She left Liverpool six months ago and returned today
Crowds of people gathered at the Albert Dock today(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Maya Gilbert has spent the last six month walking every step of the UK’s coastline. She realised she’d “fallen out of love with England” and set out on a 2,700 miles lap of the country.
The 31-year-old set off from her home in Liverpool in May 2025, giving herself 120 days to complete her mammoth hike and today she returned to the Albert Dock, welcomed by a cheering crowd of her friends and family. She’d set off six months ago 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.
Maya decided she’d “kind of” fallen out of love with England over the last 10 years, she described how she’d “slowly but surely” stopped enjoying being here so much. She said: “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.”
She also wanted to honour the milestone of her thirtieth birthday, which she celebrated in 2024, and wanted to mark a new chapter in her life with “this big, crazy walk” – to celebrate her recovery from anxiety and panic attacks in her twenties.
Maya said: “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.”
Maya set off on her huge fundraiser in May(Image: Liverpool Echo)
Finally, Maya’s challenge 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, so she can “have a bit of a party at the finish line”. She completed her hike today at Liverpool Docks.
Maya made it back to Liverpool today(Image: Liverpool Echo)
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.
Maya was 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 needed to buy food to sustain her while hiking some 22 miles per day.
Despite some challenging days, sore feet, and some loneliness on the trail, Maya’s hike helped her to fall in love with England again. She said: “I’ve fallen in love with areas of the country that I didn’t even really know anything about. It’s made me fall in love with hospitality even more, and all over again.”
You can see Maya’s journey on Instagram @mayana.gilbana. Maya’s fundraiser for Hospitality Action can be found here: www.justgiving.com/page/mayanagilbana