The guide book said today’s stretch was 8 miles. Over breakfast our host told us it was thirteen. I measured it on my phone and came up with eleven, if we took the shortest route at Almouth.
We started by walking from Warkworth back to the sea. Here’s the first glimpse.
After that it was a day of walking along the coast, lovely beach to lovely beach with sand dunes in between.
Our first obstacle was the River Aln . The shorest route I’d mentioned was a bridleway, and we guessed the coastal path didn’t go that was because it might be wet at times, over the salt marsh. But it was dry today and
easy to traverse.
easy to traverse.
However, the River Aln was very wet and not easy to traverse.
That place on the other side is Alnmouth, the place where we wanted to be. We thought maybe horses could get across at low tide, but not us.
So back we went and onto the Coastal Path and its two mile circle round the town back to the other side of the river. 
Looked like the B&B guy was right after all, and we’d added to our mileage trying to be clever.
We got to meet these guys though.
After an ice cream in Alnmouth, we were back into beach heaven.
It’s just one beach after another along this bit of coast, and most of them pretty empty. They have different characters, some with more seaweed or rockpools, others just sand for miles. They’re all beautiful.
We stopped at a pub in Boulmer for pint, where the beer garden was practically on beach, and Wilf lost a tooth. After that coast began to get rockier and we could see the cliffs up ahead bearing Dunstanborough Castle.
Before we reached it we diverted off to go to our B&B in the leafy village of Dunstan.
Johnny and Wilf both had sunburned calves and achey feet.
14 miles