(the average ‘trample width’ here was measured at over 170ft); and even the first mile out of Edale across the grassy expanse of Grindsbrook Meadows on the original route was once eroded into so many parallel paths, thanks to the tread of walking boots, that Gordon Miller described it to me as the Pennine Way motorway – three lanes north, three lanes south.
The transformation has been startling, and walking the Pennine Way through the Peak District is now a much more pleasant experience. However, Martyn Sharp is at pains to point out why the work was carried out in the first place. ‘People have to understand that we didn’t put the slabs down to make the Pennine Way easier to walk but to protect the rare habitats,’ he said. ‘We took some criticism over the slabs to start with, but the older paving stones have blended in and the vegetation has grown back around them really well.’ In fact, it’s done so well that Martyn now has to strim vegetation encroaching the path at one point.
Black Hill seems like a place reborn. It’s still a big, stern lump, but these days it’s more green than black. ‘I have a special affinity for Black Hill,’ admitted Martyn. ‘It’s not as busy as Kinder Scout but to me it’s every bit as special. There are mountain hares and short-eared owls up here now, it’s a place that’s alive once again.’ And he says the views can be just as commanding as elsewhere on the trail. ‘If you stand on the northern side of Black Hill, a little beyond the trig point, you can see Pendle Hill and even Pen-y-ghent on a clear day. It’s an exhilarating place.’
And as for that famous trig point, once the only piece of dry and recognisable land amid the summit bog, it also seems to have an admirer. ‘Every year a local man walks up the hill along the Pennine Way to repaint the trig point,’ says Martyn. ‘I try and get up to see him and I’ve even offered to supply the paint, but he politely refuses.’
From the summit of Black Hill, the Pennine Way originally struck north-westward across Dean Head Moss to reach the A635 Saddleworth–Holmfirth road, then continued across White Moss opposite. However, the ground here was notoriously wet and marshy and there were regular horror stories from Pennine Way walkers. In his 1975 guide to the long-distance footpaths of northern England, Geoffrey Berry observed: ‘The peat here is softer, stickier and deeper than any we have experienced, and that alone, on its part, is no mean achievement.’ Wooden fence palings were laid across the worst bits in the 1980s, but these soon deteriorated and were eventually removed, so in 1990 an alternative route across Wessenden Head Moor and then along the Wessenden valley, a little to the east of the original, became the recommended route and is now the permanent path. I followed it to the A635, a high and open moorland road with good views, not particularly busy at that moment, so I dropped my pack, leant against the wall and rested.
For over 30 years, this isolated lay-by has been the location of the legendary Snoopy’s snack van, a mainly weekend phenomenon that appears to be celebrated largely on the strength of the generous size of its bacon butties and the huge, steaming mugs of tea served up to Pennine Way walkers, who are no doubt grateful for a hot drink and a chat. Whether they open the serving hatch or conduct business from the door at the end depends on the strength of the wind, I was told.
Looking back, Black Hill was now more or less clear of cloud, although a little to the east my eye was irresistibly drawn to the 750ft pencil-thin mast of the Holme Moss transmitter, which was erected in 1951. Although pinned down with five sets of steel stays, the 140-ton mast looked incredibly fragile. Beyond the mast a low, grey blanket still enveloped Bleaklow. I sighed deeply. I had got over the first hurdle, seen off the opening test on the Pennine Way. But was this the right way to look at it?
Long before I took that first step at Edale, I decided I had to try to get to the bottom of the popular notion of the Pennine Way as simply a hard, uncompromising slog. The physical and mental challenge, the arduous miles of bog and bare moorland, the blisters and pain. Surely there was more to the Pennine Way than that? But the Pennine Way has always seemed to carry its reputation before it. In his book The Wild Rover, Mike Parker set the Pennine Way alongside the many hundreds of other domestic walking trails and described it as the ‘undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is’. It seems to be the only British long-distance path that everyone has heard of, even those for whom walking for fun is as alien a concept as deep-sea diving or eating snails. In the preceding months, whenever I mentioned that I was going to walk the Pennine Way people tended to respond with terms like ‘long’, ‘hilly’, ‘tough’, ‘rain’ and ‘bogs’. Others offered a shake of the head or a roll of the eyes and in their minds they probably added ‘nutter’.
In their 1980 guidebook to backpacking, Britain at Your Feet, David Wickers and Art Pedersen were pretty blunt about the Pennine Way, calling it ‘a 250-mile wet slog up the middle of England.’ They described how ‘the going is rough and can be a real body wrecker … there are exhausting hours to be spent bog hopping across the peaty plateaux, just like wading through a giant squelchy grow bag. And the weather can be truly violent, with low flying rain clouds, sleet that comes hard and horizontal, and pea souper mists that can brew up within minutes, even on the gentlest of summer days … there are certainly moments when you have to convince yourself it is doing you good, and when the very idea of the Pennine Way being a public “footpath” seems an utter euphemism.’ You get the impression they didn’t like the Pennine Way very much.
Of course, walking along the top of the Pennines is always likely to have its challenging moments, whatever route you take and however you choose to walk it, and that’s what distinguishes it from the Cotswold Way or Thames Path. The Pennines are a high, often remote chain of hills, the western facing slopes in particular prone to rain, and where there’s peat underfoot the ground is always likely to cut up. Long-distance walks are about experiencing the elements, moving slowly through different natural landscapes and being outdoors. And they’re about testing your mettle. But how far does testing your mettle mean that a walking trail should be so exacting as to make endurance rather than enjoyment the watchword?
More than almost any other UK walking trail, the Pennine Way seems synonymous with sheer physical challenge. The South West Coast Path may be much longer (630 miles compared to the Pennine Way’s 268 miles) and the overall height gain much greater (115,000ft against the Pennine Way’s 37,000ft, give or take a bit), but you rarely go half a day without dropping down to a village, café or beach. When you set off for a day on the Pennine Way, on the other hand, in most cases you don’t see a shop, pub or café until nightfall; and if you camp you might not see one at all.
As I walked north to Scotland, I pondered the question of toughness and challenge and talked to others about it. Where precisely do you strike the balance between maintaining the trail’s sheer physical (and mental) test and making it sufficiently accessible so that enough people feel both inspired and capable of attempting it? Reading accounts of early trail completions in the 1960s and 70s, I was struck by the fact that most people seemed to accept the boggy and sometimes treacherous conditions underfoot as simply part of walking along the top of the Pennines. It might not have been altogether pleasant at times, but coping with it was part of the adventure.
So was it right to tolerate the sort of erosion that I’d already heard about in the Peak District or could (and should) the path be better maintained but still remain a walking challenge? After all, a walking route that is so long, high, exposed and remote is surely challenging enough, regardless of the surface beneath your boots?
The Pennine Way’s creator had a clear view on this. In an article in The Great Outdoors magazine in April 1993, journalist Roly Smith quoted from a conversation that he had had with Tom Stephenson in 1976. Did the scars on the landscape caused mainly by the feet of Pennine Way walkers upset the route’s architect? ‘No, it doesn’t offend me in the slightest,’ Tom replied. ‘The way I see it is that this route has given so much pleasure to so many thousands of people who perhaps otherwise might have not ventured on to the hills. That is what I wanted in the first place, and when I see young people enjoying themselves on the Pennine Way, it makes it seem worthwhile.’
