The Pennine Way - the Path, the People, the Journey. Andrew McCloy

      Introduction

      The Pennine Way and I grew up together. I don’t mean that it shared a room with me or was part of the family, but I was born within a year of it opening and I have always felt an attachment to the path. When I was young, our family holidays usually involved walking and the outdoors in some sort of way; and even growing up in suburban south London I was always aware of the Pennine Way. To my mind, it loosely shared the same company as a trek through the remote Himalayas or a walk from Land’s End to John o’Groats – a fabled journey, an extreme physical challenge undertaken by a handful of really grown-up people. It seemed daunting and exciting in equal measure, with an ever so slightly mysterious air to it. John Noakes and his dog walked it for his TV programme Go with Noakes, which only added to the thrill factor. Over time, it became lodged in my consciousness, but I had never even stepped foot on it.

      As a teenager, I bought a copy of Tom Stephenson’s official guidebook to the Pennine Way. It had evocative photos of wild-looking hill country, dramatic scenes that seemed remote and detached from my day-to-day life. I followed the text across purple heather moors, over windswept hills and alongside the Roman Wall; I studied the map extracts carefully, following the red line as it wove its way amid often tightly packed black-and-white contours, page after page after page.

      In my mid teens, I began long-distance walking and discovered the challenge, fun and adventure of exploring paths on my own and with others, but not yet the Pennine Way. It was an ambition, certainly, but still something I kept at arm’s length. Perhaps I felt I wasn’t ready for it, or maybe there was a growing awareness that this famous old path was in a spot of bother: overuse and erosion had given it an increasingly bad press, so that people shook their heads and said it wasn’t worth walking any more.

      However, over the years I explored short sections of the Pennine Way on foot and got to know some parts, like the Yorkshire Dales, quite well. I eventually moved to live near its southern end in the Peak District, but still it was there and still I hadn’t walked it all.

      As both the Pennine Way and I neared 50, I decided it was now or never. I hadn’t really thought of it in any ‘midlife’ challenge or crisis sort of way, but clearly others had. A few months before I set off, I attended a small celebratory event in Edale organised by the Peak District National Park Authority, marking the Pennine Way’s 50th birthday. Among the speakers was author and local resident Mark Wallington, whose light-hearted and enjoyable account of walking the Pennine Way with his dog was published in 1997. He outlined a theory as to why so many men of a certain middling age walk the Pennine Way (or at least try to), inviting the audience to imagine a typical young man’s bucket list cataloguing all the things he might want to achieve or experience in life. It could include buying an expensive sports car, going out with a supermodel, skydiving, playing guitar in a rock group, scoring a winning goal in an FA Cup Final, 24-hour parties, walking the Pennine Way, and so on. However, as that young man gets older, more and more items on the wish list are crossed off as unobtainable, until he realises that he’s reached the point where walking the Pennine Way is the only thing left that’s even remotely feasible. Along with the rest of the audience, I laughed, but not quite as loudly as everyone else.

      There’s something genuinely fascinating about the Pennine Way. If a long-distance path could be said to work on different levels, then this is it. It was the first to be created in Britain and is arguably still the most famous. Damian Hall, author of the official National Trail Guide to the Pennine Way, introduces the path as ‘the original, the classic, the daddy; it’s the oldest, the roughest and toughest of them all.’ The long and valiant fight to secure public access to the hills is bound up in its history, while its fluctuating fortunes mirror those of the youth hostels movement, whose assorted buildings still dot the Pennine hills. Our relationship with wild places, the growth of modern recreational trailwalking, the impact of our feet on the ground and pioneering moorland restoration work, stand-out characters like the dogged Stephenson and idiosyncratic Wainwright – all of this is part of the Pennine Way’s rich and multilayered story.

      And then there’s that thing deep inside that makes some of us want to walk 268 miles across high and lonely moorland in the first place: challenge, adventure, ambition, daring, purpose, single-mindedness, escapism, masochism, madness. The camaraderie of the trail and the solitude of the hills are both there, too, however incongruous that might seem. So why does this rugged, exhilarating and flawed upland footpath evoke such profound feelings? And would I be able to walk from one end to the other and work it all out?

      I had all these thoughts swirling round in my mind as I packed my rucksack for the start of the walk at Edale in July 2015. I would walk continuously for 17 days from Derbyshire to the Scottish border, up the backbone of northern England, and try to understand the Pennine Way phenomenon – how it came into being, its evolution over five decades and why it has endured for so long, despite all its problems. I would talk to as many different people as I could about the path, especially those, like me, who were walking it in its 50th year, and would try to make some sense of why and how a mere walking trail could develop such an identity. This is the story of a most remarkable path.