A woman who found that she’d “fallen out of love with England” is walking the entire England Coast Path – a lap of the country totalling 2,700 miles – despite having never done multi-day hiking before.
Maya Gilbert, 31, set off from her home in Liverpool in May 2025, giving herself 120 days to complete her mammoth hike.
With all her possessions on her back, including her tent, sleeping bag, food and clothes, and a budget of just £10 per day for food and accommodation, she’s made it more than half way through her trek and is still going strong.
Maya had three main reasons for taking on the challenge.
“One is that I’d kind of fallen out of love with England a little bit over the last 10 years,” she told PA Real Life.
“Slowly but surely, I just stopped enjoying being here so much. Then three years ago, I was working for a couple of weeks down in Cornwall, and did a section of the coast path down there, and just was like ‘Wow. This is so beautiful’. And actually, the parts of this country that I love are the countryside and the coast.”
Secondly, Maya wanted to honour the milestone of her 30th birthday, which she celebrated in 2024. She wanted to mark a new chapter in her life with “this big, crazy walk”, and celebrate her recovery from anxiety and panic attacks in her twenties.
“From about 22 onwards, I really struggled with my mental health. I was having quite bad anxiety attacks, panic attacks, at one point some pretty dark thoughts. I struggled with that quite intensely, for like three years,” she said, adding that it was not until she was about 28 that she started to feel like herself again.
“I was doing therapy, and a lot of self work. So as I was approaching my 30s, I wanted to mark a new leaf, a new chapter in a big way.”
Finally, the trek is raising money for Hospitality Action, a charity that is there for people who work in hospitality in times of crisis, whether that is illness, financial difficulty, family problems or something else.
Hospitality Action helped Maya, who has worked in hospitality in all kinds of jobs since she was 15, with a grant during Covid, when her newly-established events-catering business was forced to close in its infancy.
Maya aims to raise £25,000 for Hospitality Action, and she has already amassed more than £3,400 on her JustGiving page.
The King Charles III England Coast Path as a national trail is still being created, linking popular local coastal trails like the South West Coast Path into a maintained trail that encompasses all of England’s coastline, totalling 2,700 miles.
The route is planned to run clockwise around England, starting just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed in the North East, on the Scottish border, following the coast through Lincolnshire, East Anglia, the south channel coast, the south-west Atlantic coast, and finishing just north of Carlisle in the north west of England.
However, Maya decided to conquer the route anti-clockwise, starting and finishing in her home city of Liverpool, so she can “have a bit of a party at the finish line”.
She will complete her hike on October 4, at Liverpool Docks, and extends an open invitation to her celebration at the finish line.
When she spoke to PA Real Life, she had made it to East Anglia, having tackled the challenging 630-mile-long South West Coast Path before venturing along the south coast into Kent and beyond.
“What I hadn’t considered when I (made the decision to go anti-clockwise) was that I would be hitting the South West Coast Path first,” Maya said.
“That is the hardest section of the entire country.
“I hit Minehead, which is the start of the South West Coast Path, and in one day, over 10 miles, I was going to do over 1,000 metres elevation, on my first hike with a big, heavy pack.”
Maya had never done any multi-day, long-distance hiking before, nor had she tackled that kind of elevation, and she soon realised she had gone into her challenge with “rose-tinted glasses”.
Her backpack weighed about 15kg at the start, which was more than a quarter of her body weight, and she quickly realised she needed to lighten the load to make the hike sustainable.
“I don’t need shampoo, I don’t need soap, I don’t need moisturiser, all these things can go,” she said.
Thankfully, a woman Maya had met on the trail who lived in Somerset offered to take some of her kit and keep it safe, so Maya was able to offload some non-essentials – losing about 2kg from her pack’s total weight.
“It’s the basics, the absolute bare minimum, basically,” she said.
“Tent, sleeping bag, sleeping mat, a little one pot stove with a tiny little burner, and then I always have emergency food with me, like dry noodles and pasta. I pass through at least one village (per day), so I can pick up stuff as I’m going.”
It was not just the kind woman in Somerset who has helped Maya on her hike, either. The challenge has opened her eyes even more to the kindness of strangers and the importance of hospitality in all its forms, reinforcing her love for the industry.
Maya is living on just £10 a day, a budget determined by the amount she was able to save before hitting the trail. However, most campsites charge more than that for a pitch for the night, and she needs to buy food to sustain her while hiking some 22 miles per day.
However, she said it has been “honestly mind-blowing how generous everybody’s been”.
“I’ve only paid for pitches, I would say, maybe not even 10 times in 66 days,” she said.
“I’ve been pitching up in campsites for free. I’ve pitched up in pub gardens. I’ve been given spare rooms. I’ve been given a caravan. I’ve been given a couple of hotel rooms.
“A brilliant pub called The Ship Inn Uphill in Weston-super-Mare gave me a spot in their back garden. When I got there, they donated £120 from all the punters and the landlady, and they gave me some pints.”
Despite some challenging days, sore feet, and some loneliness on the trail, Maya says her hike really is helping her to fall in love with England again.
“I’ve fallen in love with areas of the country that I didn’t even really know anything about,” she said.
“It’s made me fall in love with hospitality even more, and all over again,” she added.
“It’s been my career for 15 years, and you can get a little bit tired of things, and worn out and worn down, and it’s just made me fall completely back in love with it again, because I just see it in everybody.
“It’s something that I’ve done for other people for so long, and then to just be shown it by everybody, organically, has been really amazing.
“It’s given me an ever-growing appreciation for the industry that I work in.”
To follow her journey, find Maya on Instagram @mayana.gilbana.
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