Engulfed by their dry robes and cradling mugs of hot chocolate, the two swimmers seem admirably oblivious to the gusting wind barrelling off the Irish Sea. The pebble-backed beach on which they stand is still varnished from high tide and so expansive it renders the adjacent hamlet an inconsequential footnote. 

This is St Bees, on the unheralded Cumbrian coast, where the Lake District’s fells finally run out of puff and collapse into a supine, soporific coastal band. Offshore is the spiky-backed silhouette of the Isle of Man. It’s 30 miles away yet seems close enough to touch.

It’s an arresting spot but, for the next six days, a different, distant shoreline is my focus. Leaving the beach behind, I set off up the steep headland path. In my hand is a small, grey, pleasingly smooth pebble taken from the shoreline. All being well, as is the custom, I’ll be depositing this in a little under a week’s time in the restless grey waters of the North Sea. 

Rambler and author Alfred Wainwright was nearing his dotage when he drew on his unrivalled experience of hiking in his native northern England to publish a guide entitled A Coast to Coast Walk in 1973. It was exhaustively detailed, and graced with the ink illustrations that had become his trademark through the popular Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells.

As the title suggests, it wasn’t meant to be prescriptive. ‘I want to encourage the ambition in others to devise their own cross-country marathons,’ he wrote. But so brilliantly conceived and artfully evoked was his trail – from St Bees, through the picturesque heart of Lakeland, the Yorkshire Dales and on to the North York Moors – that it became an instant hit. Three national parks. A little over 190 miles. A cross-section of rural Britain in every sense.

Now, following decades of lobbying, the Coast to Coast is to officially become a National Trail. The path has benefited from a three-year, £5.6m upgrade in readiness for this spring’s ‘unveiling’, and will benefit from long-term funding and maintenance in future. 

In the spirit of improvisation espoused by Wainwright, I’m tackling it not in its beautiful, blistered entirety – but in six days of unashamed scenic cherry-picking. Leaning on car, taxi and community-run bus services, I’m focusing on half a dozen of the 16 stages into which Coast-to-Coasters tend to dissect the route. Some I’m doing in full; others in blissfully unhurried part. Of the 192 miles, I’ll be ticking off less than a third.

My opening salvo is the gentlest of shakeouts: a five-mile loop, mostly following the trail then diverting back to St Bees. On a map, the Coast to Coast route resembles a length of twine secured at either end of the country by a hook. It’s the westerly of these that I trace, past the grey shingle of Fleswick Bay and the smart green-and-white structure of St Bees Lighthouse, set high above the sheer cliffs of St Bees Head.

Soon after, the path pivots east and the horizon is filled with the commanding silhouette of the Lakeland fells. It was to these that Wainwright headed in 1930 as a 23-year-old after a grimly impoverished upbringing in Blackburn. It was his first holiday and, observing the towering peaks and lakes like slivers of polished silver, he could scarcely believe such beauty existed. It was to be a lifelong love affair that stimulated antithetical impulses in this often cantankerous recluse: to venerate, and to protect from the masses.

It’s a few miles east of Innominate Tarn, the fist-shaped pool of water where Wainwright’s ashes were scattered following his death in 1991, where I begin my second-day hike. The hamlet of Rosthwaite - just a few robust stone cottages ringed by brawny fells - hunkers in the folds of the Borrowdale Valley, south of the mountain town of Keswick. 

It’s the start of what’s traditionally the third section for Coast-to-Coasters – a rousing nine-and-a-quarter miles, up and over the saddle of the mountains and down into the village of Grasmere, where I’m staying.