At a small café along the route we stopped and purchased what for us passed for a packed lunch, bacon rolls and Danish pastries. between this and the three-course Italian dinners it is no ownder we can walk 130 miles and put weight on!
At that time there was a photographic exhibition in the museum at the entrance to the camp the contents of which defied your imagination. It was hard to believe that people could do this to each other. In the grounds of the camp there were huge earth mounds with small, insignificant plaques that said something simple like ‘6,000 people buried here’. There were many such mounds in the camp and at the bottom of the camp a huge memorial wall with the names of the thousands who died there that could be identified: young and old, male and female, healthy and infirm.
The experience, so many years removed from the original event was and still is a humbling and frightening one. To see Belsen is to see hell; to see this hell is to know the capacity of man for inhumanity. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for the soldiers who unexpectedly stumbled upon this horror camp and had to deal with the dead, dying and barely liviing. Bless their hearts, they have my respect. There is much that we owe them and all their brave comrades who did not survive the war.
The early morning light sparkled brightly across the rippled sea, as we looked back to Castle Cliff with the remains of the castle stark against a clear blue sky. All along the promenade we fought against a strong North East wind, harbinger of the storm to come.
Once up on the headland we had nice views back across the bay to Castle Cliff. To the north we could see our route along the top of the cliffs for some miles distant. The cliffs here, while lower and lacking the grandeur of the high limestone cliffs slightly further north are impressive nonetheless and at this stage pleasant walking, albeit we were walking against a strong wind.
One of the features of this walk are the many sets of steps that you have to negotiate as you drop down and climb back out of gullies and wykes. Although public bodies have tried to make it easier by putting in a variety of stone and wooden steps along the route, for this auld man they are still tiring by the time you reach the end. The muscles just above your knee and at the bottom of the front of your thighs are rock hard, rigid and cramping by the time you have climbed up and down a few hundred stairs. The climb down into and climb out off Hayburn Wyke was particularly hard going and the cliff on which it is situated is rightly called Beast Cliff. After the walk the B&B owner told us that by going to RHB we had walked it the hard way. It was ever thus!