rather bare and bleak uplands are no match for the preceding Peak District or for the Yorkshire Dales that follow; but for many artistic types, and evidently some Pennine Way walkers, this very emptiness gives the South Pennines a special character. It’s as if the sheer desolation fires the imagination and the wide and rather featureless horizons unlock some creative spark. As Ted Hughes observed in his poem ‘Pennines in April’: ‘Now, measuring the miles of silence/Your eye takes the strain’.
There’s certainly something about these stark and deserted moors that touches you. Already I felt it, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, let alone had the eloquence of Emily Brontë or Ted Hughes to express it. For 50 years, the Pennine Way has shone a light on our relationship with high and open country, on our basic need to have access to natural and uncluttered spaces where we can be challenged like this. It doesn’t matter whether we walk the Pennine Way for a fortnight, a day or even just an hour or so. Even up here, sandwiched rather ingloriously between Burnley and Bradford and where the endless slopes of heather and acidic grasses can sometimes verge on the drab, this path is our portal to another world. It’s an interface between people and landscape, and a reminder that there are other things in life besides email, shopping and celebrities.
I wasn’t finished with the Brontës quite yet. Dropping down sharply to Ponden Reservoir, I paused to admire Ponden Hall, a 17th-century farmhouse that’s reputed to be the Thrushcross Grange of Wuthering Heights. After climbing back up even more steeply, I strode out across Ickornshaw Moor and realised I really was on my own. There was absolutely no one around. A skylark trilled somewhere above me; in the far distance, a faint whine could have been a chainsaw; but otherwise there was just me and an awful lot of silent and rather featureless moorland. I stopped to have a break, resting my back against a stone wall and staring out in an unfocused way across the open slopes. Just an hour before, the moorland had been positively teeming with life above Haworth, and yet here, in the middle of July, the Pennines seemed utterly empty. The same had been true this morning around Walshaw Dean Reservoirs. It might not be the pristine wilderness experience but in these pockets of the unfashionable lower Pennines there were snatches of solitude that I hadn’t really expected.
Again, returning to Marion Shoard’s article in The Rambler magazine, I found that Tom Stephenson had summed it up well: ‘There’s a silence that you can almost hear. The wind in the different kinds of vegetation: you hear that in different tones – a whisper or a rustle on the ground, the heather and so on. There’s the sound of a curlew, the plovers, the little plaintive peep peep, and the snipe drumming in season. They’re all part of the attraction. Then there’s the different shades in the vegetation: grey-green, grey in winter with the heather sooty black. It’s surprising what different tones you get in the landscape. I like the moors at all times of year. The Pennine moors are even more colourful in winter than in summer.’
I spent the night at Cowling, an untouristy Pennine village just off the trail on the A6068. There seemed to be an unending stream of traffic heading from Burnley to Keighley, or Keighley to Burnley, including huge wagons that made the pavements shudder. My B&B was tucked away just off the main street, a short terraced row where Susan and Sandy couldn’t have done any more to make a footsore Pennine Way traveller more welcome. As soon as I arrived, I was ushered through the kitchen and sat down in the tiny back conservatory amid the geraniums and wellies, a cup of tea and slice of home-made lemon drizzle cake thrust into my hands whether I liked it or not. Where had I walked from? How did I feel? What was the weather like? Susan, in particular, was a keen rambler herself and empathy flowed in waves. Cowling might not have been the prettiest place I stayed in, but the welcome at Woodland House was certainly among the warmest.
A couple of hours after I arrived, another Pennine Way walker plodded wearily through the door. I’d already encountered Barry several times on the trail since Edale, including amid the murk of Kinder Scout on day 1; but although our walking schedules were overlapping, we hadn’t had much chance to talk and swap stories. Middle-aged and single, average height with thinning dark hair and a rounded face that easily burst into a smile, Barry was a paramedic from south London and was looking, he said, to get away from it all for a while. He was affable and interesting, but he was also exhausted and wanted an early night. Judging by his limp, he was also suffering with from sore feet, so we agreed to set out together the next day.
The following morning, as I prepared to go down to breakfast, there was a distinctive smell in the house, an almost medicinal odour that seemed faintly familiar. I presumed Susan had been cleaning the kitchen or unblocking the drains. Barry was already seated at the breakfast table, a sheepish grin on his face. As the odd smell intensified, he pushed back his chair, unclipped his sandals and raised his bare feet. Ugly great blisters covered almost all of his toes and one of his heels in great weals, the like of which I’d only seen in photos in first-aid books. Barry had evidently been treating the blisters with an antiseptic powder, and presumably before that they had been liberally sprayed with some sort of industrial-strength solution – hence the all-pervading smell throughout the house. It awakened dim and not altogether comforting memories of bathrooms and communal changing rooms from my youth. Susan came in with plates of bacon and eggs and promptly went back out. I told him to put his revolting feet away and we tucked into breakfast.
So how on earth had he managed to get this far with such debilitating injuries? Didn’t they hurt? He explained, with a wink, that he had a ‘well-stocked’ first-aid kit, by which I think he meant that there were perks to being a paramedic. He mentioned the strong painkillers that he’d been taking since day 1, plus the various foot ointments, lotions and second-skin dressings that now adorned his beleaguered digits. I got the impression that his first-aid kit not only accounted for a significant proportion of his rucksack weight but also probably contained items that were kept under lock and key in most dispensaries. When we finished breakfast, I asked to look again at his bare feet, oddly fascinated that blisters could appear in such dramatic shapes and sizes, one of them spanning several toes, and wondering at what point the patient should be hospitalised. My feet, in comparison, were blister-free and in decent shape. I took a couple of close-up photos, which made Barry hoot with laughter and Susan, who had come in to clear the table, scuttle back to the kitchen once more. Looking back at those photos afterwards, I marvelled at how he carried on. The pain might have been dulled by pills and the toes cushioned with artificial-skin dressings, but it clearly still hurt. Evidently grit and determination count for much on the Pennine Way.
However, the emergency treatment seemed to be working, at least for now, because when we set off together Barry kept up a reasonable pace with only the trace of a limp. As we made our way slowly through the fields and along the lanes, I gently began to coax his story out of him and understand more about his motivation for walking the Pennine Way. It transpired that he’d fairly recently broken up with his long-time partner, and acrimoniously too, so I immediately assumed that plunging off head first into something as different and extreme as the Pennine Way would provide a welcome distraction and perhaps a chance to recover some self-esteem. But Barry didn’t labour the point and I sensed there was more to it than that. In conversation over the next few miles with this sociable, gentle man, one or two more pieces of the jigsaw emerged and slotted into place. As we stood above Lothersdale and gazed down at the village tucked away in the fold of the hills, and to the moors peeping over the horizon, he spoke about how all he could see from the window of his town centre flat was the side of another house. He told me how, as a paramedic for the last few years, he was regularly called out to people our own age who, through drink, drugs, smoking or obesity, were killing themselves before his eyes. Then when one of his own close friends, an ostensibly healthy 40-something, suddenly dropped down dead, it really shook him. ‘I told myself, you have to live life, make the most of this one chance you’ve got. But when I told my daughter I was going off to walk the Pennine Way she said I must be mad, at my age!’ He chuckled, but with a look of resolve.
At Lothersdale, Barry decided he would take a breather. Since I was keen to press on, we said our goodbyes and I climbed up to the bumpy open top of Pinhaw Beacon. Suddenly new vistas were revealed as the ground fell sharply away to the lush green fields of the
