to stop and visit. The idea came from Dave Brooks, co-director of Hebden Bridge Hostel. When he walked the Pennine Way in 2012, it occurred to him that trailwalkers were missing out by not entering Hebden Bridge or nearby Heptonstall. Dave and the local walkers’ action group worked together to create a waymarked route from Callis Wood to the town centre, then up to Heptonstall to rejoin the Pennine Way near Hebble Hole. And what, I asked him, about those purists who say it’s not the official route? ‘Well, what about the Bowes Loop?’ replied Dave. ‘If Bowes can have a Loop, then so can Hebden Bridge.’
The Bowes Loop, much further along the path, is an alternative section of the trail via the County Durham village of Bowes. It was introduced early on, to offer more accommodation choices, but ironically there are few places to stay in Bowes these days so the Loop has lost much of its original purpose.
I do like what the enterprising folk of Hebden Bridge have done and I like the idea that the Pennine Way can evolve and improve, offering future walkers more choice and a better experience. I also like the fact that Dave proudly displays a large map and photos of his own Pennine Way walk in the entrance of the hostel. This comfortable and welcoming independent hostel adjoins the Birchcliffe Centre, a former Baptist Chapel that is now the base for a lively arts and heritage charity called Pennine Heritage (which Dave is also involved in). The charity is devoted to preserving and promoting the landscapes of the South Pennines, and its local oral history recordings and photographic collections include, most fittingly, archive material from the Pennine Way Council (which later became the Pennine Way Association).
Some short but lung-busting climbs were needed to finally exit the Calder valley and leave the colourful denizens of Hebden Bridge behind. The noise and bustle far below fell silent as I steadily made my way up across sloping pasture and deserted lanes towards the expanse of Heptonstall Moor.
Before I climbed the last field, I took a breather and veered off to visit Highgate Farm, just off the route. This is the site of a small but legendary shop known as May’s Aladdin’s Cave. It all began 35 years ago when farmer’s wife May Stocks was asked by some passing Pennine Way walkers if she could spare any fresh milk or eggs for their breakfast. This kept happening, so she asked what else they needed and, as her daughter-in-law told me across the counter, it just grew and grew. The converted stable building is crammed full of everything Pennine Way walkers could possibly want – hence the Aladdin’s Cave tag – from toiletries and newspapers to tinned food and cold pies, fresh fruit and home-made cakes to ice creams, bottled beer, and spare hats and socks. There’s a deli counter, fresh sandwiches and jars of sweets.
‘We stock what walkers ask for,’ I was told. ‘Plasters, talc and gas canisters seem to be popular.’ She went on to explain that it has become a community shop for the residents of Higher Colden, and as I stood there agonising between a giant square of flapjack and a tempting sticky bun, there was a regular stream of local people popping in for this and that, or simply to chat. Although Pennine Way walkers are no longer the shop’s mainstay, they remain important to May, a sprightly 76-year-old who still has a regular newspaper delivery round. You can camp for free in the field by the farm, and over the years she has dried boots, sown broken rucksack straps and offered moral encouragement to those wearying of Calderdale’s steep slopes. In the end I bought the enormous square of chocolate-covered flapjack, thick and rich and very filling. It kept me going till teatime.
I finally reached the top of the slope and stepped out onto the high open ground. Ahead of me, the hills broadened out and there was quite a lot of nothing. By this I mean that there were some small, far-off reservoirs, a few farms and clumps of trees, but above all a lot of open pasture and moorland. It felt like a landscape emptying out – but in a nice way – as if the Pennine landscape was pushing back its shoulders after all that built-up stuff and reasserting its more natural self (not that reservoirs and grouse moors are all that natural). I was struck, in particular, by the incredibly open vistas, how the yawning moorland rolled away, one gentle ridge after another. It wasn’t a dramatic landscape in the conventional sense of the word and there were, for instance, no plunging gorges or soaring peaks that grabbed your attention, but the general wash of this bare Pennine canvas was oddly mesmerising. I went back to the words of Tom Stephenson, a man so attuned to the hills of northern England, to see whether he could explain the effect of these moors on the senses. In an interview with Marion Shoard in 1977 (reproduced in The Rambler magazine of February/March 1989), he said: ‘You get the idea of a flat skyline, but you’re up and down all the time. It’s that attraction of them: the long lines, the level lines in the landscape characteristic of a sort of table with a sharp nose … you get the effect of plains receding as far as you can see, as one range of moorland succeeds another. That gives you a great sense of distance you wouldn’t get in the Lake District because you have a mountain interrupting your view in one direction or other.’
What was especially noticeable was the lack of people. A solitary runner, a post van and a couple of tractors were the sum total of life for the best part of two hours that morning, as I made my way by path and lane via Graining Water and the trio of Walshaw Dean Reservoirs. I paused on the far side of the middle one to read some large and evidently VERY IMPORTANT public notices. Huge boards, in vivid colours, shouted warnings at me that cold water kills, bathing was prohibited and there was a danger of falling along the bywater channel. I didn’t even know what a bywater channel was, but walking along it sounded risky. In fact, I found out that it was simply an artificial trench running alongside the main reservoir to carry away excess water, and I found this out because the Pennine Way now ran beside it.
Beyond the reservoirs, the path took to slabs as it gradually made its way up to the top of the hill. However, unlike some of the newer paved routes that I’d been treading over the last couple of days, this one was laid as long ago as 1989 by Calderdale Countryside Service and it was interesting to see how well it had bedded down, with vegetation fringing the stones all the way along. New moorland vistas now opened up ahead, with Haworth and Keighley over to the right. But the main attraction was much closer to home. The trail descended to a ruined building, variously called Top Withins, Top Withens or simply Withins. The main part of what was evidently once a small, simple dwelling was roofless and sat in isolation next to a couple of trees towards the top of the moors. In any other situation this would be just another neglected and unremarkable old building, slowly decaying year by year; except here small knots of people all over the hillside were making a beeline for it, following waymarked paths from Haworth that even included signposts in Japanese.
A prominent plaque fixed to one of the walls explained that the building was associated with the Earnshaw home described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights. Erected by the Brontë Society in 1964, the plaque and its carefully chosen wording interested me as much as the dilapidated building. It was a masterclass in non-committal. ‘The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described. But the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.’ The notice finishes with the slightly irritable comment: ‘This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries’. You can almost hear the author of the notice sighing.
There wasn’t too much to see and I felt slightly out of place among couples in white trainers and sunglasses. I wondered what they expected to find there, and whether they felt their three-mile trek across the moors from Haworth was worth it. I did consider making the reverse trip, perhaps nosing round the Parsonage Museum for an hour; but the sun was shining and I thought I’d really rather be up on the moors on my own than jostling with holiday crowds in a busy tourist village.
The last 20 miles or so had reminded me how the South Pennines have a surprisingly rich literary association. Near the path back at Standedge there had been a memorial to Ammon Wrigley, a local poet from Saddleworth, little known today but in the early 1900s he had a large and enthusiastic following. The Calder valley, and in particular Mytholmroyd and Heptonstall, was the stomping ground of the young Ted Hughes, whose poetry captures the sparse Pennine landscape in much the same way that the Brontë sisters evoked the mood of the windswept moors a century earlier. As I’d noted a
