PENNINES PERSPECTIVE
Clear your head with a glorious upland walk
Anita Sethi searches for hope and belonging in high places along the Pennine Way.
After being traumatised by racial abuse, Anita Sethi found hope and a deep sense of belonging by walking along the epic Pennine Way
Iput one foot in front of the other and then paused for breath just below the final climb to the summit of the mountain. Before setting off, I looked back to see the Pennine Way, Britain’s oldest long-distance footpath, shimmering silver in the sunlight and snaking away into the horizon. The Pennine Way stretches through 268 miles (435km) of the country, uniting north with south, east with west.
It’s known as ‘the backbone of Britain’ and had, like some magnetic force, pulled me in to walk upon it.
It was being racially abused on a TransPennine Express train that prompted my journey along the Pennine Way. “Go back to where you’re from,” a racist man had told me. This is where I’m from. I’m from the north, the glorious north. One evening I had been looking at a map of the journey on that TransPennine train from Liverpool to Newcastle and there rose up miniature mappings of mountain ranges, and rivers running in inky blue lines. I felt tingles down my spine to see those markings and longed to step inside that map, to see those lines come alive in all their threedimensional glory.
That summer, the Pennine Way haunted my dreams and called me to walk upon it, but doing so seemed like a pipe dream. I didn’t quite have the courage to make such a journey,
which seemed a daunting task, until one day when I zoomed in on the map and saw a place called Hope. I felt it nigh on impossible to see such a place name and not be filled with hope, so I decided to start my journey in the Hope Valley in the Peak District.
LIFTING SPIRITS
The walk gave me perspective and that is one of the wonders of walking. Walking on higher landscapes and looking back down gave me the chance to reflect on my experience of being racially abused – and how, for so much of my life and through various similar experiences, I’ve been made to feel as if I don’t belong here, in the country in which I was born. The country that is my home. Walking brought a feeling of greater belonging that grew with every step I took.
The highs were, well, literally high. Being on high ground and the sense of elevation it brings were transformative and alleviated the anxiety I had been feeling since the racist attack. The literal highs along the Pennine Way are manifold. There are the Three Peaks of Yorkshire; my favourite was Pen-y Ghent. There is Cross Fell, the highest point of the Pennine Way. There is High Cup Nick, which rises to an elevation of 440m (1,445ft). And if you feel like resting your feet, there is England’s highest narrow-gauge railway: the glorious Settle-Carlisle railway line, which runs from Alston up the South Tynedale Valley and includes a stop at Dent, England’s highest railway station.
Similarly, the lows were literally low – those points when I was at the bottom of a mountain and felt I would never summon the strength to climb it. Such a long-distance walk requires