Ronald Turnbull takes a walk back into hiking history
WHAT CAN WE LEARN from the amazing growth in hiking between the two World Wars? Those were the years when the great outdoors opened up to the working classes. Young people in short skirts or droopy shorts, with hazel staffs and stout canvas rucksacks, stood on grassy hilltops unfolding the handsome Ordnance Survey one-inch maps.
They travelled on foot, or by bicycle. And the sort of place they arrived at was the Yarrow Valley, 40km south from Edinburgh. Broadmeadows opened here in 1931 as the first Scottish Youth Hostel. But with the coming of the car, outdoor types headed for the Highlands. Yarrow
no longer rang to the tread of boots, and droopy shorts no longer flapped in the breezes of the Minch Moor. Broadmeadows hostel closed in 2017.
But were they wrong, those adventurous young people with their handsome if slightly inaccurate maps? I didn’t think so, as I wandered up the path that started where the youth hostel used to be, through the little wood, onto the ridgeline of Minch Moor.
The valley behind was still green, with glimpses of the shining river. But up here, snow was ankle-deep, made lumpy by the underlying heather. Winter sunshine gave views across half the Border Country, with the Cheviots a crinkly white line along the southern horizon. A gentle breeze and air temperature well below freezing kept me cool even inside fleece and windproof.
The ridgeline runs roughly along the 400m contour for 8km. Its path was once busy with not just people but also small black cows, driven southwards towards the markets of England. Nowadays, it’s part of the Southern Upland Way – though even the SUW’s ‘Great Trail’ status doesn’t bring traffic enough to support the hostel below.
One or two people had been along before me to make a trodden path. But the snow was shallow, and it was easy enough to divert over the 523m summit of Brown Knowe, for simultaneous views in every direction.
Another couple of kilometres, and the ridgeline dived under a bark blanket of spruce. In summer I’d press on to the high point, projecting above the tree layer like a bald stone in a river, for views down to the Tweed. But the winter day was fading, the low sun wiping grey-blue shadows across the landscape. So I doubled back down the Minchmoor Road, a sort of 18th-Century motorway slip road.
Now the path was narrow, encroached by heather. But it got grassy, and then became a farm track: no need to hurry, and leisure to linger as the sky faded to mauve and dull orange, the air on my face turned bitter cold, and darkness filled the glen below. In these early years of the 21st Century, one thing’s for sure: I’m glad I’m not wearing those droopy cotton shorts.