Round trip (several times)

Today's walk was planned to fill in the next segment north in our gradual progress along the coastal cliffs.

We left the car in Ravenscar and started walking south towards our last finish point, a mile or so north of Hayburn Wyke.

This provides very easy level walking alongside amazing seascapes, until we turned inland along the same path that took us (eventually) to the old railway line last week.

Today, however, we were to turn right along the access road to holiday cottages at White Hall Farm, continue for a couple of hundred yards, then cut a corner to the railway line.

All went well for a while, then both waymarking and a clear path line ran out.

"Look, we're opposite that church on the map - all we have to do is follow the field boundary round the bend and we're there," I said.

And that's how it worked out for a few minutes, until we ran into some impenetrable woodland bordering a ravine that left us frustratingly short of the old line by about 100 yards.

We doubled back along the field boundary, searching for a way through, then realised that we had wandered into a game bird area, and pheasants started taking flight all around us.

We splashed and trudged up and down fields and gullies until we admitted defeat and made our way back the way we had come, past White Hall Farm.

A muddy lane offered a short cut to the railway line, but this quickly deteriorated into a very wet squelch down to a footbridge over the stream leading to Hayburn Wyke, then an even stickier, steeper climb up.

But there was the old railway line at last, offering a brisk 2.5-mile walk back to Ravenscar. In all, we covered eight miles.

Back home, it was frustrating to look at the satellite image of the area on Google and see how close we had been to an easy escape on several occasions.

I volunteered for boot cleaning, which was accomplished with a hose, a washing-up bowl and a toothbrush in the car park at our flats.