Crail to Elie
DAY 1 START Crail Harbour. FINISH Elie.
NO612075 Follow a steep street down to Crail Harbour. Cross the stony beach beyond. Unless the tide is fully in, you can continue over rocks for 200m. Where a smooth slab slants down across your way, just before it there’s a fossil tree stump. It’s almost a metre wide, so difficult to miss if the tide is low enough. A few metres up away from the sea you could spot tracks of a giant millipede of 300 million years ago. But your own track just continues along the shoreline path for 3km to pass the exotic Caiplie Coves sea-stack. It continues for 2km to the next lovely little harbour, which is Anstruther.
NO569034 Follow the street along the harbour, and at its end turn inland to join the main A917. Follow this briefly left to cross a bridge. After it bends left then right, turn down left in
Crichton Street (with a path sign), forking right to reach the corner of Anstruther Golf Club. The path continues along the shoreline alongside the golf course, to arrive at Pittenweem.
NO550024 Head along the harbour, turning up right (Cove Wynd) to visit the cave once lived in by St Fillan, a serious long-distance walker himself who also frequented the West Highland Way, right on the other side of Scotland. Continue along the harbour and the shoreline beyond. Below a windmill, there are former salt pans, where sea water was boiled away using coal from the nearby pits and mines. The shore path leads on into St Monans.
NO527016 Go around the harbour to the village edge, and take steps down left to cross a stream below St Monan’s chapel. Cross sloping rocks below the chapel – if the tide is in there’s a short inland diversion here, rejoining the coast at ruined Newark Castle. After 1.5km you pass ruined Ardross Castle. At 3km from St Monans you reach the East Links (beaches). Pause here for peaceful sea-bathing.
NT499996 At the end of the beach, the signed path cuts off right, but you’ll want to keep along the shore past the ladies’ bathing tower, an imitation ruin used as a changing room in Victorian times, to the peninsular and lighthouse at Elie Ness. Pass around the sheltered beach of Wood Haven, and again bend round left to the end of the harbour pier, before following the harbour round into Elie, possibly – in a very strong field – the prettiest of all the East Neuk villages.