Walking with Plato (19 page)

The following morning, Wendy and I woke early to the sound of rain. I checked the weather forecast and saw that it was set to continue for most of the day. There was no point waiting for a dry spell, so we took down our tent in the rain, packed it into our rucksacks in the rain, and then set off walking in the rain.

From Horton in Ribblesdale, the Pennine Way takes a circuitous route to the village of Malham, and includes a steep climb over Pen-y-Ghent, an imposing fell that rises abruptly out of the surrounding countryside.

Pen-y-Ghent is considered quite a challenging peak. Wendy and I had climbed it once before, and remembered that it was rocky and exposed in places, and required a fair bit of scrambling. We didn’t fancy clambering over those treacherous rocks in the rain, especially not with heavy backpacks. So we elected to abandon the Pennine Way for the day, and instead take a thirteen-mile hike along small roads to the village of
Airton
.

I remember little about the day’s walk, except that we passed through some very tough-looking country and that it was very, very wet.

There’s no campsite at Airton, and so we splashed out and stayed at a farmhouse B&B. We were greeted at the door by an attractive young woman and two very lively young children. When the woman handed us the keys to our room, the oldest child, aged about four, informed us that it was a very
good
room because it had a very
bouncy
bed. Both children then accompanied us upstairs and gave us a practical demonstration of the elastic and gymnastic possibilities of our mattress.

The Pennine Way passes through Airton. So, the next morning, we re-joined it, intending to follow it all the way to the village of Cowling.

Unfortunately, after just four miles, as we passed through the village of Gargrave, I felt a stabbing pain in the small of my back. I tore off my rucksack and found that a thin metal rod, which formed part of the frame, had punctured the fabric and transformed itself into a lethal weapon.

It was impossible to continue like that. So we were forced to take a detour off the Pennine Way, and follow the Leeds and Liverpool Canal to the town of
Skipton
 – which, as luck would have it, was situated just four miles away.

We arrived at Skipton, purchased a new rucksack, and then walked southeast for a few miles to re-join the Pennine Way. After that, we headed south across hilly pastures to
Cowling
, where we camped beside a farmhouse B&B, on a sloping field covered in sheep-poo.

The following morning, we set off early on a sixteen-mile hike through Brontë country to the market town of
Hebden Bridge
.

It was a cold, wet walk through some of the most inhospitable moorland in England. Everything that grows there is adapted to survive rather than to thrive. The heather, the grasses, and the few scanty trees are coarse, tough, and self-contained. They give the impression of clinging on doggedly to life rather than embracing it.

The most famous landmark on this section of the Pennine Way, located between the bleak wilderness of Stanbury Moor and the equally bleak wilderness of Wadsworth Moor, is Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse that is said to have been the inspiration for the Earnshaw family home, Wuthering Heights, in Emily Brontë’s classic novel.

That
Wuthering Heights
is one of the great works of English literature, I wouldn’t dispute for a moment. But personally I don’t care for it. It’s too bleak, too savage, and too cruel. It disturbs me.

There’s a popular misconception – primarily among people who haven’t read it, but also, surprisingly, among some people who have – that it’s a love story. But it isn’t. It’s a hate story. There’s passion in it. And there’s desire, of a sort. But as far as the principal characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, are concerned – and most of the other characters, come to that – there’s little I recognize as love.

Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister, had it about right, I think, when she described Heathcliff’s love for Catherine as ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’.

I’ve read
Wuthering Heights
three times, and each time I’ve wondered what prompted Emily to write it. Why introduce so much gratuitous misery into the world?

But walking across those wild and inhospitable moors, that day, I began to understand.

The Brontë family lived in the parsonage in the village of Howarth, which lies within easy reach of Top Withens and the surrounding moors. So Emily would have been intimately acquainted with that harsh and unforgiving landscape. Small wonder, then, that she was inspired to produce such a harsh and unforgiving novel.

In an 1848 edition of the British newspaper
The Examiner
, a reviewer wrote: ‘Whoever has traversed the bleak heights of Hartside or Cross Fell . . . and has been welcomed there by the winds and rain on a “gusty day”, will know how to estimate the comforts of Wuthering Heights in wintry weather’ – which says it all, I think.

From Top Withens, the Pennine Way continues for another six or seven miles across Wadsworth Moor and Heptonstall Moor before passing Hebden Bridge.

Since Wendy and I were spending the night at a hostel in Hebden Bridge, we had to take a mile-and-a-half detour off the Pennine Way, into town. This turned out to be an exhausting slog, which involved a long steep descent, followed by a series of outrageously steep ups and downs. The initial descent was heart-breaking, since we knew that we would have to make up the height we had lost the following morning, when we returned to the Pennine Way.

Hebden Bridge is a spectacular town: a hotchpotch of imposing stone buildings, cobbled streets, rivers, streams, canals, roads, and railway lines, all crammed into the steep sides of the Upper Calder Valley.

It developed as a mill town in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, courtesy of its steep hills and fast-flowing streams. Today, thanks to its location halfway between Leeds and Manchester, it’s a commuter town, and thanks to its gorgeous stone buildings, cobbled streets, boutiques, and pretty waterways, it also has a thriving tourist industry.

For me, the most charming feature of Hebden Bridge was the improbable steepness of its streets. Charming to look at, that is. But when it came to walking out of town, the next morning, to re-join the Pennine Way, those steep inclines were an absolute bitch.

The seventeen-mile stretch of the Pennine Way from Hebden Bridge to
Standedge
(pronounced
Stannidge
) is perhaps the most tedious section of the Pennine Way. It runs across drab moorland, punctuated only by dull streams, unattractive drains, and un-scenic reservoirs.

End to End blogger Mark Moxon opens his discussion of this section of the Pennine Way with the words: ‘Ye gods, what a boring walk!’ and goes on to say that the bit where it crosses the M62 motorway is probably the highlight of the whole thing.

I think it’s fair to say that these sentiments are echoed by the majority of Pennine Way walkers. However, Wendy and I were fortunate enough to cross it on a misty day, which lent it a pleasing air of mystery and romance.

We arrived, late in the afternoon, at a tiny campsite in the grounds of the Carriage House pub, near Standedge. The weather was cold and damp, and our camping pitch was strewn with soggy litter from the previous occupants. So we decamped into the pub until bedtime.

From Standedge, the Pennine Way heads east across Wessenden Moor, passing alongside a number of small reservoirs, and then bends southward, climbing up through Wessenden Head Moor to the boggy, peaty summit of Black Hill.

Wainwright, the celebrated fell walker and guidebook author, describes Black Hill as his least favourite place on the Pennine Way. ‘The broad top really is black,’ he says. ‘It is not the only fell with a summit of peat but no other shows such a desolate and hopeless quagmire to the sky. This is peat naked and unashamed. Nature fashioned it, but for once has no suggestion for clothing it.’

It’s all a matter of taste though. Personally, I like bleak places. I find them exhilarating. And I’m not alone in that respect. Wendy feels the same way. And Thoreau, the nineteenth-century American author, philosopher, and naturalist, went so far as to express a marked preference for the bleak over the picturesque. In his essay
Walking
, he wrote: ‘My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!’

From Black Hill, the Pennine Way continues south, and before long reaches Laddow Rocks, an exposed crag that’s popular with climbers. Then the path traverses the side of a steep ravine, with a vertigo-inducing drop to Crowden Great Brook below, before descending into
Crowden
.

This was an easy-paced and enjoyable twelve-mile walk until about an hour from the end when the rain began to beat down. The downpour came as no surprise. In this part of the world they have a saying: ‘If you can’t see the fells, it’s raining. If you can see the fells, it’s going to rain.’ But, although the rain wasn’t unexpected, it still dampened our spirits.

The appearance of the campsite at Crowden did little to revive them. Rivulets of water ran down the leaves of the trees and bushes, glistening beads of water clung to the grass, the sides of the tents sagged beneath the weight of water, and still the rain came down.

We set up our wet tent on the wet field, and then squatted outside in our wet raincoats and wet over-trousers, heating up a tin of spaghetti hoops and raindrops.

From Crowden, our original plan had been to continue to the southern end of the Pennine Way, at Edale. But with more rain forecast, and with the hostel and the B&Bs at Edale full, and with no other option at Edale but to camp, we decided that it would be best to abandon the Pennine Way and head instead for the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-Le-Frith.

The following morning, as we squatted outside in the rain, scraping fat black slugs from the wet interior of our outer-tent prior to packing it into our wet backpacks, we felt sure that we had made the right decision.

Being End to Enders, we had no guilty qualms about quitting the Pennine Way early. For us, it had only ever been a means to an end, and never an end in itself. But still we felt a tinge of regret as we bade farewell to the moors and the mountains. Because, as means to an end go, it had been pretty bloody magnificent.

I travelled among unknown men,

In lands beyond the sea;

Nor, England! did I know til then