wasn’t raining. If this sounds pessimistic, it was largely because the forecast for the day was poor and I had set off in a heavy waterproof coat. But now, having plodded uphill, I was hot, so I peeled off an outer layer and immediately felt fresher and more alive to my surroundings. I confidently resumed my stride across the hillside towards the head of the valley. I could really tackle just about anything now, I told myself. Within half an hour, it was raining.
To take my mind off the weather, I mused as I walked: why, I wondered, does the Pennine Way begin (or end) at Edale? Why not start it at nearby Castleton, larger and more accessible and overlooked by the shapely dome of Mam Tor? Or at a point further south in the limestone uplands of the Peak District, where arguably the Pennines as a continuous body of high ground (it’s not really a proper chain of hills) really finish, eventually tapering off into the Trent valley? Over the years, Ashbourne, Leek and even Dovedale have been suggested as alternative start/finish points.
However, unlike Castleton or Ashbourne, where the streets tend to be thronged by tourists, Edale’s clientele is dominated by more adventurous and hard-nosed outdoor types. Ever since Edale station was opened over a century ago, trains from Manchester and Sheffield have routinely disgorged crowds of ramblers every Saturday and Sunday; and long before the Pennine Way was opened, this otherwise small and unassuming village was where you headed if you were serious about walking in the Peak District.
Looking around the narrow valley, hemmed in by crags and ridges, it was also clear that Edale is where the really high stuff begins. It signals the start of the Dark Peak, named after the underlying millstone grit that forms the lofty moorlands covering the northern half of the national park. It’s a sombre landscape of largely horizontal lines, bare and unpopulated, most of it above the 1500ft mark and with a peat overlay that can create boggy and uncompromising conditions. But rather than geology, I suspect that the Pennine Way’s departure point owes more to the historical issue of public access, and in particular to the celebrated hill that loomed above me now – Kinder Scout.
It is hard for today’s generation of walkers, including Pennine Way users like myself, to appreciate that within living memory you simply weren’t allowed on over 50 square miles of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow (the next major moorland to the north). In the early decades of the last century, it was reckoned to be the largest area of privately owned land in England from which the general public were completely excluded. A small army of gamekeepers made sure, sometimes robustly, that it was kept that way, so that the heather moors remained the grouse-shooting preserve of the rich owners and their guests. Open access, national trails, definitive maps of public rights of way – there was none of this for ramblers back in the 1930s. The uplands had been effectively privatised following the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries, so that much of the high Pennines was acquired by a handful of wealthy owners who curtailed public access. As workers began to pour out of the burgeoning industrial cities either side of the Pennines every weekend looking for open-air recreation, the sense of injustice grew and ramblers became more militant. Nowhere in the Peak District embodied this sense of public exclusion more than Kinder Scout. Speaking many years after the Pennine Way was eventually opened, its creator, Tom Stephenson, described Kinder Scout as ‘the cockpit of the battle for access’ and, for him, the trail simply had to start here.
Indeed, if there’s a hill in the South Pennines that matches the pre-eminence of the Pennine Way, then it’s probably Kinder Scout. Like the Pennine Way, it has a distinctive character and a reputation all of its own, even a spiritual pull for some people. It isn’t just that it’s high (2000ft), but it also feels seriously big. The summit plateau stretches almost 15 square miles and is made up of giant mounds or waves of dark chocolate-coloured peat, known as hags, and patches of bog and rough vegetation. Dotted about are weirdly shaped tors and it is fringed by precipitous rock edges. On Kinder Scout, you know you’re on something high and expansive that commands respect; but you also know that the Pennine Way goes across it.
Despite the unpromising weather, I made good progress along well-walked tracks to the head of the valley and within the hour I was puffing up a steep, stone-pitched pathway known as Jacob’s Ladder, which was once a well-used packhorse route. It seemed to rise vertically above me onto the broad south-western flank of Kinder Scout and, although I knew the path quite well, I could tell that I hadn’t walked it carrying a full backpack before. I paused at the top, gasping for breath, as the mist and rain enveloped me.
Visibility was down to just a few feet and it was cold, wet and hostile. And this was early July. I carefully followed the path past the trig point on Kinder Low and along the rocky edge of the summit plateau to Kinder Downfall. A couple of fellrunners appeared momentarily out of the gloom, then were instantly swallowed up by it once again. Soon I reached the Downfall, a narrow chasm where the Kinder river gurgles over a rocky shelf, tumbling down the steep rocky hillside far below. In really fierce conditions, the wind is funnelled up this defile and can blast the water high into the air in vertical plumes of spray; and in exceptionally cold winter conditions, the water freezes over the rocks in a white waterfall, providing ice climbing for the seriously intrepid.
When the Pennine Way was officially opened in 1965, the route from Edale to Kinder Downfall was not along the valley to Jacob’s Ladder and around the outer edge of Kinder Scout, as it is now, but directly up the hillside and then across its boggy and featureless centre. From Edale village, walkers headed straight up the steep slopes of Grindsbrook Clough beyond the Old Nags Head – a 1750ft rocky scramble beside a lively stream. Just minutes from the start, this must have been a baptism of fire for most long-distance walkers carrying a full pack. If they managed it without mishap, the next challenge was negotiating the bog. There are plenty of hair-raising stories of walkers not just sinking into the oozing peat but getting totally disorientated by the myriad peat hags, especially when the weather closed in. And this was just the opening challenge on day 1 of the Pennine Way. It was as if it had been deliberately designed to weed out the ill-prepared and uncommitted. One experienced Pennine Way walker described this first stage to me as ‘a real granny stopper’.
Even in the mist I had glimpsed patches of erosion around Kinder Low; but although the boots of Pennine Way walkers had certainly churned up the bare peat since the early days and the route across the middle had progressively worsened, Kinder Scout’s environmental problems are much more complex. Ironically, the same hills that the factory workers from the early 20th century fought so hard to access bear the scars of 150 years of atmospheric pollution, as the toxic smoke from Manchester’s coal-fired textile industry blew across the high ground of the Peak District and left a devastating legacy in the form of acid rain and heavy metals. It killed off most of the sphagnum moss that once covered the peat and acted like a giant protective sponge, and any remaining vegetation was further ravaged by the unchecked grazing of sheep and periodic fires. Ramblers’ boots simply compounded the problem. The water table dropped, the bare peat dried out and either blew away or was carried off by water, and an ecological disaster unfolded. The most badly damaged peat had the same acidity as lemon juice and almost nothing was able to grow on it.
Writer and long-distance walker John Hillaby, who came through here on the Pennine Way in the 1960s, famously referred to the eroded top of Kinder Scout as an example of ‘land at the end of its tether’. In his book Journey Through Britain, he described how all life had been drained out or burnt off, and how any green covering had all but disappeared so that just the exposed banks of dark-brown peat remained. ‘Manure is the analogy that comes most readily to mind,’ he observed. ‘The top of Kinder Scout looks as if it’s entirely covered in the droppings of dinosaurs.’
Although some professed to enjoy the so-called sport of ‘bog trotting’, the worsening conditions on the summit meant that the Jacob’s Ladder path around Kinder’s western edge, first identified as a wet-weather alternative, eventually became the officially recommended route. At the time, and when the new National Trail Guide that appeared in 1990 showed only the Jacob’s Ladder route, there were protests from the Ramblers’ Association and the Pennine Way Council, who claimed that the Countryside Commission was not following correct procedures
