Coast to Coast guidebooks: what to take on England's newest National Trail

The Coast to Coast opened as a National Trail on 26 March 2026, after a three-year programme of upgrade works. That is a change of status rather than a change of route — the line from St Bees to Robin Hood's Bay is the one Alfred Wainwright described in 1973 — but it matters more than it sounds. National Trail status brings signage, maintenance money and a single body responsible for the path. It also brings a great many more walkers, and a new round of guidebooks.

Cicerone's fifth edition, Walking the Coast to Coast Path by Terry Marsh, is published on 25 September 2026 and is the first of the major guides to carry the National Trail designation on the cover. If you are walking it next year, that is the one to watch. But it is not automatically the right book for you, and it is worth being clear about what each of the three main guides is actually for.

Three guides, three different jobs

Cicerone — Walking the Coast to Coast Path. Cicerone's house style is a route description written to be followed while walking, with mapping alongside it and the planning material front-loaded. The fifth edition is the one reflecting National Trail status, which means updated waymarking references and the official line where it differs from the traditional one. If you want a single book that tells you where to put your feet, this is the shape of book you want.

Trailblazer — Coast to Coast Path by Henry Stedman. Trailblazer's distinction is its hand-drawn strip maps, at a scale large enough that many walkers carry no separate mapping at all, annotated with the practical things a route description tends to bury: where the water is, which pub stops serving at two, how long the climb really takes. It also covers accommodation village by village in more depth than the others. If your anxiety about the walk is logistical rather than navigational, this is the more useful book.

Wainwright — A Coast to Coast Walk. The original, in Wainwright's own hand, and the reason the route exists at all. It is not a current guide and should not be your only book — the path has moved in places, and the practical information is fifty years old. It is, though, the best company of the three, and a good many walkers carry it alongside something modern for exactly that reason.

What we would take

For most people walking it for the first time: Trailblazer for the maps and the logistics, and the new Cicerone if you want the official route described in detail. Carrying both is not as extravagant as it sounds on a two-week walk, because the two books answer different questions.

If you already walk with Ordnance Survey mapping and only want the route notes, the Cicerone alone will do. If you have walked it before and are going back, take the Wainwright.

A note on the new edition

The Cicerone fifth edition is not out until 25 September, so nobody has walked with it yet, including us. What we can say is what it is: a revised edition of an established guide, updated for the route's new status, from a publisher with a long record on British long-distance paths. We will say more once it has been used rather than just read.

More on the route, and everything else we hold for it, on the Coast to Coast trail page. If you are choosing between publishers more generally, we wrote about that in Cicerone, Trailblazer or something else.