Column: Stuart Maconie
Its heartland once sealed off, its literary pedigree beguiling, the River Hodder has a very big story to tell…
The River Hodder has a big story.
MODESTY FORBIDS ME from assuming that mine is one of the first pages you turn to in this fine magazine, stuffed as it is with delights like a particularly dense, rich haggis. But if it is, you’ll be in time to watch a TV programme I made recently.
On December 10th, BBC One are showing several regional documentaries-cum-travelogues covering a variety of great British river walks. Thus, depending on where you live, you’ll be able to enjoy (I’d imagine) Nick Knowles jet-skiing down the Humber or Claudia Winkleman, Lulu and Dame Judi Dench re-enacting Jerome K Jerome’s classic boat trip in a state-of-the-art coracle.
Mine takes me along the banks of the Hodder, one of northern England’s hidden liquid gems. Hidden, that is, except to those in the know, many of whom I meet during the programme. The Hodder rises on the lonely slopes of White Hill above Slaidburn and flows for some 25 miles south into the Ribble, winding for most of its course through the shyly beautiful and still amazingly unfrequented Forest of Bowland.
Perhaps some of the walkers who zoom past on the M6 bound for the Lake District still think of this place as being out of bounds to them. Because until the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in 2000, a lot of it was: acres of grouse moor ‘protected’ behind miles of barbed wire. Hearty, tweedy men still shoot birds for fun up here but in between the gunfire, you and I can at least now enjoy this unique place unarmed.
My journey begins at Dunsop Bridge, one of the many places that lay claim to being the centre of the UK. This one, though, has the Ordnance Survey’s official satellite measured stamp of approval. It also has great bacon butties, courtesy of Puddleducks café.
At Whitewell, the Hodder is at its most theatrically gorgeous. You could once cross it by a fine suspension bridge – until 1902, when a charabanc party
from Preston became over-excited and 32 of them decided to test the aforementioned suspension by jumping up and down on it. All 32 ended up getting a fully immersive experience of the lovely Hodder and a dressing down from the landlord of the Inn At Whitewell. The current incumbent, Charles Bowman, has a gleam in his eye when he talks of restoring it, but until then the crossing here is achieved by a handsome series of stepping stones that have been in daily use for millennia. The bronze age nomads who fished this stretch of the Hodder buried their dead in a cave high on Launds Hill, and I made my way up there with an archaeologist from the University of Central Lancashire. He showed me not just the cave – full of roosting bats – but fragments of the burial urn and cremated bone. The valley I looked down on would have looked very much the same as it did to them 7000 years ago. A thought to make you wonder.
Further along, a stone arch, mossy and with no enclosing sides, spans the Hodder near Stonyhurst College. J R R Tolkien’s sons were schooled here, and he visited regularly, which has prompted speculation that this was the model for the bridge across the Brandywine in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In truth, it wasn’t (the dates don’t add up) but that doesn’t stop the less painstakingly mathematical Frodo fan coming to get dewy-eyed over it. It’s absolutely certain, however, that John and Michael Tolkien would have bathed in the swirl of the Hodder Roughs, as would have done Conan Doyle and Gerard Manley Hopkins, also old boys of Stonyhurst.
I spent two long, cold, exhausting but exhilarating days walking the eight miles of the Hodder between Dunsop Bridge and Great Mitton which will (sadly) translate to a half-hour of telly time. But come and join me anyway if you can (and perhaps if the BBC is kind enough to place the programme on the iPlayer).
And come and tramp these hills soon. They belong to you too now.