The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [37]
Even with the hundreds of named trails that we have these days, the Pennine Way, the one that started it all, remains the undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is: 268 miles from Edale to Kirk Yetholm (plus however many you have to add to reach your accommodation or because you got lost), a total of 32,000 feet climbed, and all invariably in shocking conditions. Most people take between two and three weeks, although the 20-year-old record stands at two days, 17 hours, 20 minutes and 15 seconds, with no sleep at all.
The ‘faint line on the Ordnance Maps’ became scored rather deeper than Tom Stephenson had anticipated, for Britain’s first National Trail struck an instant chord, and tens of thousands came to sample it. By the mid-1970s, large sections were a squelchy morass, and others so wide from the feet of hikers walking abreast that they were likened to a six-lane motorway, three tracks going north, three south. With two school friends in 1982, I walked the Dales Way from Ilkley to Windermere, the last (and only) time I’d ever walked a long-distance path. There’s a section north of Horton-in-Ribblesdale where it joins the Pennine Way for a mile or two, and I can still remember the shock when we hit it, for it was like stepping off a country lane on to a busy, wide highway. On the worst-affected stretches, plastic netting and mats were laid, which were later replaced with flagstones salvaged from the floors of demolished cotton mills, which seems entirely fitting when you remember the Winter Hill and Kinder protestors, the spiritual ancestors of the route. Many people hate the flagstones, but as I trekked along them on top of Kinder Scout, the thin grey ribbon of pavement stretched off over the black peat as if in a monochrome Wizard of Oz, and I was strangely charmed. But then, I wasn’t carrying a 25lb backpack and with 270 miles to go.
I knew that I had to walk at least one of the National Trails for this book, but the more I read of the Pennine Way, the surer I felt that it wasn’t going to be this one. Although the grand-daddy of British LDPs, it has been comprehensively eclipsed by other routes, most notably Wainwright’s Coast to Coast walk, and it’s now estimated that fewer than 2,000 people complete it every year. More than that, though, the route itself didn’t much appeal to me, for it is always portrayed as relentlessly dour and dirty, mile upon mile upon bloody mile of bog, moor and driving rain. I could imagine all too easily the kind of misanthropes that such bleakness would appeal to. And always has: in the 1971 Countryside Commission report on the route, when hundreds of walkers were counted and surveyed, reasons given for doing the Pennine Way included that it is ‘the furthest thing from so-called civilisation’, ‘remote from crowds, motor vehicles and the destructive influences of modern life’ and ‘to get away from the prying eyes of bureaucracy’. Wouldn’t you love a night in a remote moorland pub with that lot?
For a couple of highly entertaining days, I became slightly obsessed with reading the dozens of online diaries by folk who had managed the Pennine Way. They all shared a relentlessly upbeat tone, speckled with more revealing (and always funnier) moments of either coruscating agony or withering bathos. Folk put their every odd thought and muscular twinge into these diaries. One man detailed his pre-trail training regime, which involved taking daily walks with a cheap rucksack that he’d filled full of 23lb of potatoes. The rucksack makes his back ache and then break out in spots, but it only gets worse: ‘The training received a setback when I realised that the family had robbed some of the potatoes from my pack and the 23 lbs I thought I was carrying was in fact only 17 lbs. A further setback came when I realised that the potatoes were sweating and sprouting, so I had to find an