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It’s the generational leap that startles the most at these times of gubernatorial baton-passing. My step-mum turned 60 in May 1997, just weeks after Tony Blair’s precisely orchestrated sweep into government. Her birthday party still stands tall in my memory as one of the strangest nights I can remember, and not entirely due to the fact that I had necked an ‘E’ in the erroneous belief that it would help smooth my way through the evening. Given that the party was held on a claustrophobic cruise boat chugging down the River Severn, from which there was no escape for a full four hours, this proved not to be such a great idea. Most of their friends, and most of our family, are old school Tories, but it wasn’t the change in political complexion of the government that drove them all to be extra-drunk and extra-maudlin that night. It was the realisation that their generation had, in one fell swoop, been booted from power, and that it was never coming back.

At least on the Coast to Coast walk, it looked as if I would be one of the youngest participants. Even walking down to the beach from St Bees station, I could see various backpacked figures who were obviously on the same mission. There were couples, singles and groups, and they all seemed to be in their fifties and sixties. A gang of four blokes called me over in broad Yorkshire accents. ‘Hey fella, culd you tek us picture please?’ A camera was waved in my face and I snapped them grinning, full of hope and trepidation, comradeship and excitement, as they performed the traditional launch of the walk by dipping their boots in the Irish Sea and collecting a pebble to take to the other side of the country. We all shook hands and wished each other well.

Half an hour later, I caught up with them on the sandstone cliffs of St Bees Head, Cumbria’s most westerly point. It had been a moderately stiff climb up there, but the reward was sweeping views of a freezing grey sea, and an assortment of caravan parks backed by the dark bulk of Sellafield nuclear power station. ‘Ye might as well walk wi’ us lad,’ one of the Yorkshire blokes said, entirely kindly, I know. But I was in a pretty strange mood, and not keen to inflict it on anyone. I thanked him and declined. He wasn’t at all pleased, ticking me off with, ‘Well, that’s not t’spirit of th’Coast to Coast, lad. We’re all in this together!’ His mates all nodded and smiled at me. I walked on, feeling like a complete shit. Sod’s Law, I’d be bumping in to them now at least four times daily for the next fortnight.

After circumnavigating St Bees Head, the path ambles inland through a quarry and down various dusty tracks. For those that think that Cumbria is all tea shops and Beatrix Potter bunnies, have a look around the west of the county, a land forged in rust and pebbledash. That combination of hard-bitten villages, mountains and mines was making me homesick, for it is very much like my part of Wales. Cumbria and Cambria, much though they’d both care not to admit it, are spookily alike, both physically and temperamentally.

Another similarity is that, despite all the obvious natural advantages, they don’t always do tourism very well. Brits generally are temperamentally rubbish at the Welcome Host routine, but the more taciturn corners of our island – most of Wales and west Cumbria, for instance – are just useless at it. Even when they’re trying to smile, it comes across as slightly defensive, scared or hostile. And sometimes they just can’t be arsed even to try. On the second day, I had an early lunch in a village pub-cum-hotel right on the CtC route, somewhere that evidently makes a huge proportion of its income from those walking the path. The interior was brown and faded, the silence hung as heavy as someone standing on your chest and the food barely squeaked across the line marked ‘just about acceptable’. The girl behind the bar desperately didn’t want to be there and told me how much she hated this time of year, when the walkers starting returning in droves, and keeping her in a bloody job, the bastards.