Trekking
This endurance test brings hardship to your feet in exchange for rapture for your soul. It’s a good deal.
Hard on your feet, bliss for your soul.
THERE ARE LOTS of reasons to want to walk a long, green trail, and any of them is worth acting on. You might want the satisfaction of adding a meaty volume to your library of memories (and no asset accrues value over the years more reliably than that). You might want the bragging rights of having walked hundreds of miles in one go, and you’d deserve those. You might aspire to learn more about the island on which you live; gauge its true scale, after having your spatial senses blunted by the hasty measurements of car or train – and no tools return richer data than your feet and five senses. You may feel a yearning to journey to the centre of the countryside and yourself – and there’s good reason all pilgrimages take this form. Or you might be like me, who occasionally feels like life is a gigantic tangled ball of string – and that finding an end and just gently pulling it out over a few hundred uninterrupted miles of open country is the best way to untangle, uncomplicate and find the true thread of things again. That’s the spirit in which I began trekking many years ago, with my friend Jim, at the exceptionally complicated age of 17.
I chose the Pennine Way because it was long – at 268 miles fully half the length of England – and that mattered because not only would it take me out of day to day life for as long as seemed possible, it was also an undeniably reckonable distance. A long way by car never mind your own two feet. It was also the first official National Trail, and I was drawn to that originality, but also to the reputation it had acquired for being a bit grim. Celebrated author Alfred Wainwright, who wrote a guide to the trail, huffed “You won’t come across me anywhere along the Pennine Way. I’ve had enough of it.” This was a good omen. I may only have been a callow, undersized teenager, but I felt I’d be enlarged on the stretching rack of the Pennine Way – potentially outgrowing people who’d been set before me as giants.
It would also take me high along the spine of England, across many hills that were unfamiliar to me – from the Dark Peak to the Yorkshire Dales, Brontë Country, North Pennines, Northumberland, Hadrian’s Wall and the Cheviots. Raised on holidays in North Wales and the Lake District, these brooding names might as well have been witches’ incantations, and they were as gloomily spell-binding to me. I opted to walk the trail starting in late March, so I’d have as much rain as possible to walk manfully into. ▶
With all good adventures, you spend the months leading up to it disappearing into reveries, and busying yourself with what you imagine are meticulous preparations. I cobbled together kit including an old canvas smock of my father’s I thought made me look worldly, a towering 65-litre rucksack and boots that were several times too heavy and stiff for the job, and which made each step like swinging a lead mallet.
You learn a lot when you’re trekking, but the lessons are never harsher than those of the first few days. WHAT were you thinking with these boots, this blotting-paper all your clothes seem to be made of, this approximately half-stone of B&B accoutrements (portable radio, clock, pot of Nivea, two thick novels) you deemed essential? WHAT EVIDENCE did you have that there was a strong inner core, capable of great endurance, waiting to be discovered inside you?
Looking at the journal I kept scrupulously for four days, I see a brief high followed by an immediate plunge. We walked 16 miles from Edale to Crowden that first leg, buoyed by bright sunshine and a conveyor belt of sugary snacks. Having taken in Jacob’s Ladder (‘Steep’), Kinder Low (‘Round’), Bleaklow (‘Boggy’) and ‘loads of other places’ (‘Peaty’). We arrived at our Youth Hostel barracks feeling like army recruits who’d been immediately selected for promotion, based on our extraordinary pluck and aptitude.
But we awoke foot-sore, stiff and sunburned. Welcome to day two of your trek, the one in which so many longdistance walking aspirations founder. A day when heading down what to all intents and purposes is an endless road paved with tender patches and chafing suddenly seems less romantic. ‘Crowden to Hell’ my diary entry is titled, reflecting on 12 hours in which both weather and morale would switch direction
abruptly. “I’ve never been so dead after a walk ever” 17-year-old me wrote, after a map-reading error led us to a demoralising two-hour detour in the rain, and an arrival after dark at our miserable (now long since closed) digs. And that after what had seemed an almost wantonly ugly trudge over the stodgy moorland of Black Hill – a perfect embodiment of our emotional nadir, with its thigh-deep peat, stolidly unimaginative name and motorway-wide erosion (one of the chief reasons the Pennine Way had acquired its people-hating reputation). What lay before us was 12 days more of uninterrupted walking (we’d planned a rest day at Alston) – which if things didn’t improve was a dreadful prospect.
But of course they do improve – and they always do, as your body musters its surprising powers of resilience, your expectations right-size themselves and your brain yields to the rhythm of walking. ‘Muscle meditation’ some call it today, an act of simple effort, repeated and refined until it becomes a state of perfect automation – that’s how trekking ▶
“We arrived at our Youth Hostel barracks feeling like army recruits who’d been promoted.” immediately
feels when you’re in the groove. Making progress, rarely stopping, hyper-conscious of the moment – the texture of the ground, the smell of the air, the sound of the birds and the brooks and the breeze – yet careless of the time and the date and the decade.
By the time we crossed the M62 on the high, narrow footbridge built for the purpose we were creatures of the moor – marvelling uncomprehendingly at the fast noisy metal boxes before returning gladly to our timeless terrain. Ahead lay the treasures of Top Withens (where Emily Brontë set Victorian ripsnorter Wuthering Heights), the storied moors of Mytholmroyd and the Cragg Vale coiners, the limestone gateau of Malham Cove, handsome Pen-y-ghent, Britain’s highest pub the Tan Hill Inn (where you just pray for a snowstorm to bar further progress) and mighty Cross Fell – highest point of the Pennine Way and where a snowstorm really did nearly stop us in our tracks. (Waking to a landscape a metre-deep in snow, we climbed to Cross Fell’s nearly 3000ft summit, passing a farmer frantically digging out buried sheep, before ourselves being entombed in a white-out. Unable to see whether the ground before us rose or fell, and quite beyond our 17 years’ experience, we were lucky a much more capable walker who’d followed our footprints soon caught us up and confidently led us over the mountain’s shoulder, down into Garrigill and the sweetest pint ever illegally purchased.)
I remember Hadrian’s Wall and the vastness of Kielder Forest – a planet of trees and quiet whose edge is just tickled by the trail – and the great calm and isolation of what I remember at that time of year as the golden-coated Cheviots. But what I remember most of all is being woken from the trance I’d fallen into on the long walk up from Forest in Teesdale, past Cauldron Snout and into the North Pennines. With a strange incuriosity, I’d neglected to read ahead in my guidebook – and so conspired in the greatest surprise I’ve ever had in the hills. After hours of plodding in coming-and-going mist, the clouds whisked away, and an incredible landscape became sharp ahead and beneath. A gift of space and scale and beauty I was speechless to behold. High Cup – a ludicrously good-looking chasm, encircled by dolerite crags that look like a renaissance master’s exercise in perspective drawing. Groping for a description for my hastily restarted journal in Dufton Youth Hostel that night I said it was like the void left behind if Pen-y-ghent had been scooped out whole – but the truth is it’s much bigger than that. ▶
“I’d neglected to read ahead in my guidebook – and so conspired in the greatest surprise I’ve ever had in the hills… High Cup – a ludicrously chasm.” good-looking
After the Pennine Way stagemanaged this overwhelming encounter I never doubted it again, and realised I’d acquired a taste I would never lose – not just for the slow movements of long-distance paths, and crescendos that are built over days not hours, but also for the deep tranquillity of mind upon which things are so readily and permanently impressed. (So good is a long-distance trail at eliciting that temper in fact, I find it impossible to resist the observation that upland trails trace gradient profiles which strikingly resemble the alpha waves which signify our brains’ most relaxed, receptive state.)
I won’t say I started the trail a boy and finished it a man (though my dad, bless him, did attempt such a compliment). But by the time I claimed my free half-pint at journey’s end at the Border Hotel in Kirk Yetholm (a completer’s perk inaugurated – and, astonishingly – funded by Wainwright, and still honoured by the hotel) I had grown up. I’d learned that Britain isn’t so much a small island or a stepping stone as a great continent of adventure, depending on how you approach it. That some of the biggest thrills aren’t quick. That whether you feel like you need to grow, or slow, or simplify; give chance a chance to happen while getting – in a way modern life has a mania for distracting you from doing – a long and proper perspective on life, a trek will likely show you the way.