in my memories. The following are five that really stand out.
Knoydart, Scotland
The wilderness of Knoydart on the west coast of Scotland is a community-owned coastal zone home to both an old temperate rainforest and a new band of native woodland, protected, for now, by the exclusion of deer who would otherwise stop it growing to maturity. The village of Inverie, a good 15-mile hike from the nearest road, seems to be reinventing what isolated communities might amount to these days given support and a healthy injection of youth.
Cardigan Bay, Wales
Here I found a coast every bit as beautiful as that of its more celebrated Cornish rival, but far less crowded, and therefore generally cheaper. Alongside the delight of the rising use of the Welsh language, I found people who instinctively understood the value and importance of nature, and who also had a strong pride in who they were and the history that had led them here.
Penzance, Cornwall
In Penzance, at the western tip of Cornwall, I found a town that had taken a six-year grip on the problem of plastic, and actually done something more than mere words to alleviate it. Through its Plastic Free Town initiative, which the organisers spent long months selling to schools, businesses, clubs and other stakeholders, Penzance has taken a giant stride to reduce the use and waste of plastic, and thus provide a valuable template for communities all around the country that could usefully follow their lead.
North Norfolk
On the North Norfolk coast, deep in the winter, I saw wildfowl flocks flying in from their sea roosts to the beet fields just inland. It was a magnificent sight. We talk a great deal about being the most nature-depleted country on earth, but we also need to celebrate what we have. To watch 70,000 pink-footed geese in flight is to understand in an instant how things once were, and how they could be again.
Our most desolate islands
Finally, although I didn't set out to go to the smaller offshore islands, I ended up visiting about 30 of them in all, including the three overtly religious ones of Iona, Bardsey and Lindisfarne, 'thin' places where the border between this world and another is supposed to be at its narrowest. Without being religious myself, I found these to be quietly moving places, perhaps inspired by the long line of early saints who made their subsequent forays into the mainland from these wild, desolate bases.