There’s a way to spend time exploring England, Wales, and Scotland’s countryside without having to rent a car and learn to drive on the left-hand side of the road. The rail network in Britain is incredibly vast and allows travelers to go just about anywhere, even to very rural locations, for the price of a train ticket or a BritRail Pass. Even better is that train stations in Britain are often very close to hiking or walking trails, or work as a trailheads. That means you can see huge swathes of country, including its lesser-visited bucolic nooks and crannies, by using two affordable, convenient, and incredibly sustainable modes of transport: the train and your two feet.
Photo: Pete Stuart/Shutterstock
Explore the UK by Foot and Train With This Comprehensive Listing of Hikes From Train Stations
A new website will help you plan such a trip: Railwalks. All you need to do is to visit the website, select the area you’d like to explore, go through the list of resources available, and pick a walk you can take from the train stations in the area. The walks listed include linear, loops, and station-to-station walks, so you can still catch a train at the end of your day (or days) roaming.
Caerfai Bay on the Wales Coast Path. Photo: Charlesy/Shutterstock
One of the most famous and most scenic walk in Britain is the 870-mile-long Wales Coast Path which you can easily reach by rail. All the information to get to the trail by train is available on Railwalks by selecting Wales as your preferred area and looking at what the From Rail to Trail resource offers.
Photo: Railwalks
Photo: Railwalks
Photo: Rail to Trail
The same goes for the world-famous Lake District in the county of Cumbria in the northwest of England. A series of rails trails have been developed so you can visit this magnificent part of the country in the most sustainable way there is. All of the information you need about the Lake District’s rail trails is available on Railwalks.
Steve Melia, the founder of Railwalks, started by creating his own compilation of walks by rail on his website The Green Travel Writer and then collaborated with Slow Ways, an organization whose goal is to create a national network of walks that connect all of Britain’s cities, towns, and national parks. Together, by combining their data, they are expanding the knowledge of previously little-known walking routes for everyone to enjoy. Both Railwalks and Slow Ways are crowd-sourced and rely on hikers to share their favorite walking routes or their newly discovered hikes with them so the network never stops growing. 