St Bees Beach
St Bees is a small coastal village on the Cumbrian coast south of Whitehaven whose headland of St Bees Head provides the most westerly point in the north of England and whose beach of red sandstone pebbles and sand below the red cliffs provides a distinctive and relatively uncrowded coastal destination on a section of the English coast that is much less visited than the neighbouring Lake District. The village is significant as the western terminus of the Coast to Coast walk, Alfred Wainwright's celebrated 192-mile crossing of England to Robin Hood's Bay, and the tradition of collecting a pebble from the beach before setting off eastward is one of the established ceremonies of British long-distance walking. St Bees Head, the red sandstone headland north of the beach, is a Site of Special Scientific Interest whose cliff faces support the only mainland breeding colony of black guillemots in England, a seabird species otherwise confined as a British breeding bird to Scotland and Ireland. The black guillemots, with their distinctive white wing patches visible in flight, breed in the cliff crevices and caves of the headland and can be observed from the cliff path that traverses the headland between the coast guard station and the lighthouse. The priory church in the village, a substantial Norman building, represents the remains of the Benedictine priory established here in the early twelfth century and provides the village with an architectural and historical depth unusual for its modest size. The Cumbrian coastal path from St Bees northward toward Whitehaven and southward toward Barrow provides excellent walking in a coastal landscape quite different from the better-known scenery of the Lake District a few miles inland.