style="font-size:15px;"> It’s useful to have some basic understanding of the rocks that underpin the Pennines, in order to grasp how it’s translated on the surface and what that means for the walker in terms of visible scenery and likely conditions underfoot. Until now, I had been walking largely on gritstone and shale, over rounded moorland covered by thin, harsh, acidic soils, water-retaining peat and blanket bog, an environment that supports only a few plant species. Soon I would switch to limestone, a light and permeable rock created by the deposits in a shallow sea 300 million years before. In a limestone environment, most of the surface water disappears underground and the thin, turf-covered soil is punctured by cliffs and rocky scars. A few prominent peaks, such as Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough, stand proud due to their harder caps of millstone grit. Further north, a volcanic injection of dolerite into the rock strata created the distinctive Whin Sill, today visible as a highly resistant dark rock that forms the crags of High Cup Nick, the waterfalls of Upper Teesdale and the high points of Hadrian’s Wall. In the far north are the older Cheviot Hills, with their hard and resistant granite core, which also owe their height and shape to volcanic activity.
All that was to come. For now, the Pennine Way dropped steadily towards the leafy fields around Thornton-in-Craven and, for the next few miles, traversed a landscape of very small grassy hills known as drumlins, formed out of glacial deposits. A waymarked path peeled off to the left heading for Earby, a mile and a half off the route and an unwarranted diversion for Pennine Way walkers if it wasn’t for the presence of a small youth hostel.
One of the enduring charms of Pennine Way youth hostels is their sheer variety. In contrast to the busy modern hostels at Edale, Malham and Hadrian’s Wall, you also get the likes of Earby, located in the back streets of a former mill town between Burnley and Skipton. The 22-bed, self-catering hostel is a modest and unremarkable terraced cottage and the sole reason it’s a hostel is that it’s the former home of Katharine Bruce Glasier. She was a Quaker and early campaigner for women’s rights, co-founder of the Independent Labour Party, together with Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, and altogether a remarkable all-round social reformer. After her death, the house was bought with donations to a memorial fund and presented to the YHA in 1958. When the hostel was threatened with closure, Pendle Borough Council stepped in to save the property, then leased it back to the YHA. It’s typical, quirky Pennine Way.
This short westward extension to Earby might have had a precedent, back in the days when the Pennine Way was simply a provisional line on a map. The original plan was for the Pennine Way to reach Malham by a slightly more westerly route, via Widdop Cross and Wycoller. The grouse moors around here were, like those of the Peak District, among the most fiercely guarded in the Pennines in the 1930s; and in fact it wasn’t until the Open Access legislation of 2000 that you could legally access much of Boulsworth Hill for the first time. This was undoubtedly in the mind of Tom Stephenson when the idea for a continuous walking trail the length of the Pennines was first aired in his ‘long green trail’ article. What could be done to unlock these private moors so that the public could walk them in freedom?
Tom was born in Chorley in 1893 and spent his early years at Whalley, just a few miles away from where I was standing, on the far side of Pendle Hill. He stayed in full-time education until the age of 13, which was quite rare for a working-class Lancashire lad in those days, then began work in textile printing. Despite the (illegal) 66-hour week, he managed to escape the calico factory and, on the first Saturday after starting work, climbed Pendle Hill. It was a transformative experience and one that inspired his lifelong love of walking and the countryside. In his memoirs, Forbidden Land, he wrote: ‘Across the valley were the Bowland Fells; and away to the north Ingleborough, Pen-y-ghent and the other Pennine heights, all snow-covered, stood out sharp and clear in the frosty air. That vision started me rambling, and in the next sixty years took me time and again up and down the Pennines and farther afield.’
In a later conversation with Gerard de Waal, he went further: ‘That’s where the Pennine Way was born. I was just 13 years old when I climbed Pendle Hill. I can remember standing on the top and thinking how I wanted to climb each and every one of the hills I could see.’
Despite the long working hours, Tom regularly walked four miles to Clitheroe library to continue his reading; then, after scraping together 30 shillings, he bought an old bike so he could complete a 16-mile round cycle ride to Burnley for night classes. Eventually, after much hard studying, he won one of only two scholarship places to study geology at the Royal College of Science (now Imperial College) in London. What seemed a promising future was scuppered by the intervention of World War I. Tom, already an activist in the growing Labour movement, declared himself a pacifist and was initially given an exemption; but later he was arrested, court-martialled and sentenced to 12 months’ hard labour at Wormwood Scrubs, followed by a further term at Northallerton jail.
Upon release, he continued his political activity, any chance of resuming his studies now gone. Initially he returned to printing, but before long began to develop a successful career in journalism, writing about walking and the countryside and repeatedly pressing the case for greater access to the Pennine hills. By the early 1930s, he was reaching a national audience, first as editor of the TUC-controlled Hiker and Camper magazine, then via his regular contributions to the widely read Daily Herald newspaper. The editor gave him more or less free rein to press the ramblers’ cause, and this was the platform that allowed him to conjure up the idea of a long green trail.
Many years later, when the Pennine Way was officially opened, Tom was quoted as saying that, when he wrote the famous 1935 article, he never imagined the Pennine Way would ever be realised and that he was taken aback at the public’s enthusiastic response. Perhaps he was being typically modest, but immediately following publication of the article, he and fellow access campaigner Edwin Royce were persuaded to persevere with the idea by T (Thomas) Arthur Leonard, another of the great campaigners of the time, who among other things co-founded the Co-operative Holidays Association.
So, three years after the article appeared, in February 1938, a Pennine Way Conference was held at Hope, in the Peak District, in a guest house run by the Workers Travel Association. The aims were to consider the proposal in more detail with like-minded people and to decide what to do next. Among the invitees were ramblers’ federations, YHA groups and footpath preservation societies. Both the invitation and the full minutes are reproduced in Chris Sainty’s 2014 guidebook The Pennine Way and are available to view in the Ramblers’ Association records held at the London Metropolitan Archives. They make fascinating reading.
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