The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [15]
This is hard country. Old snow lay curdled in piles in north-facing clefts and gullies, or packed up against the dry stone walls, sullen lines of dirty sandstone augmented by concrete blocks and broken paving slabs wherever they’d collapsed. It’s a well-worn path, but you have to keep your eyes on the ground, as ankle-turning ruts and rocks litter the way. Wherever I looked, the whole scene appeared to have been painted by an artist with just three colours in his palette: olive green, battleship grey and a mucky ochre. Even calling it olive green gives it a continental raffishness that the month of March over Darwen can never possibly fulfil, but you get the picture.
Around the top of the tower there are optimistic little toposcope plaques, telling you what you might be able to see if only the mist would thin a while. It won’t. Everyone who writes about Darwen Tower mentions not seeing anything. Official boasts claim that, on a clear day, you can see Snowdonia, but someone I read said that he’s been up there dozens of times, and never caught sight of it. The plaque facing Wales has long since been jemmied off the tower, but the other two are still there. I looked out into the fog that was zipping past like a battalion of ghosts, willing myself to see, as promised, the Old Man of Coniston or Kinder Scout, my ultimate destination on this tour of the north-west’s much fought-over footpaths. A couple walking a pair of very fat Labradors loomed out of the mist instead.
Just for a minute, it suddenly cleared. Only enough to see the town of Darwen below, but given that I’d only been able to see for about 20 yards prior to that, the effect was startling. The town is a sprawl, but a sprawl of straight lines and right angles: long terraced streets in blocks and grids, angular great buildings, a vast chimney or two. It looked sharp and harsh, as if you might cut yourself on one of its edges. Suddenly, the cheerless moor and pompous little Victorian tower looked like softness itself, the swirls of tracks and billowing clouds of heather a vital antidote to all that lay beneath. Something clicked in my head about the umbilical urgency of these wild open spaces to the people locked in that once-teeming grid on the valley floor. Down below, the smog, the chapels, the factories, the watchful eyes, the gossip, the iron rules. Up above, a transitory freedom, nature red in tooth and claw, redder still in unshackled loins. Blake’s line about ‘these dark Satanic Mills’ was never far away as I drove through these towns, all the more so when every turn seemed to take me back on to the A666.
The people have not been slow in marking their victory in the battle for access. All over Darwen Tower, and in the benches around it, names and initials, going right back to the tail end of the nineteenth century, are carved into the sandstone, into the wood, or scribbled in marker pen. Snow-haired old gentlemen, pillars of the town, can still find the initials they carved as bullish youths. And it was good to see too that the modern identity of Darwen, and that cluster of towns nearby, is well represented in the daubings and chisellings. There’s football rivalry, of course (Darwen Scum ’97), and heartfelt scratchings of love and lust (Jak Is Fit As by Nicola H, Mick + Gail, Pat & Stace, Lisa Kev), but there’s also Haleema, Radek and Irmina, Wrocław and Ian Antony.
And so to Kinder Scout, the name that looms largest of all, not just over the many struggles in the north-west