by Gary Hayden
It stretches from Kirk Yetholm, just inside the Scottish Borders, to Edale in Derbyshire, winding its way through the Northumberland National Park, the Yorkshire Dales, and the Peak District National Park. For most of its length, it follows the line of the Pennines, a range of mountains and hills forming the ‘backbone’ of the north of England.
Because of its remoteness, because of the varied and often difficult nature of its terrain, and because of the extremes of weather encountered in its high and wild places, it’s the most challenging of all of the National Trails. But it’s also – for those very reasons – the most rewarding.
Wendy and I joined the Pennine Way at Byrness rather than at Kirk Yetholm. This meant that we missed the first twenty-nine miles of the trail. But, being End to Enders rather than Pennine-Wayers, we were able to do this with a clear conscience.
End to Enders are honour-bound to walk a continuous line between John o’Groats and Land’s End. But apart from that, anything goes.
Our first day’s hike along the Pennine Way took us sixteen miles across farmland and moors, and along forest tracks, from Byrness to the village of Bellingham.
Although the walking was fairly level, it was slow and difficult because there was often no clear path, and because of the mud and the water.
My clearest memories of that day are of wet boots and sodden socks, of slipping and squelching along muddy forest paths, of sinking ankle-deep in moorland bogs, and of frequent backtracking and rerouting to find tolerably firm ground.
It soon became clear that the Pennine Way was going to be much tougher than either the Great Glen Way or the West Highland Way.
We spent the night at a busy campsite, just past Bellingham, and then set off, the next morning, on a fifteen-mile trek along yet more squelchy forest tracks and boggy moorlands to Once Brewed, a tiny village consisting of a youth hostel, the confusingly named Twice Brewed Inn, and a smattering of farms.
A few miles short of Once Brewed, the Pennine Way joins the Hadrian’s Wall Path for a time. This part of the route requires a lot of scrambling up and down crags. So, by the time we reached the Once Brewed YHA, we were worn out, physically and mentally.
The hostel, which was soon to be demolished and replaced by a state-of-the-art eco-hostel, was in a tired and tatty condition. But a real bed is a real bed, a comfy chair is a comfy chair, and a hot shower is a hot shower. So we weren’t complaining.
For the seven miles between Once Brewed and the village of Greenhead, the Pennine Way continues to share a route with the Hadrian’s Wall Path.
This is a notoriously tough section, with steep ascents and descents over hills and crags. But it’s delightful. For much of the way, the path runs alongside exposed sections of the old Roman wall and past the remains of ancient turrets and milecastles. These add interest and drama to the walk.
Furthermore, because the route follows the top of a ridge, it offers glorious views of the surrounding countryside: a green patchwork of hills, fields, and forests, stretching away for an immense distance before meeting the sky.
We set up camp, early in the afternoon, on the grass outside a campers’ barn close to the ruins of twelfth-century Thirlwall Castle, and then passed a couple of pleasant hours in the tea-room at nearby Greenhead.
That night, the sky was clear and moonless. So I stayed up, past midnight, lying on a picnic bench beside our tent, gazing up at the stars.
Andromeda lay in the east, stretching out an imploring arm towards Perseus. The Great Bear stood low in the north, watching the Herdsman sink below the northwestern horizon. Directly overhead, Cygnus, the swan, stretched out his massive wings and glided silently along the Milky Way. The Andromeda nebula, 2.5 million light-years distant, stood out clearly: a tiny luminescent cloud in an ink-black sky.
After a while, I stopped constellation-hopping, switched off my brain, and simply gazed upwards. It was beautiful. Not just everyday beautiful, but Plato-beautiful. Beautiful with a capital ‘B’ – almost.
I often lie out and look at the stars. And, whenever I do, I experience the same longing I felt as a child, listening to the opening notes of Peer Gynt.
Of all the sights the world affords, no other brings me half as close to the divine, to the perfect and the unchanging, to Beauty Itself.
But there’s something else too: a curious inner trembling, an unsettling but oddly comforting sense of being lost in something vast, a strangely uplifting sense of loneliness and insignificance.
In the past, I have wondered if this experience is peculiar to me. But, of course, it isn’t. It is, in fact, an experience common enough to have acquired a label. The same label that Longinus used when discussing great works of poetry and rhetoric: the sublime.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wealthy young gentlemen would often round off their education by embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe, and steeping themselves in the art and culture of the Renaissance and classical antiquity.
These tours inevitably required them to cross the Alps. And, although, at first, these mountain crossings were considered to be arduous, albeit necessary inconveniences, over time they came to be viewed as highlights of the Tour.
The immensity and grandeur of the peaks, their inaccessibility and remoteness, their formless, chaotic beauty, the sense of danger they evoked, their utter imperviousness to human plans and desires – all of these gave rise to feelings of awe.
In 1688, in a letter describing a walking tour of the Alps, the English critic and dramatist John Dennis wrote that ‘the sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz. a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled’.
In the same letter, he took the term the sublime, which had previously been used only in discussions of rhetoric and literature, and used it to label this intense aesthetic experience.
A number of British writers, such as Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Hildebrand Jacob, later developed this idea of the sublime as a quality in nature.
In a 1735 essay entitled ‘How the mind is raised to the sublime’, Hildebrand Jacob listed some of the objects in nature that can evoke a sense of the sublime:
All the vast, and wonderful scenes, either of delight, or horror, which the universe affords . . . such as unbounded prospects, particularly that of the ocean, in its different situations of agitation, or repose; the rising or setting sun; the solemnity of moon light; all the phaenomena in the heavens, and objects of astronomy. We are moved in the same manner by the view of dreadful precipices; great ruins; subterraneous caverns, and the operations of nature in those dark recesses[.]
The experience of the sublime is one of the most profound that life affords. Lying there, that night, awed by the immensity of space and acutely conscious of my own insignificance, I felt it strongly. And, ‘at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled’.
The twenty-mile section of the Pennine Way from Greenhead to the market town of Alston is difficult to navigate, difficult to negotiate, and consists of unremarkable farmland and moorland.
It’s difficult to navigate because the waymarks are few and far between, because they don’t always point in precisely the right direction, and because they sometimes point in entirely the wrong direction.
Navigational difficulties are made all the more acute if, like Wendy and me, you are travelling from north to south.
There’s much talk, in England, of the so-called ‘North– South divide’ whereby Southerners are said to enjoy all kinds of economic, educational, and cultural advantages over Northerners.
Nowhere is this more apparent than on the Pennine Way. Those walking it from the south have access to any number of guidebooks detailing every step of the way, and benefit from largely adequate signing en route.
Those walking it from the north have access to precisely no guidebooks (it’s impossible to gain any useful information by reading a South–North guide backwards), and very often have to make do with signs showing
them where they’ve been rather than where they’re going.
The most remarkable example of North–South bias I saw on the Pennine Way was a notice warning Southerners entering a field to ‘Beware of the bull’. This self-same notice served as the only indication to Northerners that they had just left a field with a bull in it.
On the day that Wendy and I walked from Greenhead to Alston, our navigational difficulties were further compounded by mist and rain.
The trickiest sections of marsh and moorland on this part of the Pennine Way have no paths. So walkers must rely on a trail of infrequent marker posts to guide their steps. These get swallowed up in the mist and the rain, leaving those without advanced map-and-compass skills blundering around like the biblical madman among the tombs.
The difficulties of negotiation are every bit as great as the difficulties of navigation.
This is first and foremost because large sections of both moorland and farmland here are marshy. So a false step can leave you ankle-deep or knee-deep in water. This necessitates hopping, skipping, and jumping your way from dryish-looking patch to dryish-looking patch, and hoping that those patches really are as dryish as they appear.
There are also places where you have to fight your way through knee-high vegetation that catches at your boots and conceals potentially ankle-breaking rabbit holes.
The cattle also pose problems.
Along the Pennine Way, there are lots of notices warning hikers that cows with calves can become aggressive, and that it’s dangerous to walk between a cow and her young. This is no joke. According to the UK’s National Office for Statistics, an average of five people per year are trampled to death, and dozens more injured, by cows.
Unfortunately, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid getting between a cow and her calves. This is especially true on misty days when you can’t see the cows and the cows can’t see you.
On this particular day, Wendy and I often found ourselves having to retrace our steps after stumbling across surprised, nervous, or seriously pissed-off-looking cows.
The net result of the rain, the fog, the marshy ground, the knee-high vegetation, the misleading waymarks, and the scary cows was that we made achingly slow progress. At one point, it took us an hour and twenty minutes to cover a single mile.
So, like many End to Enders before us, we abandoned the Pennine Way during the latter part of the day, and walked the last six miles to Alston along the blessedly easy South Tyndale Trail, which follows the route of the old South Tyndale Railway.
Thanks to this sneaky ruse, we arrived at the Alston YHA with plenty of time to relax before bedtime.
Better still, we had set apart the following day as a rest day, and therefore got to spend an additional twenty-four hours in Alston, visiting the shops and cafés on its cobble-stoned main street, and enjoying the fine views of the surrounding fells.
This was a jolly good thing, because the next section of our journey, twenty miles from Alston to Dufton, has the reputation of being the Pennine Way’s toughest.
We set off at an insanely early hour, anxious to give ourselves plenty of hours of daylight.
The walk began easily and pleasantly enough with a five-mile stretch through farmland and along the banks of the River South Tyne to the tiny village of Garrigill. From there, the Pennine Way winds its way upwards for several miles, across fells and hills, towards the summit of the notorious Cross Fell.
A substantial portion of this three-hour stretch is taken up by the Corpse Path: a steep trail comprised of loose stones, which requires zero navigational skills but is generally detested by hikers because of the heavy toll it takes on the ankles and the knees.
Wendy and I didn’t find it too bad. In fact, we quite enjoyed it. Partly because, coming at it from the north, we were walking uphill, which is easier on the joints than walking downhill. Partly because the weather was good. But mostly because, having psyched ourselves up for a long and gruelling day, we were making surprisingly swift and straightforward progress.
Things took a dramatic turn for the worse, however, when we reached Cross Fell and began to make our way across high ground to Great Dun Fell and beyond.
At 2,930 feet, Cross Fell is the highest point on the Pennine Way and the highest point in England outside the Lake District. At 2,782 feet, Great Dun Fell is not much lower.
The region between these two peaks suffers some of the worst weather in Britain, with mist on two hundred days a year, gale-force winds on a hundred days a year, and a mean annual temperature of just four degrees Celsius.
The weather on the ascent had been warm and sunny. But at the summit everything changed. We fought our way from Cross Fell to Great Dun Fell through a gale so strong that it blew us over more than once, through mist so thick that we could barely see one another, and through blinding, stinging rain.
Although it was the middle of summer, we had to raid our rucksacks for fleece jumpers, waterproofs, hats, and gloves to protect ourselves from the cold.
The route here is ill-defined and tricky to navigate. In some of the boggiest places, there are paths made from stone slabs, but apart from that it’s a matter of walking between man-made piles of stones known as cairns.
In such poor weather, these cairns are invisible, and not even the best map-and-compass skills can save you from constant blundering and backtracking.
In the end, I had to place my entire faith in my smartphone’s GPS. ‘The GPS says we’re west of the trail,’ I would say to Wendy, shouting to make myself heard above the gale. ‘So we have to go this way . . .’
In this manner, we battled our way to Great Dun Fell and beyond, stopping inside a low-walled stone shelter, part way across, for a few minutes’ blessed relief from the wind.
After Great Dun Fell, there’s a brief descent, followed by a final climb to the summit of Knock Old Man. After this, the trail leads steadily downwards for five miles to Alston.
This descent, though tough on the knees, was a pleasure and a delight. With each step, the wind dropped, the mist thinned, and the temperature rose.
Being an inexperienced walker, it came as a glorious surprise to me to discover that beneath the summits, below the cloud line, lay a world still bathed in warmth and sunshine: a wholesome, joyful, welcoming world.
We arrived at the YHA in Dufton – a quintessentially English village centred upon a splendid old-fashioned village green – in great good humour, having conquered the longest and toughest section of the Pennine Way.
By this stage, I had become aware that the beauty of the Pennine Way is of a very different sort than the beauty of the Great Glen Way and the West Highland Way.
The beauty of those other trails – at least, insofar as Wendy and I experienced them – is predominantly of a gentle, harmonious kind. It’s the beauty of green meadows and rolling hills, of purple-flowering heather and yellow-flowering broom, of tranquil lakes and gurgling streams, and of forest paths dappled in sunlight.
But the beauty of the Pennine Way is often harsh and discordant, and, at times, not unmixed with a trace of ugliness. It’s the beauty of marshes and bogs, of jagged rocks and formless crags, of meagre trees on windswept moors, of fearful cascades, and of mist-shrouded peaks.
The landscapes of the Great Glen Way and the West Highland Way are beautiful in a way that evokes feelings of tranquillity and pleasure, whereas the landscapes of the Pennine Way have more of the sublime about them. They too give pleasure, but of a more acute kind, which stimulates as often as it soothes the mind.
Earlier in my journey, I had asked myself what it is that makes the countryside so soothing to the spirit and so refreshing to the soul. But the question had proved too deep and difficult for me to make much progress with it. Fortunately, however, finer intellects than mine have tackled the same question with greater success. Most notably, Schopenhauer.
Like many nineteenth-century intellectuals, Schopenhauer weighed in on the then fashionable debate about the beautiful and the sublime, and the wa
y we experience them. His account runs as follows.
When we encounter a beautiful object, such as a flower or a mountain lake, we may, if we are in a suitable frame of mind, lose ourselves in contemplation of it. At such times, our ego, our desire, our will, is temporarily quieted. We appreciate the object not for what it is in relation to ourselves, but simply for what it is in itself. We take a disinterested pleasure in it.
For as long as this aesthetic experience lasts, we are freed from our ordinary, self-conscious way of apprehending the world. We enjoy, for a time, the profound tranquillity of will-less contemplation.
But when we encounter the sublime – perhaps when gazing up into a starry sky or looking out over the edge of a precipice – the experience is more complex.
Sublime objects have something about them that is hostile to the human will, something that overpowers, or threatens, or overwhelms, something of pain or fear. They have a kind of beauty – often breath-taking in its intensity – but it is a terrible beauty.
Such things reveal to us the smallness and insignificance of ourselves, our wills, and our desires. In doing so, they enable us, for a time, to abandon ourselves, and to give ourselves over to the world.
When we contemplate the sublime, we don’t so much forget ourselves as free ourselves. We don’t lose consciousness of the will and its desires, but instead are liberated from them. And this gives rise to a kind of rapture, to, in Schopenhauer’s words, a ‘state of elevation’.
If all of this sounds a bit fanciful and overblown, I can state quite categorically, from my own experience, that it isn’t. It describes exactly the way I feel when I gaze up at the stars. On the one hand, I am conscious of myself and my cares and my desires, but, on the other hand, I am blissfully conscious that they don’t amount to a hill of beans.
From Dufton, the Pennine Way heads in an easterly direction for thirteen miles to Langdon Beck.
For JoGLErs, like Wendy and me, this section of the Way is a complete waste of time and effort in a purely goal-orientated sense, since Langdon Beck is actually further away from Land’s End than Dufton is. But, despite this, we enjoyed it immensely.
