I spent 5 years hiking Britain’s 11,000km coast – and I just had no idea how hard it would be

"It was 30 times harder than I could have imagined when I started at St Paul’s – I just had no idea.”

Multi-award-winning photographer Quintin Lake is referring to his experience of walking the coast of Knoydart – a gloriously rugged expanse of unforgiving wilderness in north-west Scotland.

“It’s just days and days without a single hint of a path,” he recalls. “And the cliffs go right down to the sea.” He then talks about the added difficulties created by the climate – having to pour water from his boots each night, being soaked through by the end of each day, and returning to the same sodden clothes the following morning. “The best I could ever hope for was to be damp and warmish.”

He isn’t joking.

At Knoydart, progress was slow. “I was only walking 9km a day, even though I was moving from dawn until dusk. The terrain was so difficult and so exhausting. I was constantly having to make these decisions of, ‘do I do this slightly sketchy side-climb on some rocks, or do I backtrack in the wet and the rain to do another two hours of the day?’ For that whole section, the challenge was just to physically be able to do it.”

You may wonder why Quintin was, of his own volition, putting himself through such an ordeal.

He was midway through his boldest ever photographic project – walking around the entire coastline of mainland Britain. The Perimeter – as he named the project – wasn’t just following paths. It was about getting as close to the coastline as possible, even if it meant trespassing or making the journey more difficult.

Maybe I’m just a bit of a masochist, but it was the hardest and best part of the journey.

“Maybe you’ve got a port or industrial area and there’s a little peninsula. The footpaths tend to just ignore that because it’s annoying for people to do a big wiggle if they’re going from A to B. But I would always do the wiggle because often I would find something that was a bit more unexpected.”

The entire route came to a whopping 11,000km (nearly 7000 miles), and it took Quintin 454 days to complete it over more than five years.

Each day he took hundreds of photos of whatever he found – be it a golden sunset beach, the reflective waters of an estuary… or a concrete ferry terminal. “If you open a Lonely Planet walking guide, say, you tend to think the whole country is pubs, rolling fields and dramatic cliffs. But a big part of it is also walking through an urban area, a firing range or an industrial site. And to me, I find that just as interesting.”

Many of his finest experiences were off-path in spots to which almost nobody ventures. And the best of the lot? We’re back to Knoydart again.

“Maybe I’m just a bit of a masochist, but it was the hardest and best part of the journey – without doubt my favourite part of the country,” insists Quintin. “I feel I got my best photographs during that section. I thought, this is a real adventure – I need to put every fibre of my determination into doing this. But I also felt I was being rewarded through it.”

Quintin believes his thirst for hardship first stemmed from when he was 10 years old and his mum had the idea of the two of them walking from John o’ Groats to Glasgow – a walk of about 300 miles. “She wasn’t that experienced as a hiker, and I remember one night we misjudged the distance, and we slept under one of those crinkly foil blankets, literally on the path. For me, that was exciting. I loved going back to school and telling my friends about this adventure under this survival blanket.

“I also loved thriving on the problems. That was the thing that really changed me, because it removed that sense of fear – that if everything goes wrong, you’re not going to die just because you’re a bit cold at night. That was probably life-changing.”

Experiences like these normalised long journeys for Quintin, and when he was 20 he walked from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

“I could pretty much forensically tell you every little bit about that journey, and I think I’ve been chasing that sense of connection with the landscape ever since.”

Quintin trained as an architect, though his passion for photography as an art form went from strength to strength. He retrained as a photographer and began working in commercial architectural photography, giving him skills that benefit his landscape photographs today.

At the beginning I thought, well, what could go wrong? How hard can it be? And this turned out to be very naive.

“In architecture you always think about the underlying structure of things – what the true essence of something is. And that’s how I look at the landscape. If it’s Crib Goch, say, the first thing I notice is the angle of the line, the play of light and dark, the composition that the mountains are making, and then how that will relate to the camera frame. So I’m looking at the underlying geometry of things, which I think is a good skill in photography.”

Quintin thought it would be impossible to actually make money from capturing landscapes. But then, in 2010, he won the Amazing Places category in the Travel Photographer of the Year competition, and his self-belief grew when he started selling fine art prints to fund further travel. The idea for Perimeter began to develop four years later when he was recovering from a case of meningitis and decided to walk the Thames Path.

“I had to slow down. I live in Cheltenham, and that meant if I had a problem on the Thames Path I could get a bus or taxi home. But because I was slowing down, the photography got better.”

After completing the walk, he then tackled the coastal part of the River Severn. “It sounds quite flippant, but I was so fired up with inspiration about this that it was only a couple of weeks after finishing the Severn coast I thought, well, let’s try and walk the whole thing.”

And so, on 17th April 2015, he stood at St Paul’s Cathedral and began the longest walking adventure of his life. “At the beginning I thought, well, what could go wrong? How hard can it be? And this turned out to be very naive.”

To start with, he would walk for two days at a time, but soon realised things would need to change. “The two things I realised quite quickly were that if I didn’t camp, it would become fantastically expensive. And that I needed to block out longer periods of time, or it would just take too long.”

Quintin became mostly self-sufficient, carrying five days’ worth of dehydrated food and camping wild most nights. He walked an average of 15 miles each day, but again needed to re-evaluate how he would undertake this enormous challenge when he suffered two ‘overuse injuries’, as Quintin puts it – shin splints and a split tendon.

“You can’t wing it. You can’t eat junk food, not sleep enough, not stretch, and not expect to get injuries. So I’m actually fitter now than 10 years ago because I don’t drink alcohol, I don’t eat processed food, I sleep more, I stretch more. And that means my body isn’t going to suffer like that.”

But his most frightening lesson of all came near the end of the walk on the apparently benign Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, where the cliffs are eroding away.

“I didn’t know that the cliffs erode five metres a year,” says Quintin. “The OS map shows all the roads going to the edge of the cliff, and normally you would think there’s going to be some stairs to and from the shore. But, of course, there aren’t because they’ve been washed away.”

Quintin got stuck below the cliffs as the tide was rising. “It got to the point where the waves were lapping over my boots and I was trying to scramble up these cliffs which are like wet concrete. That was the moment where I thought I would have to hang on and call the RNLI. That was the most terrifying moment of the journey.”

Quintin kept jogging along, looking for a way up, and eventually found a section of cliff that looked potentially climbable. “Maybe it wasn’t an advisable thing to do, but I managed to clamber up on this loose earth. And I did get to the top and collapsed on my back, shaking with adrenaline.”

But amid the inevitable mishaps on a venture of this scale, Quintin was continually rewarded both by seascapes he knew and those he didn’t.

“I had never experienced Northumberland before, but I thought it was so beautiful,” he recalls.

“It had been quite a sad moment for me to leave Scotland because in England I had to stealth camp, which does make you feel a bit like a vagrant.

"But the next day it was Bamburgh Castle, and the day after that it was the Holy Island of Lindisfarne – it was a full moon and I could walk on the pilgrim’s path to the island under moonlight. And then there were the big beaches like Druridge Bay.”

But what he enjoyed throughout was the continually changing mood, terrain and environment served up by the coastline. For Quintin, this is something that is unique to Britain.

“The geology of this island is mushed together like playdough. All those changes, one after the other, is such a beautiful thing to explore at the pace of walking. There literally wasn’t a single day of this 454-day journey where I was bored or felt the day looked the same as another.”

And this is why he believes walking supersedes cycling and driving as the best way to explore and photograph our coastline. “I think there’s a state of contentment you get with the act of walking which you don’t get in anything else. It keeps you entertained and intrigued, but also allows you to relax, which is what you need for creativity.

“What is the true nature of the Cumbrian coast or of the south coast? I don’t think it’s an easy question to answer, but if you place yourself in it for a number of days and you’re literally smelling it and touching it, I think you can intuitively feel it in a way that you just can’t if you drive somewhere.”

Quintin has depended on walking for many of his projects. It hasn’t just been a vital component of his photography – it has been a vital part of his life too.

“It has given me everything. It has given me inspiration. It has given me a sense of purpose. It has given me health. It has given me happiness. It has opened up a world of creativity for me. I really couldn’t imagine life without it. And it’s so simple, and free, and there for all of us.”

It has given me everything. And it’s so simple, and free, and there for all of us.

Quintin's 3 favourite landscapes

Of the thousands of photos Quintin took on his journey around the perimeter of Britain, here are three which gave him particular moments of joy.

1. Skiary, Knoydart, Highland

“Skiary is a tiny cottage next to Loch Hourn in the north of Knoydart. You’ve got these layers of granite mountains rising up with the mist. It’s so epic and is my favourite image of the whole project. When I started the journey walking into Kent, I never believed that the island would contain that drama. I mean, it’s something I’d imagine you would have in a Norwegian fjord, not in Britain.”

2. Barmouth Bridge, Gwynedd

“This is my favourite image in Wales. In the background you’ve got Cadair Idris, and it’s all misty and the tones are beautiful. And it’s really harmonious because the bridge adds to the landscape and so does the nature.”

3. Bristol Channel from Exmoor, Somerset

“The South West Coast Path actually goes along the edge of Exmoor, so it’s really quite high overlooking the Bristol Channel. I took a photo across the channel where the clouds form these kind of bands which mirror the horizon. And then you get this hint of Wales in the distance. That’s my favourite image in England… ironically, of Wales.”