the day had only reached Kinder Low. He camped below the summit, but unfortunately his horse bolted during the night and after that he packed it all in.’
Perhaps the strangest sight, from the early 1970s, was a man that Gordon encountered walking down Grindsbrook Clough who said he was finishing his Pennine Way walk from north to south tossing a caber the whole way. ‘He was wearing a kilt but had a proper rucksack and boots,’ recalled Gordon. ‘He seemed entirely normal and rational, except for the fact that every few strides he was heaving a small telegraph pole in front of him and said he had been doing that all the way from Scotland.’
Beyond the Snake Pass is Bleaklow, a huge, lofty morass of wet and inhospitable moorland that is every bit as inviting as its name. Dutchman Gerard de Waal, writing about his Pennine Way walk in the 1980s, describes Bleaklow as an ‘indeterminate wilderness of peatbogs’ and tells of how he and his companion frequently became submerged up to their waists. For such an unpleasant and presumably hair-raising experience, his description of how they extricated themselves is remarkably composed and matter of fact. ‘When it happened – it is always unexpected – we kept calm. We found, by experimenting, that you should not try to withdraw one leg at a time because the full body weight applied on the other leg will make you sink further. Another real danger is that suction will remove your boot, leaving you in a terrible predicament. The practical answer was to bend our bodies forward until they were supported by the ground. And, like members of the Amphibia, we then crawled out of the peat inch by inch, leaving the burbling ooze to settle.’
I shuddered at the thought of immersion, to any depth, in this cold black quagmire, but luckily conditions have improved since then. Still, Bleaklow’s upper slopes were wreathed in dark and threatening clouds and the omens were not good that afternoon. The long and winding path made its way over a sandy depression and up into the mist, then it started raining again. There was absolutely nothing to see – no views, no wildlife, no people. Bleaklow Head looked like something out of a 1970s horror film; if a lumbering creature had emerged from behind a rock or jumped out of a swampy hole, I wouldn’t have been surprised. The summit was marked by a pile of stones with a long pole crudely sticking out of its top, as though someone had been hastily buried on a battlefield. I think it was more by luck than by judgement that I found my way off the top of the hill. I bumped into a father and his dejected-looking son, who were also trying to escape, and as we exchanged pleasantries it began to really bucket down. When the austere grey shapes of Longdendale emerged from the gloom below, I was relieved. Day 1 on the Pennine Way wasn’t meant to be like this, but at least it was almost over.
A couple of hours later, in dry clothes and with a hot cup of tea clasped in my hands, I sat chatting to my B&B hosts at the Old House above Rhodeswood Reservoir. With the closure of Crowden Youth Hostel to individuals a few years ago (group bookings only now), their establishment is one of the few options left for Pennine Way walkers looking for a roof over their head in this sparsely populated valley. For 17 years, Joanne and her husband James have run a mix of guest house, bunkhouse and café rolled into one, with Pennine Way walkers making up 90 per cent of their overnight customers. So, bearing in mind that they’re at the end of most people’s first day from Edale, what state are most walkers in when they cross their threshold? Do they get many people wanting to give up? ‘Yes, there’s some that tell us they’ve had enough,’ replied James. ‘They say “I can’t do another 260 miles of that”, but I tell them you’ve walked 15 miles from Edale today, then it’s 12 miles to Standedge tomorrow – take it each day at a time, it gets much easier!’ He paused for a moment and lowered his voice. ‘Of course it doesn’t, really, but you have to encourage them.’
Even for those that have reached Crowden without mishap, the end of day 1 is a time for reappraising your kit list, as James knows only too well. ‘The weight of your pack is absolutely vital and people tend to set off carrying far too much. We have literally bin bags full of gear that walkers have left here, including tents, sleeping bags, clothes, camping stoves – you name it. I make them put their names on the bags and say if they don’t come back and claim them by the end of the year they’re all going to the charity shops in Glossop.’
Then there are those walkers who, to put it mildly, have drastically underestimated the Pennine Way. ‘There was the American man who set off from Edale in patent leather shoes. He made it as far as the Snake Pass but chartered a taxi the rest of the way to us,’ said James. ‘Another Pennine Way walker who was booked in for the night rang me on his mobile and said he was lost. I asked him to describe the view, what he could see, so I could try and work out where he was. He said he couldn’t see anything because he was in a wood. I was a bit puzzled, but I supposed he was already down among the trees of Longdendale. It turned out he had got completely disorientated on Bleaklow and had ended up walking in the opposite direction back into the Ashop valley. He still made it to us, mind you, and carried on the next morning.’
Of course, plenty of Pennine Way walkers have no problems on the opening day – Kinder Scout and Bleaklow in favourable conditions offer invigorating walking – and indeed, some particularly fit and determined individuals stride on well beyond Crowden. But, James confided, what really riles him are the walkers who have an unrealistic expectation of the Pennine Way and complain that the trail is not properly maintained. ‘They imagine the Pennine Way is a clearly defined, well-walked trail and so they moan when they find there aren’t signposts all over Bleaklow showing them where to go. They seem to expect a surfaced path the whole length, so they won’t get lost. One party who got lost blamed it on the fact that the trail of orange peel they were following just stopped in the middle of the moor. Lots of people don’t seem to be able to read a map properly or use a compass, even though they’re often carrying them!’
James looked ruefully out of the window at the late afternoon drizzle and shook his head. ‘They read some online diary of a bloke who’s yomped it over from Edale in five hours and then are surprised when it takes them over eight and they’re utterly exhausted.’
My conversation with James was given added poignancy by the arrival of two other Pennine Way guests that night. They traipsed in wearily and wetly some time after 7pm, having taken the best part of nine hours to cover the 15 miles from Edale. Both in their 60s and evidently ill-equipped for a long-distance walk, the two men had got lost on Bleaklow and had walked half way to Glossop before working out where they were.
Later on, in the pub at Padfield, I gently tried to coax more of their story out of them. How, for instance, had they been navigating? It turned out that one had been using a mapping program on a small hand-held electronic device. Some sort of GPS? No, just a free download from a website; but the rain had got into it and apparently the thing hadn’t loaded properly anyway. What about a guidebook? Surely they had a Pennine Way guidebook between them? The second man fished a small, rather soggy hardback volume out of his pocket and passed it to me. It was Wainwright’s Pennine Way Companion, the once popular if somewhat idiosyncratic guide to the trail written by the famous fellwanderer just three years after the trail was officially opened. Since the 1990s, the book had been revised several times to take account of route changes, new paved sections and so on. I flicked to the front to check which of the recent versions they were using and was astounded to see that it was an original copy, published in 1968. They had been navigating using out-of-date maps and an uncorrected route description that was almost as old as me. I didn’t see them at breakfast the next day and learnt later that they had given up that morning.
It is very easy to chuckle at people who set out in the wrong footwear, or to disapprove of those who can’t use a compass properly and who get hopelessly lost on the moors, but at some point or other most of us have been out of our comfort zone in the great outdoors. Arguably, the only way to achieve and develop as an individual is to push yourself to the very edge and test the limit of your ability. For me, it’s summed up by a slogan that used to adorn the front cover of the Sheffield Clarion Ramblers magazine: ‘The man who never was lost, never went very far’.
Of the many Pennine Way guidebooks
