The road to heaven

WE went to a family wedding in Lancashire this month, but this isn’t about family weddings other than to say that men’s morning-suit waistcoats seem to be making a bid for attention. I spotted shocking pink, brilliant green and ochre yellow plus one with brass buttons. In Hew’s case, it’s a concoction of two fabric triangles—the showy bit—tied round the neck with a string and another at the waist.

What I want to write about is our journey. We set off from London at about 9am, deciding to use the M6, which goes all the way up to Preston, our destination. Nine hours later, we arrived. The journey had taken longer than a flight to South Africa largely because the authorities had decided to convert the road into a ‘smart motorway’. It wasn’t clear to me how this is going to be any different by the time work stops in a couple of years. What it did mean, however, was that the traffic was either travelling at 20mph or queuing and stationary.

We made a vow, there and then, never to use the M6, smart or otherwise.

For our return, we plotted a complicated scheme. Lancashire seems blessed with more motorways than the rest of Britain. We started off on the M65, going east, then the M66 going south towards Manchester until we hit the M62, which crosses the country from Liverpool to the outskirts of Hull.

This last was a rare—and unexpected—treat. If you want to see England at its most beautiful and varied, this is the road to take. For a start, Lancashire is a lovely county. I’d thought of it as all cotton mills and factories belching smoke, but I suppose those days are long past. I suppose, also, that, being towards the west coast, it gets plenty of rainfall, which results in verdant fields and thriving trees.

The roads are calm and winding, interspersed with delightful villages, their gardens blazing with bright flowers, windowboxes, hanging baskets and all sorts of ingenious containers that contrast with the solemnity of the grey stone of the buildings.

Lancashire gives way to the South Pennines, which used to be very familiar to me. The motorway goes over what, in winter, is bleak moorland, but, in August, was sunny, welcoming and full of flowering heather. Between Manchester and Huddersfield, there’s barely a single village, but plenty of outlying farms, all rearing sheep.

At one point, the motorway divides itself into two with, in the central reservation, a grey-stone farm with dry-stone walls and lots of sheep. I couldn’t work out how the farmer ever left it as the motorway seemed to have no junction, simply a grass track leading to a field. How do the sheep get to market?

The names up in this height are quite typical: Saddleworth Moor, Rishworth Moor, Moss Moor and Scapegoat Hill. Deanhead and Krumlin are tiny villages with, just a bit south, the larger village of Slaithwaite (pronounced locally as Slough-wit). At some point, you travel along the highest patch of motorway in England, which is carefully signed.

In all, it was a delightful trip, which made up for all the ardours of the M6. I would have liked to have gone further along it, but we had to branch off onto the M1, which took us to London. I was sorry to have missed villages called Cridling Stubbs, Great Heck and Eggborough. There’s also the Aire and Calder Canal.

Indeed, I would recommend a trip down the M62 for tourists keen to see what England can offer on a single journey: rugged hills, old stone farms and glorious scenery, whether of moorland or green fields. It would be a revelation to a coachload of Americans or Japanese. And to the English, too.

‘The M62 would be a revelation to a coachload of Americans ’