one of the most thought-provoking was a short piece by Dr A Smith and Mr M Imrie in the 1985 Pennine Way Booking Bureau booklet, published by the Youth Hostels Association (YHA). The two men had successfully completed the Pennine Way in 1984, but both were interested in the effect that it had on their bodies and minds, even though one was already a marathon runner. The back story lay partly in the fact that YHA wardens along the Pennine Way were concerned about the number of walkers who didn’t complete the trail because they were fundamentally ill-equipped and ill-prepared. At the time, it was claimed that around a third of walkers attempting the Pennine Way, or at least a third of those staying in youth hostels, gave up, a figure that showed no sign of improving. (A report by the Pennine Way Management Project in 1991 went even further: ‘Unsubstantiated opinion suggests a drop-out rate of 70 per cent at the end of the second day, around Standedge to Mankinholes, this massive defeat being the result of exertions on the first two most strenuous and demanding days of the entire expedition.’)
In their fascinating and thoughtful article, called ‘How to complete the Pennine Way’, the two scientists said that amid all the advice on what boots or equipment a prospective Pennine Way walker needed, there was virtually nothing on the main reason for walkers giving up – ‘body chemistry’. The article explained how the first few days on the Pennine Way prove an enormous shock to the system for most people. ‘The normal store of muscle glycogen and free blood sugar is used up, giving rise to hypoglycaemia (shortage of blood sugar),’ they explained. They went on say that despite the consumption of sweets and energy bars the body will start to access its fat store, but unless you are a regular athlete this turning of fat into sucrose will be a slow and inefficient process to start with. ‘You will feel hungry, tired and depressed due to a low blood sugar level. The conversion of food into mechanical energy is inefficient, the majority turning into heat. The body then counters heat by sweating. Sweat is a mixture of water and body salts, mainly sodium chloride. Loss of body liquids and salts can result in partial dehydration leaving you weak and shaking. Most of the essential B vitamins are water-soluble and excessive sweating can result in a temporary deficiency. Such deficiencies will result in a reduced efficiency in converting fat into energy as well as producing depression, irritability, diarrhoea, etc.’
The authors suggested a number of ways to counter these problems, including taking vitamin B supplements, using salt on your food and taking a supply of ripe oranges for liquid and sucrose/energy (but not too many as they can act as a laxative!). And there were four additional tips: take a companion; avoid thinking of the days ahead and concentrate on tonight’s objective; pack a good pair of trainers so you can switch from your boots on drier ground or if blisters develop; and use Vaseline on sore patches on your feet in conjunction with stretchy plasters.
The article was written over 30 years ago but the message is still relevant: walking 268 miles in less than three weeks across rough ground in all weathers is an extreme and in most cases unique challenge to the human body, so it pays to do more than simply program the GPS and buy a decent pair of boots by way of preparation.
Mike Imrie went on to walk the Pennine Way a dozen times and for a decade was membership secretary of the Pennine Way Association, so it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about the art of completing a long-distance challenge on foot. He wrote an equally interesting follow-up article (called ‘Health Revisited’), this time for the Pennine Way Association’s newsletter in spring 1995, in which he looked at how to achieve the right balance of vitamins and minerals in a long-distance walker’s body (in particular, B vitamin complex and vitamin C). As befits a nuclear scientist, it was typically well researched and extremely comprehensive and is worth tracking down to read in full.
However, for northbound walkers contemplating day 2, he and Dr Smith had some crumbs of comfort. They suggest that if you set off from Edale and make it as far as Malham, then your body will have largely adapted to the new regime and you should have overcome any initial problems. And they offer this concluding observation: ‘If you complete the walk despite suffering you will be twice the person you were. If you give up you will be diminished. Good luck!’
2
CROWDEN – HEBDEN BRIDGE
Repairing the green trail
Longdendale wasn’t exactly alluring the following day, murky and uniformly grey with moisture heavy in the air. It was one of those mornings, I told myself, where you simply have to get up and get going without too much thought in between. I crossed a former railway line that now forms part of the east–west Trans Pennine Trail, a coast-to-coast walking and cycling route from Southport, near Liverpool, to Hornsea, beyond Hull. It was as deserted as the lifeless reservoir below, one of five (Bottoms, Valehouse, Rhodeswood, Torside and Woodhead) that occupy almost the entire valley floor. The only activity seemed to be on the far side, where an endless stream of vans and articulated lorries were growling their way along the A628, which links Manchester and the M1 via the high and bleak Woodhead Pass.
Once clear of Longdendale, I slithered up the damp hillside into the cloud above Laddow Rocks. The sodden undergrowth made short work of my dry trousers. I waded through a stream where the slab bridge had partly collapsed and tried to negotiate several patches of spongy ground and bog, before finally embarking on a paved section that marked the long, gradual ascent of Black Hill. My feet were sodden and squelching and all I could see was wet, lifeless moorland. It was not a great start to day 2.
I plodded on for a bit, then decided to call a halt and maybe cheer myself up with a chocolate bar that had been earmarked for a likely afternoon treat to head off flagging energy levels; but much to my surprise I realised I was nearly at the top of Black Hill. I stopped by the trig point and, as I poured a cup of coffee from my flask, the thinning clouds finally parted and a little watery sun shone through. This was better. I celebrated by eating some chocolate anyway; and my spirits were raised further by a short but good-natured chat with a passing walker, a local man, who told me that in his opinion Black Hill was a fine place and unfairly treated by the walking guidebooks.
Mind you, by all accounts, Black Hill’s bad press was once well deserved. Writing in 1968 in his Pennine Way Companion, Alfred Wainwright described the summit as a ‘desolate and hopeless quagmire’ where the peat was ‘naked and unashamed’. The vegetation had been completely eroded so that the trig point was marooned in a soft bed of glutinous peat and only survived because it was built on a small island called Soldiers’ Lump (named after the army engineers who originally surveyed the hill). To physically reach it entailed a dirty and potentially dangerous adventure, as Wainwright himself found out when he became completely stuck in the peat bog. He was rescued by the efforts of his walking friend and a passing national park warden who managed to pull him free.
Half a century later, the summit of Black Hill is almost unrecognisable. The fact that I had reached the top sooner than anticipated, and that I was simply wet rather than covered in bog, is testament to the fact that a slabbed path runs up to and beyond the trig point, which itself now sits on a neat cairn in the middle of a small paved area. More remarkable still is that in all directions there is vegetation: coarse grasses, heather, bilberry, cotton grass and rushes. There are wet patches, of course, as you would expect on any Pennine top, and its sense of bareness and bleakness will never be to everyone’s taste, but this is a hill with a new lease of life. It’s a far cry from that degraded, boot-sucking sea of exposed peat that once gave Black Hill the darkest of reputations; and it recalls not just the low point in the Pennine Way’s fortunes, but the moment when the path’s very existence came under threat.
By the mid 1980s, it was clear that sections of the Pennine Way were in serious trouble, principally where the heavily used path crossed fragile, peat-based moorland, and especially in the Peak District and South Pennines. After years of official inaction, the case for some sort of intervention was now irrefutable.
In 1987, the Peak District National Park Authority and the Countryside Commission established
