Monday 17th March 2025

Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Not a lot of evidence of the occasion on the path today apart from some Pogues music blaring out from a seafront bar in Ingoldmells and a rather tiddly lady wearing a green felt hat on the bus.

Today we drove to Mablethorpe to start our walk to Skegness, knowing we could get the bus back. Back in the land of public transport! The drive takes us 1 hour 20mins from our accommodation in Hull and along some winding country lanes with deep eaus (colloquial name for ditches) either side, so luckily today completes this section. Again, we parked up in the Seal Sanctuary car park.

And what an absolute joy, after one mile’s walk along the road into the seafront of Mablethorpe, we had miles of easy and pleasurable promenade strolling. It’s marvellous to be able to look around and take in the views of the sea and golden sands without having to watch your every footstep as we do on most of the other coastal path terrains … keeping a lookout for trip hazards, coastal erosion … or snakes!!

Occasionally we hit a few yards of soft sand where the wind had blown it over onto the path and this seemed to get worse and worse. Then we spotted a digger ahed, clearing the sand from the path – what a hero. As we neared, we paused behind waiting for him to stop and wave us through. After a good 10 minutes he was still clearing away so we carefully sidled our way past, only to be subjected to a torrent of abuse from an old chap with no teeth but a fine set of shiny earings – the digger driver – “You could have warned me. Are you stupid?” Our heckles rose but we bit our tongues and without making eye contact kept walking forward.

We’d walked 6 miles by now and there were absolutely no public toilets open – they don’t open till Good Friday! So we were thankful to come across ‘The Vista at the Boatshed’ cafe, where we could both relieve and refresh ourselves. We were sat enjoying a cappuccino in the sun when who parks up and comes marching in but the digger driver …. we thought he had chased us down. Luckily he completely ignored us and left with his takeout coffee in hand.

After a little farmland walking we were taken on to sand dunes and today they were pretty much soft sand the whole way, which is tough especially on already tired legs. We soldiered on, stopping at 9 miles for our picnic lunch to re-energise. From there it was more soft sand dunes until we eventually reached promenade once again and that we relished. There was a 400 yard interlude of more soft sand as the sea defence path had been reclaimed by the golf course – we did divert to the beach but saw a way back onto the path – didn’t realise we were being naughty till we reached the end!!

When we passed Butlins we felt sure we were near but the views of the pier kept stretching ahead. Then finally, after 5 hours 16 minutes of walking and having burnt 1,688 calories, we arrived at Skegness Pier, having achieved 16.37 miles.

Probably about 2/3 promenade to 1/3 soft sand I’d say – a fabulous walk all the same … just a tad too long!!