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By Root 377 0

some unexpectedly hair-raising experiences. After the Undercliff, the one section of British coast path I was most keen to try was the Elie chain walk, in Scotland. Part of the splendid Fife Coast Path, the section at Elie is a kind of via ferrata, or ‘iron way’, where you have to haul yourself up and down cliffs using chains bolted into the rockface. It is great fun: enough of a challenge to demand real concentration and give some hairy moments, especially if you’re prone to vertigo, yet easy enough for most to attempt. The path is also supremely beautiful, as the chains take you into coves and gulches that you’d never reach otherwise, and have you hanging above pounding blue waves if you time it right. It’s no idle leisure path either, for the chains were initially installed sometime in the early twentieth century to allow local fishermen access to remoter corners of the coast.

Purists will sniff at the idea that Elie is a proper via ferrata, as you don’t have to clip yourself on to the chains and there’s little danger of a serious injury. There is a commercial one now in the Lake District, along an old slate miners’ path, but for proper terror, you need to go abroad. The most infamous via ferrata in Europe is in the Tatra mountains of southern Poland. The Orla Perç (Eagle’s Path) was established in 1901, and climbs up sheer rock faces to over seven and half thousand feet. Dozens have died attempting it. Even that doesn’t qualify as the continent’s most terrifying path, though, a title that surely belongs to El Camino del Rey (King’s Path) in Andalucia, southern Spain. A one-metre-wide walkway built in 1905 on to the side of a sheer cliff, it was originally used to ferry workers between two hydro-electric schemes. Parts of it have completely crumbled away, leaving just a metal girder to edge along, with a drop of up to 700 feet below. Even looking at the various videos on YouTube of young desperadoes walking the camino was enough to make me swoon.

Welded as they are to totting up their Munros, Nuttalls, Marilyns and all the other sub-divisions they’ve invented for Britain’s modest mountains, Wainwrighty types would contend that Britain’s most dangerous path is something like Striding Edge on Helvellyn, or one of its fellow glacial arêtes, such as Crib Goch on Snowdon or Carn Mór Dearg on Ben Nevis. These knife-edge paths have all the right ingredients, and there have been accidents galore, but I think my nomination for the country’s deadliest path is coastal. It’s still marked on the map as a right of way, but unless you really know what you’re doing, your chances of surviving it are slender.

Even on the OS, it looks like no other. Crossing the shifting sands of Morecambe Bay in Lancashire, the path arcs out from Hest Bank, ploughing a course so determined that alarm bells start ringing, for, more than any other path on the map, it looks to be all theory and no practice. The smooth line courses across seven miles of sandbank, mudflat and estuary, disgorging itself on the other side of the bay at Kents Bank, to the south of Grange-over-Sands. Before the turnpikes and railways, this was the only route across to Furness from the main body of Lancashire; a coach service ran six days a week until the railway opened in 1857. One of its last trips saw ten farm workers drown on their way to a hiring fair, when the coach driver, who was reported to be drunk, lost control in the middle of the sands and was subsumed by the tide.

Standing at Hest Bank, on the edge of the bay, I watched the sea sweep in. At first, it was low tide, when there are 120 square miles of sand in the bay, gleaming gold and silver against the fantastical backdrop of the Lakeland fells. Within half an hour, the whole bay was covered by water, and as I watched it race in faster than any man could escape it, I shuddered at the thought of being caught out there, in the cold, in the mist, in the gloopy half-world between land and sea. Remembering the 23 Chinese cockle-pickers who drowned there one winter’s night in 2004, so lost and confused and far from home,