Wild Camping the Berwickshire Coastal Path
April 16, 2026I wonder how many relationships – friendly or romantic – have been sabotaged by a misadventure in the great outdoors?
I speak as a repeat offender. Several times over the years, I’ve dragged people along on backpacking trips that were not just out of their comfort zone, but actively uncomfortable. Mileage too high, bags too heavy, nights too spartan. I have thoughtlessly flogged uncomplaining friends through 18-mile days with full camping gear on their backs, only to discover when the tents go up that their feet have been in tatters for hours.
I’m always forgiven, of course, and hindsight is mercifully rose-tinted – but when we reminisce warmly of triumph against the odds, I sometimes suspect my companions would actually rather it had been fun rather than heroic.
The first backpacking jaunt in a new relationship, then, is a danger zone. You want your other half to enjoy the thing you love, and to be happy doing more of it. Pitch the trip wrong and you might sour the activity for good.
Picking the right route
It’s a situation I found myself in last summer. In my case, the odds were broadly stacked in my favour. The new-ish girlfriend, Helen, was a regular walker, unfazed by rough ground or foul weather. What she hadn’t done since school D of E was to camp wild or carry a big pack.
We deliberated over routes, and in the end it was Helen herself who hit on the Berwickshire Coastal Path. A lucky strike for both of us, since it turned out to be pretty much the perfect beginner backpacking trail.
Easy mileage and minimal logistics
Running between Cockburnspath and Berwick-upon-Tweed, the 28-mile (45km) Berwickshire Coastal Path takes most walkers 2–4 days. We spread it over three, walking north to south, with a full day in the middle and half days at beginning and end to accommodate our travel time. The easy pace gave us plenty of time to stop off for a pint, a paddle in the sea or a bit of lunch along the way.
Apart from a 4-mile stretch outside of Berwick, most of the route is north of the Scottish border, so wild camping is legal – and there are plenty of good spots to kip down. Though much of the walking follows quiet cliff-top paths, foreshores and country lanes, the route also passes through several villages – and the larger port town of Eyemouth – so you can get away with carrying very little in the way of supplies. The well-stocked community shop in Cockburnspath is easily missed, but provides a useful spot to load up on treats at the beginning or end.
In terms of getting there and back, both ends of the route are easily accessible by public transport. Berwick-upon-Tweed has a train station, while the number 253 bus runs regularly between Berwick station and Cockburnspath (approx. 50 minutes, bordersbuses.co.uk). For drivers, both Berwick and Cockburnspath are minutes from the A1, with plenty of parking.
A cliff-top bagpiper
Helen and I bowled up to the Borders on a sun-soaked afternoon in the middle of July, drinking fizzy pop at the wheel and breaking the drive to pick strawberries at Felton Fruit Farm near Morpeth. Arriving in unexpectedly pretty Cockburnspath, we parked up on the square, did a last audit of our packs and liberated my impatient two-year-old toy poodle, Mouse, from the boot.
Together, the three of us set out across fields in the late afternoon sun, making for the coast at Cove Harbour. And as opening gambits go, Cove takes some beating. A tiny 17th-century harbour, accessed by a tunnel through the headland, it looked like something straight out of The Famous Five.
‘It’s like Cornwall,’ said Helen, ‘only without any people.’
Adding to the storybook quality of the scene were snatches of bagpipe music on the breeze, at first so faint that we thought we might be hearing things. But there it was, growing steadily louder until we spotted a distant figure standing at the edge of the cliff, serenading the seabirds with aplomb.
‘Guaranteed to be a middle-aged man,’ I said.
In fact, I couldn’t have been more wrong. As we approached, our piper turned out to be a lone teenage girl with cropped hair who nodded shyly as we passed – presumably banished from the family home after one too many 120-decibel renditions of Highland Laddie.
Pease Bay and the ruined chapel
The picturesque, sparsely populated Berwickshire coast provides a rich habitat for seabirds, marine mammals and numerous colonies of static caravans. We passed the first caravan park nestled unobtrusively in Pease Bay. Retired couples sat in companionable silence on their decking verandas, sipping sundowners and spritzing themselves with Avon Skin So Soft.
On the headland above stood what was left of the 12th-century chapel of St Helen. Ruined for at least 250 years, only the west-end gable remained defiantly upright against the gales, surrounded by the littered remains of indecipherable gravestones. One had a prominent skull and crossbones on it.
From here, the route dipped inland for a spell, yomping across cattle pasture and along country lanes to the isolated farmstead at Dowlaw. Along the way, fields gave way to coastal heath, and we found a sheltered spot to put up our tent for the night.
First-night nerves
More than the days, it’s the nights that can make or break a camping trip. A springtime overnighter on the North York Moors had revealed that Helen slept very cold in a tent, and strike two needed to be a lot more comfortable for both our sakes.
An appeal to WildBounds head of customer success, Ellie, for a women’s sleeping bag recommendation, had resulted in one of Ellie’s own spares turning up in the post. With a comfort range of -3° down to -10°, some might have considered this three-season down bag a bit warm for mid-July in the Scottish borders. Not Helen.
‘This is lush,’ she said, zipping it right up to the top and settling down to read a book about the demonisation of middle-aged women.
With Helen tucked up warm and well-fed, the only remaining concern was the dog.
When he came to me a year earlier, I was Mouse’s fourth home. A failed lapdog with a track record of biting old ladies, he was a cat-sized terrorist with a growl like a pizza bike and superb walking stamina. I liked to imagine his squash ball-sized brain as a tiny tumble-dryer full of wasps, complete with a little loudspeaker playing Tick Tick Boom by the Hives.
This was only his second backpacking trip – the first having been a weekend jaunt on the North York Moors about a month earlier. It had not gone particularly well, and he had tried to nip me in the confines of an MSR one-man tent.
Gingerly, I placed Mouse’s sit-mat and sleeping bag (the bottom of a cheap Argos one, cut off and hemmed) at the foot of my own. There was a warning growl as I zipped up the tent, but it faded to a sort of indignant pigeon noise in the orange-tinted dusk light. I focused on my Kindle and tried to stay very still.
Scuba divers and seabirds
In the event, both my tent-mates slept peacefully until morning, when I woke up with a face full of licky poodle. I crawled out into the open air to brew up some coffee, and when I took Helen a cup, she was peering at her Fitbit.
‘Do you realise that’s the longest uninterrupted sleep I’ve had this year?’
I offered a silent prayer of thanks for Ellie and her down sleeping bag.
It had rained in the night but the morning was dry and cool. Past Dowlaw, the path returned to the clifftops, and we shared some elevenses near the old admiralty distance poles above West-in-Thirle Bay, watching the dive boats through my pocket monocular.
Running between St Abbs Head and Eyemouth, Berwickshire Marine Reserve was established over 40 years ago, and the richly populated underwater landscape of rocky reefs and kelp forests remains Scotland’s only voluntary marine reserve. Add to that the many unlucky wrecks sitting off this treacherous coast – some in comparatively shallow water – and you can see why some of the local fishing skippers have reinvented themselves as scuba dive operators.
Above the waterline too, the Berwickshire coast teems with life, and the trail led us onto the jagged promontory of St Abb’s Head, one of Scotland’s National Nature Reserves. The cliffs and guano-caked offshore stacks are home to tens of thousands of seabirds, and butterflies mooch around the wildflower meadows on still summer afternoons.
The path was busier here. Dog-walkers and groups of daypack-toting Dutch tourists followed the well-worn track around the headland past the Stevenson-built lighthouse and the cluster of keepers’ cottages. In a hollow nearby was the remains of a walled orchard garden that must once have provided food for the three lighthouse keepers living in this wild spot.
Berwickshire at leisure
Early-afternoon hunger pangs led us onwards into St Abbs itself. At the Old School Café near the top of the village we sat barefoot at a picnic table while we waited for plates of hot food. Fortified, we shouldered our packs and made it about ten minutes further before we dropped them again for a spot of rockpooling in Coldingham Bay.
With its sandy central beach, surfers and cutesy beach huts, Coldingham felt like we could have been somewhere down in the southwest, and it was the busiest of all the beaches we passed – yet just around the point at Linkim Shore we had the pebbly beach entirely to ourselves. We paddled in the weedy shallows until Mouse shot off along the strandline to harass a small boy on a pushbike. Fortunately he didn’t mind, and turned out to be an 11-year-old Norwegian who greeted us in impeccable English.
A little way behind, his mother and little sister were making slow and rather wobbly progress along the shoreline.
‘It’s her first time on a bike,’ explained the mum when they caught up.
If I were walking the Berwickshire Coast Path again in similar weather, I might be tempted to camp at Linkim. There were some cracking spots along the shore, though the presence of well-established fire circles suggests you might not be alone.
Herring Queens of Eyemouth
If most of this coast so far felt like a land of summer holidays, Eyemouth was very much a working town. Less polished, but with an appeal of its own, the harbour was full of shellfish boats and the streets were festooned with banners for the upcoming ‘Herring Queen’ festival.
Crowned each summer and honoured with a flotilla of boats, there have been more than 80 Herring Queens in Eyemouth since the tradition began in the aftermath of WW1. Picked from the girls at the local high school by a panel of judges, they represent the town at civic and charity events, and many of the banners up around the town bore black-and-white pictures of former queens.
We tipped back a pint at the Ship pub by the harbour basin, then covered a last few evening miles along the coast – passing the golf course and climbing over Blaikie Heugh to find a flat camp spot in some scrubland at the corner of a field. Mercifully shattered for once, Mouse curled up at the foot of Helen’s sleeping bag while I heated some boil-in-the-bag chilli.
Approaching the border
We woke up to drizzle that continued all morning, light enough that I never really needed a jacket. Coffee and breakfast, then on to the quiet coastal hamlet of Burnmouth. A boarded-up school and wild blackcurrants growing on the way down to the harbour. Firmly in holiday-let territory, we squeezed up against the wall to make way for a throaty-sounding Audi with a personalised plate.
Back up to the cliffs, which we clung to for most of the rest of the route, past deer browsing in the fields, soggy sheep and a monastic-looking little Frenchman with a long beard and round glasses taking morning coffee by his camper van.
Nearby, at Lamberton Skerrs, a romantic ruined bothy clung to a little shelf halfway down the cliff – allegedly once home to an 18th-century smuggler who got rich off black-market tea.
Caravans and cinnabar moths
Crossing into England on the final approach to Berwick, we were back in caravan park country again – many of the plots made more homely with gnomes, solar-powered garden lights or resin statues of spaniels.
For days, Helen had been inspecting clumps of ragwort at the edges of the path, and finally, on the outskirts of Berwick, she found what she was looking for. Tiger-striped cinnabar moth larvae browsing contentedly on the toxic alkaloids, complete with a few adults drying their delicate red and black wings in the sunshine that was beginning to break through.
It was a last little triumph in a walk that had delivered far beyond its modest mileage. Reaching Berwick, we had a fish and chip lunch while we waited for our bus back to the car – tantalised by the prospect of showers and a night camping at the wonderful Ruberslaw walled garden near Hawick.
As it happens, the Berwickshire Coastal Path isn’t the only long-distance route that starts/finishes at Cockburnspath. It’s also the eastern terminus of Scotland’s 214-mile coast-to-coast route, the Southern Upland Way. Sitting on the bus, dog snoozing at my feet, I turned to Helen.
‘So…’ I began. ‘Do you think you might fancy doing some more backpacking?’