The Wild Rover_ A Blistering Journey Along Britain_s Footpaths - Mike Parker [38]
And off he goes, doubtless to the considerable relief of his family. Meticulously cataloguing the real ales on offer in every pub, he gradually heads north, but is not happy on reaching the youth hostel at Haworth, which is ‘in a fine old mansion with much more room than most. However, my dormitory was filled with a coachload of German teenage boys and the floor was littered with empty beer cans (despite this not being allowed by the YHA).’ Youths in a youth hostel; whatever next? To escape, he heads to a nearby pub ‘where I met a Cornish chap from the same dormitory and was bored to tears by his rambling tales, so only stayed for a pint and escaped for an early night.’ The paths, the hostels, the portions of apple crumble and the pints of Theakston’s all tumble by, until the heart-stopping climax is reached at Kirk Yetholm: ‘I finished with a meal at the Border Hotel of steak and kidney pie and chips for £3.50 and 5 pints of the local bitter.’
Such painstaking accounts are not even just products of the incontinence of the blogging age, for if you poke around in the dusty corners of most local reference libraries, you’ll find much the same sort of stuff in print form. Neatly typed, with grainy pictures, an unflagging monotone and a haphazard approach to punctuation (few commas, lots of exclamation marks), they are the proud, self-published records of men – always men – taking themselves right to the edge and facing their inner demons, before overcoming them with a dry pair of socks or a decent pint of Pilkington’s Old Scrote. One such marvel that I unearthed in a Lancashire library is the 1985 logbook of a man who did the Pennine Way, while his wife and her cousin drove each day’s leg of the route in a temperamental ‘Volkswagen caravanette’. This doubled up as their nightly accommodation, the ladies sharing the bed while Rambling Man kips in a bunk he has rigged up in the front. He’s not at all keen on paying good money to park up in caravan sites, when there are so many lay-bys to be had for free. The ladies are ‘none too pleased at the lack of toilet facilities on these moorland night stops’, he reports. ‘Still – the cows and sheep manage – so what’s the difference?’
At Malham, the gang stumble across a big ramblers’ rally to mark the 20th anniversary of the Pennine Way’s opening. Seemingly imagining himself as a reporter on the regional teatime news, he tells us: ‘Today, Mr Tom Stephenson, now 92 years of age, is guest of honour at Malham House where select guests are meeting for dinner, amongst them are Barbara Castle (Politician) and Mike Harding (Joker), but I am not invited!’ Further north, he gets lost one day in the mist, and although he reaches that evening’s appointed destination anyway, the fact that he went ‘wrong’ worries him all the way to Scotland. His poor wife is forced on the next bank holiday weekend to drive him back to the same place, just so that he can re-walk the ‘correct’ bit of route. That she didn’t take advantage of the situation and bury him on a lonely peat moor is a mystery.
Both of these scribes from the Pennine frontline have dabbled with the other National Trails, as well as numerous other long-distance paths. For our online correspondent, this was the first of his three trips along the Pennine Way, each recorded in microscopic detail. He also repeats Wainwright’s Coast