Writer shows there’s more to the moors than the Brontës

WE ARE accustomed to the London-based media having a poor knowledge of life outside the M25, so it comes as no surprise to find that its grasp of northern geography is pretty dire.

The latest lamentable example of this came during February’s apocalypse-like fires which raged over 1.5 square kilometres of moorland above Marsden in the Colne Valley. In response, the thought processes of one national daily newspaper clearly ran along the following lines: “Yorkshire plus moors equals Brontë”.

So it distilled the bizarre spectacle of the Pennines ablaze in winter down to a feeble cartoon featuring Cathy and Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Never mind the small matter of the fire actually being 25 miles away from the relatively small area of moorland associated with the Brontës.

As we know in Yorkshire, not all Pennine moors happen to lie around Haworth, or north of the M62 for that matter, and a timely reminder of that is supplied in a lovely new book by artist and cartographer Christopher Goddard. In a style which will be familiar to devotees of Alfred Wainwright, he has sketched and mapped the vast tracts of moorland and detailed 20 walking routes.

Goddard grew up in Sheffield and spent much of his childhood roaming the hills around Wharncliffe and Bradfield. Sheffield, he writes, is “fused onto the moors” in way that is unlike any other UK city. Some of his walks are on old salters’ ways laid down in the Middle Ages to bring the vital preserving ingredient of salt from Cheshire to towns and cities east of the Pennines.

Back along these routes went Sheffield knives. Other walks follow packhorse trails which were the main trans-Pennine conduits for goods before canals, railways, roads and the M62.

A feature of the book are Goddard’s vignettes of the area’s many surviving centuries-old guide stoops, boundary stones and crosses. But other aspects of the landscape have disappeared, Goddard says, and he warns about the depletion of peat bog over the last few decades, a resource now vital for storing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in order to slow down climate change.

This is the result of overgrazing, burning, draining and acid rain erosion produced by emissions from chimneys. Some of the damage, Goddard points out, is thankfully being repaired by the Moors for the Future Partnership with the support of the Peak District National Park, the RSPB, National Trust and the water companies.

“While we should be grateful for this beautiful wild landscape on our doorstep,” he writes, “we should be under no illusion about it. This landscape is not ‘natural’. It has been managed by humans for centuries, even millennia, altered since Bronze Age man began cutting down trees on the high ground, cultivating the thin soil and accelerating the formation of the peat that dominates the landscape today.”

■ The South Yorkshire Moors by Christopher Goddard. (Gritstone Publishing, price £12.99).