have pointed out that the relatively small cost of repairing a stretch of worn footpath, when compared to the cost of building just a few yards of new road, for instance, is a price worth paying, especially when you factor in all the physical and mental benefits associated with taking exercise in the outdoors. A well-used and eroded path is evidence that people are walking it and want to walk it, so the argument goes.
However, 50 years on and attitudes have shifted. It might still be just as important to encourage young people onto the hills, but it’s no longer acceptable to sit by and allow such obvious environmental damage to take place. I suspect, too, that many outdoor users are increasingly aware of their individual impact and uncomfortable with the notion that their own feet are damaging the very same wild and beautiful landscapes that they come to enjoy. And such damage, too. A full condition survey of the Pennine Way in 1989 showed that for the trail south of the M62 (including all of the Peak District), the average worn or trampled width was found to be 40ft; but on the summit plateau of Kinder Scout the trample damage spread up to half a mile wide!
As I left the Peak District, on the newly laid causey paths amid recovering moorland, I really couldn’t see that there was any other option but to repair and renew, even up here where by rights it should be wild and untouched. Indeed, I even felt a faint sense of hope that amid so much wider ecological destruction that we have been wreaking on the planet for the last couple of centuries, we still have it in our gift to step back and, through purpose, ingenuity and hard work, rectify the damage. Either way, the Pennine Way had been pulled back from the brink.
I turned my back on Black Hill and that soggy first day and headed off down the increasingly sunlit Wessenden valley, now on a firm and inviting track past a string of small reservoirs. At the top, by the roadside, was a National Trust interpretation board that explained how this part of Marsden Moor was once known as the Black Moor because it was covered by soot from the surrounding mills and factories. It also featured an old photo of the long-vanished Isle of Skye Hotel, which once stood near this spot, describing how day trippers used to walk up to this lonely moorland pub for ham and egg teas.
The building has long since gone, compulsorily purchased and demolished in the 1950s by a water company for fear that their nearby reservoir water would be polluted; but the pub lives on in the local name for the A635 (the Isle of Skye road), as well as in the name of the annual Four Inns race, for which it is the starting point. This long-running team competition is held around Easter and involves a 45-mile non-stop walking/running route over the rough moors of the Dark Peak, linking four pubs: the Isle of Skye (site of), the Snake Pass Inn, the Old Nags Head at Edale, and the Cat and Fiddle on the moors to the far west. Of course, two of these pubs are on the Pennine Way, and the Snake Pass Inn just off it. The winning teams often take as little as six or seven hours, while others walk through the night and stumble in after 20-plus hours.
At Standedge, more a location than an actual settlement, the route crosses the A62 Huddersfield–Oldham road. In the early years of the Pennine Way, Peter’s Transport Café was a fixture of the hilltop car park, a refreshment stop for lorry drivers and commercial traffic in a pre-M62 era when the trans-Pennine road was much busier. Judging by the accounts of Pennine Way walkers at the time, the café was also a welcome sight for walkers at this remote location; but alas, it burnt down in 1970 and, like the Isle of Skye Hotel, has been consigned to the stuff of memories.
The route was now obvious, direct and mostly firm underfoot, with sections once notorious for their bog tamed by paths of aggregate and slabs. After the cloud and rain of the Peak District, it was now blue skies and sunshine in the South Pennines, bright and incredibly clear. Below me the high-rise buildings of Rochdale looked almost within touching distance, which was both fascinating and slightly unnerving at the same time. Between Crowden and Hebden Bridge, the Pennine hills seem to take a sharp intake of breath: the bare upland spine separating Oldham, Littleborough and Greater Manchester from Huddersfield, Halifax and West Yorkshire to the east is just a few miles wide. It seemed as if the ribbon of undeveloped upland trodden by the Pennine Way was the only thing stopping northern England from turning into one giant retail park or housing estate.
This sense of walking through an almost semi-urban, man-made environment was compounded by a string of small reservoirs. Further afield and off the main Pennine chain, there were a growing number of wind turbines visible. In particular, even as I watched, a large wind farm seemed to be taking shape north of Rochdale, with cranes hoisting gigantic shafts and propellers skywards. But it wasn’t just a visual assault on the senses. The growl of the M62 was first audible at least half an hour away, until eventually the trail dropped down to a cutting below Windy Hill in order to cross the motorway via a high and slender footbridge.
Originally it seems that the plan was for the Pennine Way to cross the M62 slightly east of its present line, following the A672 as it passed underneath the motorway at junction 22; but – the story goes – Transport Minister Ernest Marples (a keen rambler, it was said) insisted that the Pennine Way should have its own footbridge. And not just any off-the-shelf urban design either, but a reinforced concrete three-hinged arch with a span of 220ft, complete with counter-curve and side cantilevers. In other words, the Pennine Way got the sort of elegant and bespoke bridge that the country’s foremost long-distance footpath deserved, which I find very satisfying.
The M62 bridge was completed early in 1971 and Pennine Way walkers were crossing it before the motorway tarmac had even been laid. The Manchester Guardian carried a splendid photo by Robert Smithies of almost 100 ramblers from the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society, who were the first to cross the new bridge on Easter Sunday. The photo was reproduced on the front cover of the Society’s annual report for 1971–72 and shows a line of waving figures stretching right across the new structure, with just bare earth and a couple of diggers below. (Incidentally, when Smithies died in 2006, his obituary in The Guardian described how he enjoyed recounting the background to one of his other Pennine Way pictures – a walker struggling through winter blizzards – which had his editor in raptures. ‘I just drove up the Snake Pass, between Sheffield and Manchester, parked up where the footpath crosses and turned the car heater on,’ he recalled. ‘Then I waited for the first silly sod to materialise out of the snow.’)
Perhaps not surprisingly, this section of the M62 is the highest point of any motorway in England, peaking at 1221ft. And with Scammonden Bridge (the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the UK) and the well-known Stott Hall Farm (where the motorway carriages were built either side of the building, so marooning it in the middle) just to the east, the Pennine Way footbridge is in noteworthy company.
I stood mid bridge and took a photo of the endless stream of traffic 65ft below. A lorry hooted and I waved. I looked down as vehicle after vehicle sped underneath at what seemed to be breakneck speeds. A few drivers glanced up at me, perhaps fearful of what I was about to hurl down on them, or maybe wondering why a fully grown man was spending a July morning taking photos of motorway traffic.
The M62 is just one of numerous trans-Pennine roads that the Pennine Way hops across. Beginning with the Snake Pass and A628 Longdendale highway, there are five other major A roads that cross the Pennines within a few short miles; and at Standedge the railway and canal also go deep beneath the surface. On occasions, walking the Pennine Way seemed like an exercise in geometry, at least at its southern end.
At Blackstone Edge, the modern A58 linking Littleborough and Ripponden is also eclipsed by more historic thoroughfares. For a short distance, the Pennine Way drops downhill on a line of neat dark setts, the smooth grey stones standing out vividly against the grassy Pennine hillside. It was originally a packhorse track that was widened to become a turnpike, although some have claimed that its origins go all the way back to the Romans. It’s certainly a location that has been well documented by travel writers over the centuries, many of whom seemed to find it particularly daunting. As far back as 1696, Celia Fiennes reported that the 1500ft-high hilltop was ‘noted all over England for a dismal high precipice’. Daniel Defoe crossed the Pennines in 1724, referring to them
