The Pennine Way

The granddaddy of long distance trails ends in Kirby Yetholm and I was celebrating my achievement in the company of the free pint traditionally provided to finishers at the Border Hotel.  

The Pennine Way is a dreary trial of endurance at the best of times and that winter had been the wettest on record, bequeathing a legacy of unrelieved bogginess. The moorland was treacherous and in places passable only with the help of paving stones rescued from defunct mills which had been transported by helicopter. These protect the delicate peat from erosion but result in a path as characterless as a city sidewalk. The endless unchanging expanse was initially relaxing after months of captivity in an airless office. Featureless moors make few demands, either physically or mentally, and are an ideal environment for solitary cogitation.  But after a few days, the monotony became a torture of sensory deprivation; increasingly my thoughts centred on the ill-conceived absurdity of exchanging the revelry of the London Olympics for self-imposed exile in this dismal landscape. Gradually, overcoming tedium became the main challenge, greatly exceeding the effort required to trudge a dozen or so miles a day.

Other walkers were a rarity. One day I was overtaken by a lone hiker who stopped to explain that the patterns on nearby rocks were fossils of prehistoric ferns.  When I reached a cafe, he was sitting outside, airing his feet. He showed me a photograph of the fossils in his guidebook and said he'd picked up a loose piece which he passed me. 'Those regular dimples look like the pattern on asbestos sheeting,' I remarked. He examined it carefully and turned it over. The back was machine-smooth. He tested the edge with a fingernail; small flakes fell off. He looked up, smiled and tossed it into a nearby bin. 'Just as well you didn't take it to a museum for carbon dating,' I commented. 

Summer is mythical in these latitudes and the passing days served up an unvarying diet of heavy rain and chilling wind so that I was simultaneously cold, damp and sweaty, despite the promises of my unconscionably expensive kit.  The unseasonable weather culminated in an afternoon of impenetrable fog. When a breeze hoovered it up, a horseshoe shaped cleft was revealed, half a mile wide and deep enough for a hang glider.  This was High Cup Nick, a precipitous chasm gouged by a giant claw.  Subduing vertigo, I edged forward gingerly.  At eye level, a pair of red kites circulating indolently on the thermals paused and hovered ominously. Suddenly, their suspending threads snipped, they dropped a thousand feet on to invisible prey. Through the dissolving mist, a distant pastoral scene, Housman's land of lost content, slowly materialised. A dream of English shires, theatrically lit by slanting sunlight, with neatly jigsawed fields, soporific villages and spired churches attached to long shadows.

Ruminating on three weeks of muddy plodding, this was the memory which, framed by its murky context, made the journey worthwhile. 

© David Thompson 2015