I won’t lie, I was looking forward to this section, the bit between Prestatyn and Edale, the absolute least. Even before my mental health went to shit back in 2022 and I pretty much hated fucking everything and spent my days on the Offa’s Dyke Path Googling ways to not be on that bastard path anymore. Tarrant’s ankles weren’t really ankling by that point either, she was in a lot more pain than she was letting on, so we abandoned our attempt to walk from Eastbourne to Land’s End to John O Groats at Prestatyn and buggered off to The Seychelles for two weeks instead. But yeah, we do still want to complete the challenge, we’ll just have to do it in sections instead of all in one go because I can’t see either of our jobs cheerfully giving us off the requisite time for a task like that, especially given our penchant for stopping after three miles because we found a particularly nice pub. Did I say a month, boss? Pretty sure I meant two…

Anyway. This section. The section of doom. It was already causing me stress before my mood trickled out of my ear and manifested as an ongoing tantrum. It didn’t look particularly nice, it was quite close to all manner of civilisation, accommodation of the affordable variety was all but non-existent and it didn’t really look like we could get away with wild camping either. Well fuck. But now we didn’t have to do it in one go, we live in West Yorkshire now, we could just day trip it from train station to train station and drive back home every evening. We’d get to sleep in our own bed every night, eat dinner in our own living room, fall asleep to Star Trek if we wanted to, what’s not to love?

Of we fucked then to Flint train station where we parked the car up and caught a fast metal tube on rails to Prestatyn and rocked up to the stone that marks the official end (or start if you’re being controversial) of the Offa’s Dyke Path. Last time we were here was one year and eleven months ago, pretty much to the day, having spent 90 days getting there on foot. That’s why we’re calling this day 91. I did wonder if we could call it day 91 given the very long gap between day 90 and now but it’s our walk and we’ll pretty much do whatever we damn well please.

The weather was actually okay albeit the kind of cold you do NOT expect from June thank you very much, I feel like we got off lightly considering it was pissing it down all the way to Flint. We shuffled the rest of the way down to the beach, swung a right and carried on along the Wales Coast Path which is pretty much what we’d be following for most of the day.

The trail started us off along the beach so obviously we hated it straight away. Yes, I get it, it’s a Coast Path, but really? The actual sand? Fortunately the tide was well out so we kept to the wet sand which is way easier to walk on, conveniently ignoring the signs warning of soft mud at low tide. Yeeaahhh… I’d rather be sucked into soft mud than get sand in my shoes, mate. I fucking hate the tiny particles of evil. We’ll stick over here and if we die we die.

We didn’t die and we actually made pretty good time to Talacre which has exciting things such as a public toilet and a bakery which also sells hot drinks. We utilised the facilities and grabbed a coffee so Tarrant didn’t accidentally murder anyone in a lack-of-caffeine induced rage.

After we left Talacre it was… well it was just a plod. A long, flat plod. The planning was stressing me out so I’d let Komoot, a hiking app, plan it for me. I’d told it where we wanted to start and finish and let Komoot decide where to go which is great because yay no actually having to think, but it does like to avoid roads. Sounds fab doesn’t it? Who likes walking along roads?

But about halfway through the walk today there was a little lump in the otherwise very calf muscle-friendly elevation profile where Komoot wanted us to head inland because the coast path led us along a road. A shorter, flatter distance but Komoot does abhor a road. We, however, could cope with a few exhaust fumes if it meant we could get this plod over and done with just that little bit quicker. Admittedly the trail gained points for being mostly dry and not a slushy quagmire hell bent on stealing your shoes, but immediately lost those points for being full of cows.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think this section of the Wales Coast Path showcases the best Wales has to offer. The flatness is pleasant but dull, it doesn’t take you past the loveliest places that exist in the country, a lot of it is on hard surfaces which my right heel has opinions about. It got to the point with five miles to go where we just wanted it to be over. The flatness and the terrain meant we made good time though which was ideal given that, when we decided to do it this way, we really didn’t take into account the driving distances.

It took an hour and twenty minutes to get from Slaithwaite to Flint this morning and thanks to slow moving traffic along the motorways, it took over an hour and a half to get back. Fortunately we managed to smash out 17.8 miles in just over seven hours. Today is our shortest day. Tomorrow is our longest. Wish us luck.

STATS
Day: 91
Day on LEJOG: 50
Distance walked today: 17.8 miles
Total walked so far: 1131.97 miles
“The Top Half” total walked so far: 17.8 miles
Weather: Pissed it down all the way to Flint but cleared up and was lovely and sunny. Bit of a chilly wind though.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

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Prestatyn, Sir Ddinbych (Denbighshire) to Y Fflint (Flint), Clwyd, Wales

Useful shit to know…

• Flint train station has a car park costing £2.20 for 24 hours. You can pay by cash, card, or the PayByPhone app.
• The train from Flint to Prestatyn cost £4.80 each one way but we could only travel on the Transport For Wales train we’d booked. The Aviva train that left earlier was twice the price.
• Trains can be an utter clusterfuck thanks to engineering works. Might be an idea to have a plan B?
• Flint is a small station with a manned ticket desk and toilets, but they make you show your rail ticket before they’ll let you in to use the bog.