On 7th January, I passed a literal milestone: a striking sculpture marking the end (or for some people the start) of the South West Coast Path. I hadn’t been that bothered about this, as our ambition is to walk all of the England and Wales coast, but as we got nearer I started to feel light-hearted and was positively beaming by the time I saw the galvanised steel map and giant hands holding it. It was a blustery day and we had got soaked in the rain earlier, but a rainbow came out and there were some passers-by willing to take our picture and congratulate us. And we immediately began the West Somerset Coast Path.
It’s hard not to, to be fair, as they actually overlap. This got me thinking about milestones, targets, endings and beginnings. We use them a lot in our sustainability work: be they output targets like net zero carbon emissions, or outcome targets like 1.5 degrees, or process targets like publishing an annual sustainability report.
We know that the targets aren’t an end in themselves, but they can be really motivating.
Bite-sized chunks
My little log book records how many miles walked on the path, and how many walked (and sometimes cycled) getting to or from that day’s stretch. Sometimes we know we’re not going to walk as far as the guidebook suggests, and some days we go further. That feels good.
Curiosity about the data itself
I note when we pass county boundaries, and when we go through significant mileage totals (50, 100, 1,500 - we’re over 1,970 now, since beginning in Hunstanton, Norfolk, in 2015). My walking companion, Mr Making the Path, also calculates various averages and outliers: our longest day was when we missed a bus near Rye in Kent. Not to be repeated. We know which month we did the most miles in, and what our average is for a wet Wednesday.
Measuring to see what’s possible
When we began our walk, we were just doing the North Norfolk Coast Path. We never would have committed to the whole of England and Wales if we’d had the idea at the start. It was just a short walking holiday. Data for that walk is not as comprehensive. But once we’d done it, we though we’d like to complete all of Norfolk. And then Suffolk beckoned, and there was a guide book which made it enticing. And suddenly it felt OK to claim we were intending to walk the entire coast of England and Wales.
Comparing notes
We haven’t joined any walking forums or clubs, or sent off for our South West Coast Path completers badge (a classic self-awarded certification if ever there was one). From time to time we fall into conversation with other walkers, and compare notes - the merits of walking poles, whether a stretch of path has fallen into the sea, miraculous bus successes - but we’re not part of a peer-learning network. We acknowledge the back-packing through-walkers as the elite - doing it all in one go, carrying their own tent. We have our idiosyncrasies (if you’ve got half an hour, I’ll tell you about how we use bikes and don’t use ferries, and how we touch in and out to form an unbroken chain). These quirks don’t make us better or worse than other walkers, just different. And that’s fine, because the future of the planet doesn’t depend on us all completing the walk as well and as fast as possible.
Seeing new horizons
For weeks, when we were walking in East Anglia, we could see the cranes of Felixstowe. When we reached Ilfracombe, we could clearly see Wales. Being able to actually see some of the future achievements, creeping imperceptibly closer to them, is exciting. And in the sustainability field, yes, we may still have a long way to go to meet UK decarbonisation targets, for example, but we can see what’s possible when hear about other countries which have made more progress, or when we see data about wind- or solar-rich weeks of electricity generation.
Not just data, stories
Although Mr Making the Path’s log book is data rich, it does include notable events summarised in staccato prose: ‘lost car key’, ‘chough flock’ and ‘heatwave’. My journal is mainly text - the tiny (and sometimes large) dramas of the day, the characters. The woman who complained about ‘holiday scum’ and then told us where to look out for the remarkable mannequins in the garden of Damien Hirst’s mother’s house. Maybe she thought walking the coast path isn’t a holiday. Top trolling, anyway. The stories aren’t usually about how to do the walk, but about what makes it worth doing.
Are we nearly there yet?
In the early days of all this sustainability malarkey, it was hard to know what targets to set. What’s the end point? Absolute targets seemed unnecessary, unrealistic or unjustifiable. Now, with things like the Science Based Targets Initiative and Net Zero, we can be much more confident about what an appropriate destination is. We can see how close we are to it, and what our rate of progress is. On our walk, we think about the time taken (is it better or worse that we’ve been doing it since 2015?), and the time it will take to get all the way back to Hunstanton in Norfolk (as long as it takes, and maybe we’ll not get there). We think about where we began, and where we are now (Minehead). We think about how many miles we’ve walked (1,975.1) and how many there still are to do (unknown, but around 2,500 more).
Reaching an important milestone
The South West Coast Path is a long, well-known stretch and completing it felt more satisfying than I’d expected, given how far there is still to go. A little cause for celebration and an excuse to use the drum roll emoji on the family WhatsApp. But we kept going for another 1/3 mile that day, so that we could say we had definitely begun the West Somerset Coast Path.
Which milestones have you reached? What can you see on the horizon? Which path have you only just begun?
Making the Path by Walking
This piece was first published in January 2023’s Making the Path by Walking newsletter. Scroll right down to subscribe.