The King named a 2,700-mile coastal path after himself. His great-great-great-grandmother's estate won't let you walk it.
It is brilliant, the best thing I'll do in my working life.
That's Neil Constable, who spent years leading the delivery of the King Charles III England Coast Path for Natural England. A 2,700-mile trail around the English coastline, free to walk, connecting cliffs, harbours, beaches and pubs from one end of the country to the other. The longest managed coastal path in the world.
Not a vanity project. Not a rebrand of something that already existed. A genuine, decades-long effort to open up the coast to everyone.
In a country that loves to argue about who's allowed to walk where, this is a statement: the coastline belongs to all of us.
I cycled Britain's coastline with my best mate, one week per year for seven years. So when the King Charles III England Coast Path was inaugurated in March 2026, it felt personal.
On 19 March 2026, King Charles stood on the chalk cliffs at Seven Sisters in East Sussex, the wind doing what wind does on the English coast, and officially inaugurated the path that bears his name. The messaging was clear: this is open.
Except it isn't.
Roughly 80% of the path is walkable — just over 2,000 miles. 556 miles have yet to be opened. That's longer than the entire Camino de Santiago. The delays aren't engineering problems, they're legal standoffs, landowner disputes, and political stalemates that have been running for years with no resolution in sight.
Why announce it now?
Because the royal diary doesn't wait. Charles has committed to creating 25 National Nature Reserves by 2027. Seven Sisters was the 13th. The inauguration was doing double duty. The government wanted a tourism push for summer 2026: wait for completion and you miss the window. After 18 years spanning seven Prime Ministers, you either launch or the project becomes a permanent embarrassment.
They needed a moment more than they needed completion.
It started under Gordon Brown's government with the Marine and Coastal Access Act in 2009, legislation championed through Parliament by Hilary Benn. The first section opened in 2012 along Weymouth Bay. Since then, the project has survived multiple changes in government commitment, funding squeezes, and a pandemic. The Ramblers had been campaigning for it since 2004. Their volunteers physically walking, surveying, and mapping every proposed stretch, negotiating with more than 25,000 individual landowners along the way. These aren't bureaucrats — they're walkers who believed the English coastline should be accessible to everyone, and they spent 20 years making it happen.
Until 2023, it was simply the England Coast Path. It was renamed to mark the King's coronation, and to his credit, the rebrand works. Charles warned about plastic pollution in 1970, aged 21, and is patron of Surfers Against Sewage. You'd think the royal warrant would help get it over the line.
Three hundred metres of beach
The most absurd story on the entire route is happening on the Isle of Wight. Queen Victoria, Charles's great-great-great-grandmother, had a seaside residence called Osborne House. Edward VII gifted it to the nation in 1902. English Heritage now manages the estate. The coast path needs to cross a 300-metre stretch of its beach.
English Heritage has said no. For seven years.
Their argument: security risks to Queen Victoria's "irreplaceable" collection and the presence of around 10,000 Crown items stored near the coast in Swiss Cottage, a miniature chalet on the Osborne House grounds. It was shipped piece by piece from Switzerland by Victoria and Albert as an educational playhouse for their children, who filled it with their own curiosity cabinet. The collection includes natural history specimens, fossils, antiquities from around the world, the first transatlantic telegraph message and… a five-legged deer. They also say the volume of walkers and infrastructure required — fences, gateways, CCTV — would damage the historic landscape. This, for an estate that already welcomes thousands of paying visitors through the front gate every year.
The alternative: walkers get diverted onto a 2-mile inland detour along a narrow pavement next to the A3021, a busy, unpleasant, and by the Ramblers' own assessment, dangerous road. A national trail named after the King cannot pass through a royal estate that was given to the public over a century ago. By contrast, Balmoral, where the King actually lives, manages public access through its grounds without the world ending.
The Isle of Wight Ramblers have held multiple protests outside Osborne House. A provisional agreement was actually reached in 2022, until English Heritage withdrew it.
Seven years. Three hundred metres. Still no resolution.
The pattern
And Osborne House isn't an outlier. It's the pattern. In North Norfolk, negotiations are ongoing with a hotel whose grounds would provide a safer, more scenic route, but the hotel won't budge. In Cumbria, the original route between Gretna and Allonby was withdrawn entirely after landowners raised safety concerns about cattle and marshland. In Hampshire, the Hythe Ferry, which connects Southampton to Hythe across Southampton Water and forms a key link in the coast path, has been suspended since August 2024 after its pontoon was declared unsafe. The operator needs £250,000 to replace it, doesn't have the money, and is now up for sale. And then there's coastal erosion, the cliffs and beaches literally reshaping themselves faster than the bureaucracy can keep up.
Here, at least, there's a clever piece of legislation: unlike traditional rights of way that are legally lost when land erodes, the England Coast Path has a "roll-back" provision. The route repositions itself as coastlines change. It's the first trail in England designed to move with climate change rather than fight it.
Wales and Scotland solved this already, albeit in different ways. Wales built a complete coastal path in six years, from 2006 to 2012. Scotland said "just go wherever you like" — the Land Reform Act of 2003 gave everyone a right of responsible access to most Scottish land and water bodies. And England has spent 18 years, £28 million, and negotiations with 25,000 landowners, and still can't get past a five-legged deer on the Isle of Wight.
2,700 miles of trail. 18 years of campaigning. Thousands of volunteers. And still, 300 metres of beach that won't let you through.
The people who made it happen
It's taken nearly two decades, and it's nearly there. Aside from perhaps Hilary Benn, it's not because of politicians (or kings). It exists because of the people who spent decades fighting for it, most of whom will never appear in a headline.
