Читать книгу The Pennine Way - the Path, the People, the Journey - Andrew McCloy - Страница 9

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CROWDEN – HEBDEN BRIDGE

Repairing the green trail

Longdendale wasn’t exactly alluring the following day, murky and uniformly grey with moisture heavy in the air. It was one of those mornings, I told myself, where you simply have to get up and get going without too much thought in between. I crossed a former railway line that now forms part of the east–west Trans Pennine Trail, a coast-to-coast walking and cycling route from Southport, near Liverpool, to Hornsea, beyond Hull. It was as deserted as the lifeless reservoir below, one of five (Bottoms, Valehouse, Rhodeswood, Torside and Woodhead) that occupy almost the entire valley floor. The only activity seemed to be on the far side, where an endless stream of vans and articulated lorries were growling their way along the A628, which links Manchester and the M1 via the high and bleak Woodhead Pass.

Once clear of Longdendale, I slithered up the damp hillside into the cloud above Laddow Rocks. The sodden undergrowth made short work of my dry trousers. I waded through a stream where the slab bridge had partly collapsed and tried to negotiate several patches of spongy ground and bog, before finally embarking on a paved section that marked the long, gradual ascent of Black Hill. My feet were sodden and squelching and all I could see was wet, lifeless moorland. It was not a great start to day 2.

I plodded on for a bit, then decided to call a halt and maybe cheer myself up with a chocolate bar that had been earmarked for a likely afternoon treat to head off flagging energy levels; but much to my surprise I realised I was nearly at the top of Black Hill. I stopped by the trig point and, as I poured a cup of coffee from my flask, the thinning clouds finally parted and a little watery sun shone through. This was better. I celebrated by eating some chocolate anyway; and my spirits were raised further by a short but good-natured chat with a passing walker, a local man, who told me that in his opinion Black Hill was a fine place and unfairly treated by the walking guidebooks.

Mind you, by all accounts, Black Hill’s bad press was once well deserved. Writing in 1968 in his Pennine Way Companion, Alfred Wainwright described the summit as a ‘desolate and hopeless quagmire’ where the peat was ‘naked and unashamed’. The vegetation had been completely eroded so that the trig point was marooned in a soft bed of glutinous peat and only survived because it was built on a small island called Soldiers’ Lump (named after the army engineers who originally surveyed the hill). To physically reach it entailed a dirty and potentially dangerous adventure, as Wainwright himself found out when he became completely stuck in the peat bog. He was rescued by the efforts of his walking friend and a passing national park warden who managed to pull him free.

Half a century later, the summit of Black Hill is almost unrecognisable. The fact that I had reached the top sooner than anticipated, and that I was simply wet rather than covered in bog, is testament to the fact that a slabbed path runs up to and beyond the trig point, which itself now sits on a neat cairn in the middle of a small paved area. More remarkable still is that in all directions there is vegetation: coarse grasses, heather, bilberry, cotton grass and rushes. There are wet patches, of course, as you would expect on any Pennine top, and its sense of bareness and bleakness will never be to everyone’s taste, but this is a hill with a new lease of life. It’s a far cry from that degraded, boot-sucking sea of exposed peat that once gave Black Hill the darkest of reputations; and it recalls not just the low point in the Pennine Way’s fortunes, but the moment when the path’s very existence came under threat.

By the mid 1980s, it was clear that sections of the Pennine Way were in serious trouble, principally where the heavily used path crossed fragile, peat-based moorland, and especially in the Peak District and South Pennines. After years of official inaction, the case for some sort of intervention was now irrefutable.

In 1987, the Peak District National Park Authority and the Countryside Commission established a three-year management project to examine ways to repair the worst-eroded sections. They had found that, since a survey in 1971, the width of the path had widened dramatically in certain places as successive walkers tried to avoid the exposed and glutinous peat, which of course only made the erosion worse. What was once a 6ft-wide path on Black Hill had increased to 71ft across, while between Slippery Moss and Redmires to Blackstone Edge the width of bare path had grown by a staggering 900 per cent!

In the first phase of the project, led by Molly Porter, various techniques were trialled, some with more success than others. Since digging out the peat to the bedrock was not a realistic option, most techniques involved floating an artificial path on top of the soft surface. There were wooden duckboards, strips of black plastic matting anchored to the ground, elaborate raft paths that floated on geotextiles, and even sheep’s wool. Chestnut fence palings, wood chippings and brash were laid in long lines to try to provide a firm walkway across the peat. Most succumbed to the harsh Pennine weather and actually became eyesores and tripping hazards, so were later removed, but it was valuable experience and lessons were learnt. Some techniques were truly experimental, such as the construction of a short path on Snake summit consisting of expanded polystyrene blocks covered with loose stone. It was based on road construction methods over deep peat sites in southern Norway, which effectively allowed the highway to float. Initially the results were very encouraging, but heavy downpours and poor drainage made the blocks too buoyant and caused them to split, so that the path began to wobble alarmingly, much to the consternation of passing walkers.

In 1991, Mike Rhodes was appointed as project manager. Reflecting on some of the highs and lows in a report ten years later, he described the time when he was walking alone to his car on the Snake summit one winter’s afternoon after a site visit. ‘It was going dark, it was misty and I was tired from the miles of dodging slurried peat bogs. Suddenly, without warning, I found myself up to my waist in cold liquid peat. I clung to a tussock, hauled myself out and sat there, soaking wet and stinking of rotting vegetation.’

Mike later became Access and Rights of Way Manager for the Peak District National Park Authority. He told me that, 30 years ago, the conditions were so bad that it was make or break for the Pennine Way. ‘In the mid 1980s it got to the stage where the impact of the Pennine Way on the Peak District moorland was so severe that it threatened the Pennine Way’s actual existence. It was a choice of either making a major intervention and spending a significant amount of money to make the route sustainable – or close it. At one point the National Park Authority was even discouraging people from using the trail.’

A maintenance team of four (later five) was established to carry out large-scale repair and maintenance works. It was long, hard work in sometimes extreme conditions, often involving a walk of several miles across pathless bog just to get to the site. Martyn Sharp, one of the original members of the maintenance team, was appointed in 2003 as the Pennine Way Ranger for the Peak District stretch of the national trail. ‘The top of Black Hill was in a sorry state back then,’ he admitted. ‘You couldn’t reach the summit without sinking in up to your knees or above. There was an attempt to redirect walkers away from the very top, around the edge, but in the end we had no choice but to lay stone slabs to the trig point.’

The reaction to the team from passing walkers wasn’t always appreciative either, as the project report from the time notes: ‘It seems that some of the Pennine Way walkers thought they were there for a working holiday, and some thought they were convicts.’

In 1991, after the failed experimental surfacing techniques, the team began introducing traditional methods of repair using stone paving and, on some of the steeper slopes, stone pitching. It would prove to be the most long-lasting solution, as well as arguably the most appropriate, because from the beginning the choice of remedial action was based on a careful assessment of the location and a desire to respect the essential wild character of the upland landscape.

The flagstones came from the floors of derelict mills in the West Pennines. They were destined to be broken up as waste but instead were lifted, packed in crates and flown by helicopter to the Pennine Way. The large rectangular slabs of Bacup sandstone were placed rough side (underside) upwards in order to give maximum grip to walkers’ boots. Laid directly onto the ground, in effect they float on the soft peat as their size spreads the surface area loading. As far as possible, they were laid in gentle curves following the natural undulations and contours and so avoided artificially straight lines. Since the stones were recycled and 150 years old, they were already weathered and didn’t have the look of newly quarried material. Some still had the drilled holes that were once used as the footings of looms.

‘We were aiming to recreate the traditional techniques of causey paving and stone pitching that have been used for centuries on the packhorse routes across the Pennines, but adapting them for a modern recreational route,’ explained Mike Rhodes. ‘Look at places like Blackstone Edge on the Pennine Way, or Stanage Edge in the Peak District, for examples of these old surfaced routes. We used natural local stone originally cut from the Pennine hills for use in the mills and factories. And now we were returning that stone to the same hills. The stones are natural products and part of the Pennine landscape.’

It’s an interesting reversal of the process described by Ted Hughes in his poem ‘Hill-Stone was Content’, in which Hughes wrote of the Pennine stone being cut, carted and ‘conscripted’ into the mills, forgetting ‘its wild roots/Its earth-song’.

There’s an uncanny but powerful sense of coming full circle. Stones that were originally quarried from the Pennine hills were used to build the mills that fed the Industrial Revolution; the workers looked to escape the weekday drudgery by rambling in the same hills; when they finally achieved decent access and people walked for leisure, some of the moorland paths became eroded and needed repairing; the mills closed down and the redundant stone was returned to the hills to form durable and lasting pathways. How neat is that?

Much of Mike’s work on the Pennine Way and for the national park has been about balancing the conservation and protection of the moors with enjoyable recreation. ‘One of the fundamental principles of footpath repair is that you make it a good path that people will walk on. And when I see people coming out to walk the Pennine Way without leaving an impact then I consider that my job will be done. I really do think we’re beginning to get there now.’

However, paving the Pennine Way was only part of the story. The next phase saw the revegetation of the surrounding ground, which had begun in earnest with the management project in the 1990s. In 2003, an initiative was launched called Moors for the Future, an ambitious partnership of public and private bodies that before long ran one of the biggest moorland conservation projects in Europe. Such was its success that in 2015 the partnership received the largest ever award made by the European Union to a UK-based nature conservation project – the small matter of €16 million (over £12 million) for its MoorLIFE 2020 project. It began by installing new hilltop fencing to control sheep numbers and prevent overgrazing, then launching fire awareness campaigns, since over 400 fires have been recorded on the national park’s moors since 1982, many with devastating consequences for the moorland vegetation. Around 10,000 tiny dams were constructed to prevent damaging surface run-off (a technique known as gully blocking), and systematic fertilisation and reseeding began. In addition, over 750,000 plugs of native moorland plants were planted (by hand!) and sphagnum moss was reintroduced to begin the long process of restoring the blanket bog and stabilising the peat.

Funding also came from the water utility companies, for whom discoloured water washed off the eroded peat costs millions of pounds to treat each year. There were separate initiatives to replant clough woodlands on the edges of the moors and a community science project to help people better understand moorland ecology, since research into moorland conservation techniques was integral to the Moors for the Future programme.

If you’re wondering how relevant all this is to a walk along the Pennine Way, then read Wainwright’s description of Black Hill in the 1960s in Pennine Way Companion; or look at photos of walkers floundering on Kinder Scout in the 1970s and 80s. There are still visible scars on Featherbed Moss where successive Pennine Way walkers tried to dodge the worst of the bog (the average ‘trample width’ here was measured at over 170ft); and even the first mile out of Edale across the grassy expanse of Grindsbrook Meadows on the original route was once eroded into so many parallel paths, thanks to the tread of walking boots, that Gordon Miller described it to me as the Pennine Way motorway – three lanes north, three lanes south.

The transformation has been startling, and walking the Pennine Way through the Peak District is now a much more pleasant experience. However, Martyn Sharp is at pains to point out why the work was carried out in the first place. ‘People have to understand that we didn’t put the slabs down to make the Pennine Way easier to walk but to protect the rare habitats,’ he said. ‘We took some criticism over the slabs to start with, but the older paving stones have blended in and the vegetation has grown back around them really well.’ In fact, it’s done so well that Martyn now has to strim vegetation encroaching the path at one point.

Black Hill seems like a place reborn. It’s still a big, stern lump, but these days it’s more green than black. ‘I have a special affinity for Black Hill,’ admitted Martyn. ‘It’s not as busy as Kinder Scout but to me it’s every bit as special. There are mountain hares and short-eared owls up here now, it’s a place that’s alive once again.’ And he says the views can be just as commanding as elsewhere on the trail. ‘If you stand on the northern side of Black Hill, a little beyond the trig point, you can see Pendle Hill and even Pen-y-ghent on a clear day. It’s an exhilarating place.’

And as for that famous trig point, once the only piece of dry and recognisable land amid the summit bog, it also seems to have an admirer. ‘Every year a local man walks up the hill along the Pennine Way to repaint the trig point,’ says Martyn. ‘I try and get up to see him and I’ve even offered to supply the paint, but he politely refuses.’

From the summit of Black Hill, the Pennine Way originally struck north-westward across Dean Head Moss to reach the A635 Saddleworth–Holmfirth road, then continued across White Moss opposite. However, the ground here was notoriously wet and marshy and there were regular horror stories from Pennine Way walkers. In his 1975 guide to the long-distance footpaths of northern England, Geoffrey Berry observed: ‘The peat here is softer, stickier and deeper than any we have experienced, and that alone, on its part, is no mean achievement.’ Wooden fence palings were laid across the worst bits in the 1980s, but these soon deteriorated and were eventually removed, so in 1990 an alternative route across Wessenden Head Moor and then along the Wessenden valley, a little to the east of the original, became the recommended route and is now the permanent path. I followed it to the A635, a high and open moorland road with good views, not particularly busy at that moment, so I dropped my pack, leant against the wall and rested.

For over 30 years, this isolated lay-by has been the location of the legendary Snoopy’s snack van, a mainly weekend phenomenon that appears to be celebrated largely on the strength of the generous size of its bacon butties and the huge, steaming mugs of tea served up to Pennine Way walkers, who are no doubt grateful for a hot drink and a chat. Whether they open the serving hatch or conduct business from the door at the end depends on the strength of the wind, I was told.

Looking back, Black Hill was now more or less clear of cloud, although a little to the east my eye was irresistibly drawn to the 750ft pencil-thin mast of the Holme Moss transmitter, which was erected in 1951. Although pinned down with five sets of steel stays, the 140-ton mast looked incredibly fragile. Beyond the mast a low, grey blanket still enveloped Bleaklow. I sighed deeply. I had got over the first hurdle, seen off the opening test on the Pennine Way. But was this the right way to look at it?

Long before I took that first step at Edale, I decided I had to try to get to the bottom of the popular notion of the Pennine Way as simply a hard, uncompromising slog. The physical and mental challenge, the arduous miles of bog and bare moorland, the blisters and pain. Surely there was more to the Pennine Way than that? But the Pennine Way has always seemed to carry its reputation before it. In his book The Wild Rover, Mike Parker set the Pennine Way alongside the many hundreds of other domestic walking trails and described it as the ‘undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is’. It seems to be the only British long-distance path that everyone has heard of, even those for whom walking for fun is as alien a concept as deep-sea diving or eating snails. In the preceding months, whenever I mentioned that I was going to walk the Pennine Way people tended to respond with terms like ‘long’, ‘hilly’, ‘tough’, ‘rain’ and ‘bogs’. Others offered a shake of the head or a roll of the eyes and in their minds they probably added ‘nutter’.

In their 1980 guidebook to backpacking, Britain at Your Feet, David Wickers and Art Pedersen were pretty blunt about the Pennine Way, calling it ‘a 250-mile wet slog up the middle of England.’ They described how ‘the going is rough and can be a real body wrecker … there are exhausting hours to be spent bog hopping across the peaty plateaux, just like wading through a giant squelchy grow bag. And the weather can be truly violent, with low flying rain clouds, sleet that comes hard and horizontal, and pea souper mists that can brew up within minutes, even on the gentlest of summer days … there are certainly moments when you have to convince yourself it is doing you good, and when the very idea of the Pennine Way being a public “footpath” seems an utter euphemism.’ You get the impression they didn’t like the Pennine Way very much.

Of course, walking along the top of the Pennines is always likely to have its challenging moments, whatever route you take and however you choose to walk it, and that’s what distinguishes it from the Cotswold Way or Thames Path. The Pennines are a high, often remote chain of hills, the western facing slopes in particular prone to rain, and where there’s peat underfoot the ground is always likely to cut up. Long-distance walks are about experiencing the elements, moving slowly through different natural landscapes and being outdoors. And they’re about testing your mettle. But how far does testing your mettle mean that a walking trail should be so exacting as to make endurance rather than enjoyment the watchword?

More than almost any other UK walking trail, the Pennine Way seems synonymous with sheer physical challenge. The South West Coast Path may be much longer (630 miles compared to the Pennine Way’s 268 miles) and the overall height gain much greater (115,000ft against the Pennine Way’s 37,000ft, give or take a bit), but you rarely go half a day without dropping down to a village, café or beach. When you set off for a day on the Pennine Way, on the other hand, in most cases you don’t see a shop, pub or café until nightfall; and if you camp you might not see one at all.

As I walked north to Scotland, I pondered the question of toughness and challenge and talked to others about it. Where precisely do you strike the balance between maintaining the trail’s sheer physical (and mental) test and making it sufficiently accessible so that enough people feel both inspired and capable of attempting it? Reading accounts of early trail completions in the 1960s and 70s, I was struck by the fact that most people seemed to accept the boggy and sometimes treacherous conditions underfoot as simply part of walking along the top of the Pennines. It might not have been altogether pleasant at times, but coping with it was part of the adventure.

So was it right to tolerate the sort of erosion that I’d already heard about in the Peak District or could (and should) the path be better maintained but still remain a walking challenge? After all, a walking route that is so long, high, exposed and remote is surely challenging enough, regardless of the surface beneath your boots?

The Pennine Way’s creator had a clear view on this. In an article in The Great Outdoors magazine in April 1993, journalist Roly Smith quoted from a conversation that he had had with Tom Stephenson in 1976. Did the scars on the landscape caused mainly by the feet of Pennine Way walkers upset the route’s architect? ‘No, it doesn’t offend me in the slightest,’ Tom replied. ‘The way I see it is that this route has given so much pleasure to so many thousands of people who perhaps otherwise might have not ventured on to the hills. That is what I wanted in the first place, and when I see young people enjoying themselves on the Pennine Way, it makes it seem worthwhile.’

Others have pointed out that the relatively small cost of repairing a stretch of worn footpath, when compared to the cost of building just a few yards of new road, for instance, is a price worth paying, especially when you factor in all the physical and mental benefits associated with taking exercise in the outdoors. A well-used and eroded path is evidence that people are walking it and want to walk it, so the argument goes.

However, 50 years on and attitudes have shifted. It might still be just as important to encourage young people onto the hills, but it’s no longer acceptable to sit by and allow such obvious environmental damage to take place. I suspect, too, that many outdoor users are increasingly aware of their individual impact and uncomfortable with the notion that their own feet are damaging the very same wild and beautiful landscapes that they come to enjoy. And such damage, too. A full condition survey of the Pennine Way in 1989 showed that for the trail south of the M62 (including all of the Peak District), the average worn or trampled width was found to be 40ft; but on the summit plateau of Kinder Scout the trample damage spread up to half a mile wide!

As I left the Peak District, on the newly laid causey paths amid recovering moorland, I really couldn’t see that there was any other option but to repair and renew, even up here where by rights it should be wild and untouched. Indeed, I even felt a faint sense of hope that amid so much wider ecological destruction that we have been wreaking on the planet for the last couple of centuries, we still have it in our gift to step back and, through purpose, ingenuity and hard work, rectify the damage. Either way, the Pennine Way had been pulled back from the brink.

I turned my back on Black Hill and that soggy first day and headed off down the increasingly sunlit Wessenden valley, now on a firm and inviting track past a string of small reservoirs. At the top, by the roadside, was a National Trust interpretation board that explained how this part of Marsden Moor was once known as the Black Moor because it was covered by soot from the surrounding mills and factories. It also featured an old photo of the long-vanished Isle of Skye Hotel, which once stood near this spot, describing how day trippers used to walk up to this lonely moorland pub for ham and egg teas.

The building has long since gone, compulsorily purchased and demolished in the 1950s by a water company for fear that their nearby reservoir water would be polluted; but the pub lives on in the local name for the A635 (the Isle of Skye road), as well as in the name of the annual Four Inns race, for which it is the starting point. This long-running team competition is held around Easter and involves a 45-mile non-stop walking/running route over the rough moors of the Dark Peak, linking four pubs: the Isle of Skye (site of), the Snake Pass Inn, the Old Nags Head at Edale, and the Cat and Fiddle on the moors to the far west. Of course, two of these pubs are on the Pennine Way, and the Snake Pass Inn just off it. The winning teams often take as little as six or seven hours, while others walk through the night and stumble in after 20-plus hours.

At Standedge, more a location than an actual settlement, the route crosses the A62 Huddersfield–Oldham road. In the early years of the Pennine Way, Peter’s Transport Café was a fixture of the hilltop car park, a refreshment stop for lorry drivers and commercial traffic in a pre-M62 era when the trans-Pennine road was much busier. Judging by the accounts of Pennine Way walkers at the time, the café was also a welcome sight for walkers at this remote location; but alas, it burnt down in 1970 and, like the Isle of Skye Hotel, has been consigned to the stuff of memories.

The route was now obvious, direct and mostly firm underfoot, with sections once notorious for their bog tamed by paths of aggregate and slabs. After the cloud and rain of the Peak District, it was now blue skies and sunshine in the South Pennines, bright and incredibly clear. Below me the high-rise buildings of Rochdale looked almost within touching distance, which was both fascinating and slightly unnerving at the same time. Between Crowden and Hebden Bridge, the Pennine hills seem to take a sharp intake of breath: the bare upland spine separating Oldham, Littleborough and Greater Manchester from Huddersfield, Halifax and West Yorkshire to the east is just a few miles wide. It seemed as if the ribbon of undeveloped upland trodden by the Pennine Way was the only thing stopping northern England from turning into one giant retail park or housing estate.

This sense of walking through an almost semi-urban, man-made environment was compounded by a string of small reservoirs. Further afield and off the main Pennine chain, there were a growing number of wind turbines visible. In particular, even as I watched, a large wind farm seemed to be taking shape north of Rochdale, with cranes hoisting gigantic shafts and propellers skywards. But it wasn’t just a visual assault on the senses. The growl of the M62 was first audible at least half an hour away, until eventually the trail dropped down to a cutting below Windy Hill in order to cross the motorway via a high and slender footbridge.

Originally it seems that the plan was for the Pennine Way to cross the M62 slightly east of its present line, following the A672 as it passed underneath the motorway at junction 22; but – the story goes – Transport Minister Ernest Marples (a keen rambler, it was said) insisted that the Pennine Way should have its own footbridge. And not just any off-the-shelf urban design either, but a reinforced concrete three-hinged arch with a span of 220ft, complete with counter-curve and side cantilevers. In other words, the Pennine Way got the sort of elegant and bespoke bridge that the country’s foremost long-distance footpath deserved, which I find very satisfying.

The M62 bridge was completed early in 1971 and Pennine Way walkers were crossing it before the motorway tarmac had even been laid. The Manchester Guardian carried a splendid photo by Robert Smithies of almost 100 ramblers from the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society, who were the first to cross the new bridge on Easter Sunday. The photo was reproduced on the front cover of the Society’s annual report for 1971–72 and shows a line of waving figures stretching right across the new structure, with just bare earth and a couple of diggers below. (Incidentally, when Smithies died in 2006, his obituary in The Guardian described how he enjoyed recounting the background to one of his other Pennine Way pictures – a walker struggling through winter blizzards – which had his editor in raptures. ‘I just drove up the Snake Pass, between Sheffield and Manchester, parked up where the footpath crosses and turned the car heater on,’ he recalled. ‘Then I waited for the first silly sod to materialise out of the snow.’)

Perhaps not surprisingly, this section of the M62 is the highest point of any motorway in England, peaking at 1221ft. And with Scammonden Bridge (the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the UK) and the well-known Stott Hall Farm (where the motorway carriages were built either side of the building, so marooning it in the middle) just to the east, the Pennine Way footbridge is in noteworthy company.

I stood mid bridge and took a photo of the endless stream of traffic 65ft below. A lorry hooted and I waved. I looked down as vehicle after vehicle sped underneath at what seemed to be breakneck speeds. A few drivers glanced up at me, perhaps fearful of what I was about to hurl down on them, or maybe wondering why a fully grown man was spending a July morning taking photos of motorway traffic.

The M62 is just one of numerous trans-Pennine roads that the Pennine Way hops across. Beginning with the Snake Pass and A628 Longdendale highway, there are five other major A roads that cross the Pennines within a few short miles; and at Standedge the railway and canal also go deep beneath the surface. On occasions, walking the Pennine Way seemed like an exercise in geometry, at least at its southern end.

At Blackstone Edge, the modern A58 linking Littleborough and Ripponden is also eclipsed by more historic thoroughfares. For a short distance, the Pennine Way drops downhill on a line of neat dark setts, the smooth grey stones standing out vividly against the grassy Pennine hillside. It was originally a packhorse track that was widened to become a turnpike, although some have claimed that its origins go all the way back to the Romans. It’s certainly a location that has been well documented by travel writers over the centuries, many of whom seemed to find it particularly daunting. As far back as 1696, Celia Fiennes reported that the 1500ft-high hilltop was ‘noted all over England for a dismal high precipice’. Daniel Defoe crossed the Pennines in 1724, referring to them as ‘the Andes of England’, which is perhaps stretching it a bit. He described a tortuous journey in a blizzard over the moors from Rochdale to Halifax, where the wind blew so strong he could hardly open his eyes and snow obliterated the track. Perhaps most oddly of all, it was in mid August.

Already the Pennines were changing and the walk taking on a subtly different character. The trail remained doggedly high but as Greater Manchester finally disappeared from sight and the hilltop obelisk of Stoodley Pike loomed ever closer, the path swung round and the deep green gash of the Calder valley was revealed. I gazed down at Todmorden and at the narrow valley snaking its way eastwards across the Pennines towards Hebden Bridge. A train clattered somewhere deep below and all along the bottom there were mill chimneys and densely packed houses clinging to the lower hillsides, since this was once a highly industrialised place. But they were broken up by extensive clumps of woodland and a lush green patchwork of fields that spread steeply up the hillsides. High pasture could be glimpsed above and there was a distinct feeling that the Pennines were about to raise their game.

A path peeled off to Mankinholes, where the youth hostel, occupying a former 16th-century manor house, has long been a popular stop-over for Pennine Way walkers. Incidentally, if you want to see how a stone-slabbed track beds down over time to become part of the landscape, then look closely at this historic causey path. Also known as the Long Drag, it leads down to the hostel from the moorland top. It was built to provide paid work for men whose families were starving as a result of the so-called Cotton Famine (the severe depression in the Lancashire cotton textile industry in the early 1860s, caused in part by the American Civil War, which halted the regular supply of imported raw cotton bales).

Closer to hand, though, there is a monument that dominates the view: as hilltop edifices go, Stoodley Pike is an impressive sight. Work started on a permanent memorial on this spot in 1814 to mark the defeat of Napoleon. It was promptly stopped when he escaped from the island of Elba and was completed when he was finally finished off after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Unfortunately, in 1854, the whole thing collapsed, supposedly after being weakened by an earlier lightning strike, and a more lasting, solid version was built. Someone also had a sensible afterthought and a lightning conductor was added a few years later. I’d read that it also came under threat of demolition in World War II, when there were concerns that it might be used to guide German bombers. However, it still stands today, a 120ft-high needle-shaped point partly coated in black soot. There’s an outside balcony 40ft up, which offers even better views, but to access it you have to run the gauntlet of an internal spiral staircase covered in broken glass in the near darkness. I fished out my head torch to help me find my way and soon I was leading a merry gang of ramblers and sightseers into the gloom.

If the Peak District grouse moor owners and their gamekeepers were staunchly against allowing ramblers greater access to the Pennine tops, then the water companies who owned large tracts of moorland in the South Pennines were equally resistant. Although the last two reservoirs I had passed, White Holme and Warland, were in fact built primarily to feed the Rochdale Canal, most of the reservoirs in this area were constructed to satisfy the thirst of the industrial communities either side of the Pennines. The water companies claimed that allowing public access to their upland catchment area would lead to contamination and spread disease, and they had acquired and demolished cottages, farmhouses and even, as I’d seen, a pub through compulsory purchase for this reason. There was little hard evidence to back up their claim – after all, livestock often grazed the moors – but in an era before treatment works were widespread, it was a strong and evidently persuasive argument. However, occasionally there was a glimpse of an ulterior motive. In his book Forbidden Land, chronicling the struggle for access to mountain and moorland, Tom Stephenson quoted the British Waterworks Association’s opposition to the Access to Mountains Bill 1939: ‘Among their general objections they included “the tendency of such areas (ie mountains and moorlands) to become a resort for undesirable characters among whom immorality and licentiousness is rife”. ’

In the period between the two World Wars, frustrated ramblers and access campaigners looked for ways to overcome these seemingly implacable obstacles. There had been the rallies and trespasses, of course, most publicly on Kinder Scout, where the mass trespass had made national headlines and highlighted the woeful lack of access to the Peak District’s moorlands. But for one journalist, walker and activist, there was another ploy.

Tom Stephenson was the ‘open-air correspondent’ for the popular Daily Herald national newspaper. He wrote a now famous, double-page feature entitled ‘Wanted – A Long Green Trail’, which appeared in the newspaper on 22 June 1935. This was the first time that an idea for a walking route the length of the Pennines had been properly aired. Reading the article today, it seems likely that Tom and probably others had been considering such a route for a while. As my own walk progressed, I would learn much more about the self-effacing and remarkable Tom Stephenson, creator of the Pennine Way and tireless access campaigner.

The spur for Tom’s article was a letter that the paper had received from two American girls asking for advice about a ‘tramping holiday’ in England. Tom explained to readers that the Appalachian Trail and John Muir Trail stretched thousands of miles through the girls’ homeland but that England had nothing to compare. Instead, despite the popularity of walking in England, our own hills were ringed with what he called ‘wooden liars’ – notices declaring that the land was strictly private and that trespassers would be prosecuted. He invited the reader to consider how, little more than a century before, people were walking unhindered along old Roman roads, pilgrimage routes, shepherds’ trods and drove roads, criss-crossing the hills for a variety of purposes, but now many of these routes had been lost and access closed off. Ramblers might pour into the likes of the Peak District every Sunday to enjoy good open-air recreation, but their freedom to roam the hills and moors was severely curbed. The answer, Tom artfully suggested, was ‘something akin to the Appalachian Trail – a Pennine Way from the Peak to the Cheviots’.

Walking a long distance for recreation and fun, as opposed to doing it for work, a religious pilgrimage or because you had no other transport, was something that had actually begun in continental Europe some years before. As Colin Speakman explains in his 2011 book Walk!, the Westweg (West Way) had been developed in the Black Forest of Germany in 1900 by the Black Forest Society, and before long other popular trails emerged and similar networks grew in places like the Vosges. Young Germans (who called themselves Wandervögel or ‘wandering birds’) poured out of the cities to explore the countryside. They began to enjoy a growing and ever more intricate system of marked paths linking one walkers’ hostel to another, the paths often depicted by no more than simple splashes of paint on a tree trunk or rock.

This idea of purposefully creating a waymarked long-distance walking route soon spread to Sweden, then crossed the Atlantic to America, where the 265-mile Long Trail was established in Vermont, stretching from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. However, the Appalachian Way (or Trail), completed in 1937, was the first long-distance path that really captured the national imagination and whose scope (2100 miles from Georgia to Maine) matched the ambition and grandeur of the United States.

While recognising the achievement, Tom Stephenson was keen to ensure a sense of proportion for any such route along the Pennines. In his Daily Herald article, he painted a picture of how the Pennine Way might look: ‘This need be no Euclidean line, but a meandering way deviating as needs be to include the best of that long range of moor and fell; no concrete or asphalt track, but just 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.’

He outlined a likely course, which with the exception of Boulsworth Hill and Pendle Hill was uncannily like the final agreed route, and in a nod to the prevailing royal jubilee he suggested it could be called the Jubilee Way or Georgian Path. The name was clearly of less importance than the overriding desire to secure a public foothold in these forbidden lands. The idea of the Pennine Way had arrived.