St. Bees Beach

The village of St. Bees is on the western coast of Cumbria, at the end of a long valley, four miles south of Whitehaven. It has a long sandy beach, and is a popular holiday resort. Nearby, the rocky promontory of St Bees Head, the westernmost point of Cumbria, is the start of the ‘Coast to Coast walk’.Cumbria’s most westerly point, it was here that St. Bega, an Irish nun, was shipwrecked in the ninth century. Legend has it that St Bega and other surviving nuns went to Lord Egremont for land to build a priory.His response was that they could have any land that was covered by snow the next day (it was midsummer at the time). Next day land between the castle and the sea was covered in snow, and so the priory was built.St Bees Head, a red sandstone bluff, forms one of the most dramatic natural features along the entire coast of North West England. There are four miles of towering precipitous cliffs, of ‘St Bees sandstone’, the red stone used for so many buildings in Cumbria.