Weekend Walking: St Annes Treasure Trail

I can cross another “to do” off my 30things list – on Saturday we made the most of the unexpected sunshine by doing this Treasure Trail walk in St Annes on the Fylde coast in Lancashire.

The walks from Treasure Trails promise to take you around the main areas of a town, showcasing all the highlights and generally providing a pleasant walking route, whilst (and this is the important part) also adding an element of fun with a trail of clues to hunt down. This St Annes trail started off at the main pier, and the theme of the trail was a murder mystery (don’t worry, I won’t be featuring any spoilers in this post). Step 1: get a little distracted by the beach before getting started on the trail.

This trail really does guide you round the highlights of the town, which include the park and rose gardens, various memorials, the lovely little high street, the promenade and the pier. It starts and ends at the beach, which is a bonus if you’re doing it on a sunny day.

The murder mystery story is a nice touch – you’re hunting for clues on landmarks which have been linked to the mystery’s suspects and weapons that can be eliminated one by one. I did enjoy this, although at some points I did feel that by focussing in on the directions and clues in the trail I was missing out on just enjoying the route and the walk in the sunshine – so I suppose this is something to bear in mind. I’m not sure how the other treasure trails are, but in this one a lot of the clues were quite close together, and I’d probably prefer more time between each one to take things in.

That being said, we did take our time and stopped off at various points to sit and enjoy the weather. And we’d definitely have missed out on several parts of the town without this trail to follow.

The trail is apparently 2.25 miles long and takes 2 hours – which sounds about right if you take your time as we did. It’s all on flat ground and wasn’t a challenging walk at all. And most of the clues were pretty easy to find. What’s great is that there is a text service provided by this company so that if you struggle to find one, you can text in and have the answer sent to you for free. This was helpful for us when we managed to completely miss one out on the route!

I’m not going to lie, it was a little embarrassing walking around like a tourist following paper directions, but it was worth it by the end when we solved the case and finished up with ice cream on the beach. So I’d recommend these trails for something different to do. We got pretty into it and it was a nice way to see the town. (And how cute is my new Little Mermaid tee from Primark?!)