St Cuthbert’s Way is a 62 mile waymarked walk from Melrose in Scotland via the Cheviot Hills of Northumberland to Lindisfarne, also known as Holy Island. Theo and I walked an extended St Cuthberts Way in September 2012, starting in Peebles and using a couple of sections of the Southern Upland Way to connect us in at Melrose. I’m not intending to blog the whole thing, but just to share some of the places we used and liked along the way in the hope that this might help others doing the walk
We started off at the Old Mill camp site at West Kyloe Farm just off the A1 and with our end point of Lindisfarne in sight a few miles away. This is a clean and tidy site with excellent facilities which mostly caters to motorhomes but will take tents by arrangement. The owner, Teresa Smalley, was very helpful, let us store our car at the site until we got back ten days later and even gave us a lift to the bus in the morning. The only thing to bear in mind if you’re on foot is that the camping area is about a half mile from the road.
We took three buses to get from the Beal crossroads to Peebles. It all worked out fine but I would suggest using Traveline Scotland‘s phone helpline to plan a route like this as my internet searches had failed to track down some services that would have made life simpler if I’d known about them earlier.
From Peebles, we took a section of the John Buchan Way over Cademuir Hill and into the Manor Valley. This was a really great short walk. We really wanted to be in the Manor valley so we could walk south over the hills to Meggett Water and the Southern Upland Way, but accommodation in this dead end valley is relatively hard to come by. The best place is Castlehill Knowe B&B but their rooms were fully booked. However Sue and Roger kindly made space for us to camp in their garden, gave us access to indoor facilities and cooked us breakfast, all for the price of a tent pitch. It would probably be possible to wild camp further up the valley, but a lot of it is owned by a very large egg producer who didn’t sound too co-operative.
The walk from Manor to Meggett is only signed at either end but isn’t difficult to follow and has great views of Dollar Law, one of the highest hills in the Borders. We ended the day at the Tibbie Shiels Inn campsite on St Mary’s Loch. This is in a lovely location but facing three valleys running from SW to NW so it gets a lot of weather. And did while we were there. The facilities are basic and it was feeling a bit end of season, so we decided not to spend a rest day there and continued on after one night. [Tibbie Shiels closed in 2015 under curious circumstances.]
Next time: the Southern Upland Way
Old Mill camp site
Garden Cottage, West Kyloe, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland, TD15 2PF
Telephone: 01289 381279
Email: teresasmalley@westkyloe.demon.co.uk
Traveline Scotland
Telephone: 0871 200 22 33
Castlehill Knowe B&B
Castlehill Knowe Bed and Breakfast, Kirkton Manor, Peebles, Scottish Borders, EH45 9JN
Telephone: 01721 740218
Email: sueroger@onetel.com
Tibbie Shiels Inn campsite (now closed)
Tibbie Shiels Inn, St Marys Loch, Selkirk TD7 5LH
Telephone: 01750 42231
Email: info@tibbieshiels.com