The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [22]
Getting there 30 years late was no anti-climax. In truth, it was way better than I’d dared hope, even after looking at so many photostreams of it from my fellow nerds on the internet. The old A625, after just three decades of abandonment, is a salutory lesson in the vanity of hoping to conquer Mother Nature, here on one of her very own named peaks. The shattered road drops away in cliffs, its layers of make-do-and-mend tarmac giving it the look of geological strata that had been painstakingly laid down over millennia. Faded white lines and Cat’s-eyes point into cracks, holes and sheer nothingness. Above sat Mam herself, calmly waiting, occasionally shivering, and in total control of all she surveyed.
One unfortunate by-product of the A625’s closure was that the adjacent Winnats Pass, a narrow defile through limestone turrets, has seen a considerable rise in traffic thundering through. The thin road is a 1:5 hairpin rollercoaster, and on a bright March day it was plenty busy enough; it must be a nightmare on a bank holiday Monday. Winnats Pass has an honourable place too in the story of our fight for access to our wild places, for it was here that national Access to Mountains rallies were held annually from the late 1920s through to the outbreak of the Second World War. They were generally fairly polite affairs, a few hundred or thousand picnicking happily in the natural amphitheatre of the Pass and applauding the rambling lobbyists and sympathetic politicians of the day. The events on Kinder Scout of April 1932 galvanised the event, with 10,000 turning up for the rally two months later, many of them young Kinder veterans and their friends noisily demanding support from the more timorous wings of the access movement. The rather diffident and polite world of rambling had changed for good.
Winnats Pass, and the neighbouring tourist honeypot of Castleton, were the perfect places to bring my northern footpath odyssey to an end, for I wanted to kick off the walking boots and place all these stories in their wider context of how folk up north like to relax. If Edale, with its cute train station and no main road or street lights, comes across like something off a 1930s OS map, all knobbly knees, mess tins, bad teeth and the tantalising chance of a fresh air-assisted leg-over, then Castleton is its twin in Sunday best. Castleton is where you take your aunties on a day trip, and although I’d never been there before, it felt somehow like the embodiment of my 1970s childhood, all lacquered hair-dos, gift shops that have you clucking at the prices, ice-cream faces and lacy doilies. It’s famous for its spectacular caves, and the unique local stone, called Blue John, that comes from them. Blue John is, you are regularly assured, one of the most prized of decorative rocks, but to my eyes its garish swirls looked tailor-made for clunky 1970s ashtrays, and not much else. Entirely fittingly, it was to Castleton that one of the earliest Coronation Street outings took place, a 1965 jaunt to the Blue John mine organised by upright Emily Bishop (or Nugent as she was at the time). In the shop at Speedwell Cavern, there’s a lovely photo of them filming Hilda and Stan Ogden, Len Fairclough, Elsie Tanner, and Mr and Mrs Walker as they tottered off the excursion coach. I pulled on my cardy, channelled the spirit of Annie Walker and went for a cup of tea. Loose leaf, in a china cup.
There were countless other paths I could have walked, innumerable hills, forests and moors that had witnessed the north-west’s struggle