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.
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HEBDEN
