Читать книгу Great Mountain Days in the Pennines - Terry Marsh - Страница 9

PREFACE

Arriving at the summit of Great Whernside (Walk 28)

During the late 1980s, still cutting my writer’s teeth, I braved the world of the Pennines to work on The Pennine Mountains. It was an eye-opening experience – one that led me into gelatinous peaty folds and across high, airy summits. Raised in industrial Lancashire, what little I knew of the Pennines was to my mind tarred with the same brush of bleak grimness as the towns and villages gathered among the Pennine landscapes.

I soon came to realise that the stereotypical portrait was a chimera, an unfounded legend that betrayed the beauty that I came to discover here. Some years later I visited again, preparing another guide for walkers, but in the meantime had learned how to appreciate these softer, more moulded landscapes, and had realised that absence of the crags that frequent the Lake District and parts of Snowdonia didn’t have to mean an absence of a perfect walkers’ domain.

The walks in this book are very much personal favourites. There are, of course, the summit routes that one might expect to find, but I’ve introduced a few that are much less well known. Together they give a taste of the Pennines that should appeal to everyone, and encourage all to try a few new flavours.

Terry Marsh, 2013

Pen-y-ghent from the descent to Stainforth (Walk 22)