Interest in long-distance, low-impact walking is surging as England opens the world’s longest continuous coastal walk. Photographer Quintin Lake, who’s walked over 6,835 miles (11,000 kilometers) of Britain’s coast, reflects on what it means to experience a country slowly, and on foot.
It looked more like twilight the first morning I stepped out, somewhere along the South West Coast Path in Dorset, southwest England. The sea was a flat, metallic gray, and the wind bore a familiar salty tang. I’d started early to ‘beat the crowds’, but the sea and sky sapped all urgency. The path lulled me into its own, slow rhythm.
Weeks later, that rhythm stayed as the landscape changed further southwest: Now, the rolling greens of East Devon, the sharper edges of South Devon, and finally, the rugged regions of Cornwall. Walking the coast in fragments, I understood one thing: A place I thought I knew was far stranger, wilder, and more expansive when encountered on foot.
British photographer Quintin Lake has spent five years pursuing this slow unravelling of a country. His project, The Perimeter: A Photographic Journey around the Coast of Britain, led him to walk more than 6,835 miles (11,000 kilometers) around Britain’s coastline. He didn’t walk continuously; he did it in sections—returning, leaving, and returning again—until he had traced the outline of the island entirely by foot. The journey started on 17th April 2015 and was completed on 15th September 2020.
His timing feels prescient. In March 2026, England opened the King Charles III England Coast Path, a 2,700-mile (4,500-kilometer) trail—the longest managed coastal walking route in the world, making the entire English coastline legally walkable, stitching together cliffs, beaches, estuaries, and towns.
The completion of this path may be new, but the impulse and desire to move slowly through a landscape aren’t. And Lake’s own journey didn’t begin as a grand project, but as a shift in pace. Trained as an architect, he moved into architectural photography, traveling widely before illness forced a pause. “A bout of meningitis encouraged me to slow down,” he tells me.
That slowing-down brought a different way of seeing. Walking along the river paths of the Thames and the Severn were less about distance, and more about attention. “That slowly crystallized into the idea of walking and photographing the entire coastline of Britain.”
Lake connection to the landscape began early. He was born in Norfolk, flat country in the east of England where the beaches are vast and the sky is always the most dominant part of the landscape. “It must have shaped my love of wild open spaces and my desire to walk through them,” he recalls.
“Knowing that there is a well-marked footpath means more people that might not see themselves as ‘walkers’ will get to reap the physical and mental benefits of walking,”
- Quintin Lake
At home, the observant nature of his parents “sparked my curiosity to look carefully at what was around me.” That curiosity led to his passion project. “I set out hoping to understand and see more deeply what makes Britain what it is—its geography, its history, and its diverse landscapes.”
There was also the pull of uncertainty. “The thrill of not knowing what was around the next headland,” he says. But over time, the project shifted. The spectacular became less important than the overlooked. “It became equally about observing how everyday beauty and surprise could be found in places far from the iconic images of Britain.”
That I understood. The moments I recall now from those walks weren’t the grandest views. They were smaller, quieter: A clearing in the fog; the sound of echoing waves; the sight of a single walker in the distance. Walking seems to compress and stretch time, in odd ways. Hours go by in a repetition of steps, but a single moment can hang suspended.
Lake feels this altered sense of scale is central to what walking reveals. “Places that seem ordinary from a distance become extraordinary up close while areas assumed to be crowded can feel utterly empty,” he says. And over the course of his journey, there were stretches where he “didn’t see a soul for five days at a time.”
The solitude demanded its own rhythms and rituals. “I carried my favorite coffee when I could—the smell and taste at the start of the day gave me comfort in bad weather,” he tells me. “If I needed to distract myself from aches and pains, I would listen to music: Drum and bass or techno to keep me moving.”
Having grown up within these landscapes, Lake thought he knew them, but the act of walking began to change that certainty. “It exposed Britain as much more wild, remote and varied than expected,” he says, and particularly in Scotland, where sections like the Rough Bounds of Knoydart in West Invernessshire—an area locked in by Loch Hourn, Loch Shiel, and Loch Moidart and often called Scotland’s last true wilderness—pushed him physically and emotionally. He describes reading the road to Cape Wrath, after navigating terrain without paths, as “an emotional high point, even physically bringing me to my knees.”
But the project was not defined by singular extremes as much as it was by accumulation. The 454 days he spent walking created a layered relationship with the landscape. “Each time, I’d rediscover places on different terms,” he says.
That repetition also deepened his photographic practice. “Walking created a rhythm and intimacy with the land,” Lake says. Carrying equipment, camping, moving slowly… these weren’t inconveniences, but conditions that sharpened perception. “It allowed me to discover less obvious sights and linger in moments that would otherwise be missed.”
There is a quiet resistance in this approach, especially when the world is in the midst of tick-off travel culture. See a landmark, capture the view, move on. Walking disrupts that; it calls for time, attention, and a willingness to stay long enough for a place to reveal something beyond the obvious.
Walking the edge of a country isn’t really about the edge at all. It is about everything that gathers there: Histories, weather, people, and the quiet stretches in between.
I wonder if the completion of the coastal path risks becoming another item on a checklist. But Lake is excited about it and its “potential to open up Britain’s remarkable coastal diversity to walkers everywhere.”
More than that, he believes it may lower the threshold of entry. “Knowing that there is a well-marked footpath means more people that might not see themselves as ‘walkers’ will get to reap the physical and mental benefits of walking,” he says. Some, he adds, might even find themselves drawn further in, “get hooked and want to do the whole thing.”
The idea of “the whole thing” is both seductive and misleading. Even Lake’s journey was not continuous. And perhaps that’s how the coast is meant to be experienced: Not as a single, linear achievement, but as a series of encounters over time.
Walking sections of the South West Coast Path, I found myself thinking less about distance and more about continuity. The act of walking sharpens certain instincts: Noticing weather before it turns, reading the shape of the land, sensing subtle shifts in terrain. It also quietens others: The urgency to arrive; the need to fill silence.
Lake believes that quiet is where something deeper emerges. “Walking reveals layers of beauty, nuance and rawness in the coastal landscape that you simply don’t notice at speed,” he says. Alongside that external discovery is something more inward. “For many, the slow pace encourages reflection, resilience and a renewed appreciation for the natural world… and often a deeper personal insight into patience, presence and connection with place.”
Even today, the pull of the outdoors hasn’t dimmed for Lake. “It’s still the same sense of adventure, or going to places that I don’t know,” he says. At the moment, he’s drawn to the high places of England and Wales. “442 mountains which I’m walking between and sleeping on top of, still carrying my tent and camera—with only 51 [more] to go.”
When he’s not chasing distance, he looks for quiet pleasures. “My perfect day when I’m not traveling is repeating a well-loved local walk where I live in Gloucestershire, either along the Malvern Hills or beside the River Wye.”
Reflecting on five years of circling an island on foot, Lake reiterates that the essence was never in a single defining moment, but in the accumulation of days. “Every day, no matter the weather, there were moments of beauty and discovery.”
I think back to a morning on the coast, further north, near Lynton in Exmoor. The light was low and golden, cutting across the dunes and catching the edges of grasses swaying in the wind. There was no dramatic view, no landmark; just the steady sound of the sea.
I realized that walking the edge of a country isn’t really about the edge at all. It is about everything that gathers there: Histories, weather, people, and the quiet stretches in between.
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Teja Lele trained as an architect, only to find her love for words outweighed that for architectural drawings. An editor and writer based in India, she writes about travel, architecture, food and lifestyle, with bylines in publications such as BBC Travel, Mint Lounge, South China Morning Post, Nikkei Asia, and The New Indian Express.
