Day 1 – Cresswell to Warkworth (10.5 miles)
Gilli and Allan arrived at the cottage around 10:15am, after dropping their dogs off at the kennels, and we got on the road shortly after that. We executed the first “car shuffle,” which was an operation that would be completed many times over the next few days: we drove in two cars to Warkworth, left our little rental Renault Captur in a parking lot there, and then all piled into Allan’s car and drove to Cresswell and parked there for the start of the walk. At the end of the day we would then all drive in the Renault from Warkworth back to Cresswell to pick up Allan’s car.
It was a pretty grey day when we set off, but not as wet as we had feared, and actually a pretty comfortable temperature, with little wind. We set off northward along the beach and then along a grassy path to the East Chevington Nature Reserve, and then on to the Druridge Bay Country Park visitor center, where we got our NCP ‘passports’ stamped and enjoyed lunch at the cafe (for me, mince (beef) pie and beans). After lunch we continued on through the dunes toward Amble. Around Amble for the first time we ran into the shortcomings of the route description in our guide, which was fairly vague about exactly which way to go through the town – we also discovered that the directions were written before the construction of a large, spike-topped fence near the marina, which required a certain amount of improvisation to get around … In the end though we made it through Amble, and headed on up toward Warkworth. Around Amble we had run into the first real rain of the day, but it was fairly light and didn’t inconvenience us too much – in fact it was nice to have the excuse to break out our fancy new Eddie Bauer rain gear. Overall then we had a quite pleasant day with some lovely beach views, a nice walk into Warkworth with views up to the castle, and in general not too strenuous a start to the whole hike.
