The Pennine Way
Angus Cater hikes the moors
Come on Boggy, keep up.’ my daughter, Joanna, looked up furiously as she struggled to extract herself from another piece of black, foul-smelling earth. We were on day three of walking the bottom half of the Pennine Way, the toughest physical challenge that a teenage Joanna and her friend Lizzie had ever faced—lizzie’s father had dropped out after two days, with sore feet.
Christopher Wright’s A Guide to the Pennine Way (1991) describes the first day: ‘Immediately north of the village [of edale] is Kinder Scout, an extremely irregular plateau covered with peat bog and extending over 15 square miles.’ This is where Joanna acquired her nickname, as she seemed incapable of identifying the dry bits.
There’s also a 2,060ft climb over Bleaklow Head. By the time we arrived at the youth hostel at Crowden, the girls had developed a motivational chant: ‘We hate Angus Cater, we hate Angus Cater.’ It was only partly humorous.
Stretching from the Peak District to the Scottish borders via the Yorkshire moors, the Pennine Way was the first of the longdistance footpaths known as National Trails to open, in 1965, some 30 years after it was first mooted by journalist, conscientious objector and rights-of-way campaigner Tom Stephenson. In 1935, he wrote an article in the Daily Herald entitled ‘Wanted— A Long Green Trail’, imagining it as ‘a faint line on the ordnance maps, which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land’.
According to the minutes from a conference held in 1938, the Pennine Way was intended to ‘be available for all time as a natural heritage of the youth of this country, and of all who feel the call of the hills and lonely places’.
After the initial shock to the system, my youthful companions soon acclimatised to their wild, lonely, magnificently beautiful surroundings. We had every type of weather (it was midsummer), but, when the sun broke through, the pleasure was intense. The midges liked it, too.
‘After 15 square miles of peat bog and a 2,060ft climb over Bleaklow Head, the girls had developed a motivational chant: “We hate Angus Cater”
There are youth hostels most of the way, plus the odd bunkhouse. Never have such refuges appeared so luxurious. They called to mind Kahlil Gibran’s words in The Prophet about joys and sorrows being inseparable: ‘Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.’
We left the Peak District National Park at Standedge, after which the path follows the boundary between Greater manchester and West Yorkshire, described by mr Wright as ‘the watershed from which streams descend on one side into Lancashire, and the other into Yorkshire’.
map reading wasn’t easy and we misplaced the path a few times. The grey sky seemed almost to be touching us; we felt we were about to be sucked up into the damp clouds, like the Dementors in the ‘Harry Potter’ books. It was here that morale sank to its lowest: we’d been walking for three days, the journey seemed never-ending, the drizzle perpetual.
A story was called for and it was up to me to provide it. And so started, Scheherazadelike, a saga of romance and adventure that lasted for three days and saw us through to the end of our journey, under blue skies and in sunshine, in the North Yorkshire village of Hawes. Twenty years later, when I asked Joanna for her memories, she recalled blocking her ears and shouting ‘La, la la’ whenever there was a slightly risqué bit.
Moonscape on the moors: the magic intensifies when the sun breaks through
Julian Smith, a member of my running club, Ranelagh Harriers, set the Pennine Way relay world record in 1971. He wrote in the club gazette: ‘When it’s a pleasant Friday afternoon in May, you’re running alone on dry bouncing hills high in the Cheviots, not a soul within miles, panoramic views all around, it’s exhilarating… but when it’s a damp, cold and misty 2am and you’re stumbling through flooded bogs and scree somewhere on Cross Fell, it’s grim.’
I’ve made the walk sound a bit grim—and some of it was—but it was also one of the most memorable experiences of mine and my daughter’s lives. You need to be reasonably fit, have good equipment and be a proficient map-reader. Go try it—you won’t regret it.