Walking with Plato

by Gary Hayden

  We arrived at Skipton, purchased a new rucksack, and then walked southeast for a few miles to re-join the Pennine Way. After that, we headed south across hilly pastures to Cowling, where we camped beside a farmhouse B&B, on a sloping field covered in sheep-poo.

  The following morning, we set off early on a sixteen-mile hike through Brontë country to the market town of Hebden Bridge.

  It was a cold, wet walk through some of the most inhospitable moorland in England. Everything that grows there is adapted to survive rather than to thrive. The heather, the grasses, and the few scanty trees are coarse, tough, and self-contained. They give the impression of clinging on doggedly to life rather than embracing it.

  The most famous landmark on this section of the Pennine Way, located between the bleak wilderness of Stanbury Moor and the equally bleak wilderness of Wadsworth Moor, is Top Withens, a ruined farmhouse that is said to have been the inspiration for the Earnshaw family home, Wuthering Heights, in Emily Brontë’s classic novel.

  That Wuthering Heights is one of the great works of English literature, I wouldn’t dispute for a moment. But personally I don’t care for it. It’s too bleak, too savage, and too cruel. It disturbs me.

  There’s a popular misconception – primarily among people who haven’t read it, but also, surprisingly, among some people who have – that it’s a love story. But it isn’t. It’s a hate story. There’s passion in it. And there’s desire, of a sort. But as far as the principal characters, Catherine and Heathcliff, are concerned – and most of the other characters, come to that – there’s little I recognize as love.

  Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s sister, had it about right, I think, when she described Heathcliff’s love for Catherine as ‘perverted passion and passionate perversity’.

  I’ve read Wuthering Heights three times, and each time I’ve wondered what prompted Emily to write it. Why introduce so much gratuitous misery into the world?

  But walking across those wild and inhospitable moors, that day, I began to understand.

  The Brontë family lived in the parsonage in the village of Howarth, which lies within easy reach of Top Withens and the surrounding moors. So Emily would have been intimately acquainted with that harsh and unforgiving landscape. Small wonder, then, that she was inspired to produce such a harsh and unforgiving novel.

  In an 1848 edition of the British newspaper The Examiner, a reviewer wrote: ‘Whoever has traversed the bleak heights of Hartside or Cross Fell . . . and has been welcomed there by the winds and rain on a “gusty day”, will know how to estimate the comforts of Wuthering Heights in wintry weather’ – which says it all, I think.

  From Top Withens, the Pennine Way continues for another six or seven miles across Wadsworth Moor and Heptonstall Moor before passing Hebden Bridge.

  Since Wendy and I were spending the night at a hostel in Hebden Bridge, we had to take a mile-and-a-half detour off the Pennine Way, into town. This turned out to be an exhausting slog, which involved a long steep descent, followed by a series of outrageously steep ups and downs. The initial descent was heart-breaking, since we knew that we would have to make up the height we had lost the following morning, when we returned to the Pennine Way.

  Hebden Bridge is a spectacular town: a hotchpotch of imposing stone buildings, cobbled streets, rivers, streams, canals, roads, and railway lines, all crammed into the steep sides of the Upper Calder Valley.

  It developed as a mill town in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, courtesy of its steep hills and fast-flowing streams. Today, thanks to its location halfway between Leeds and Manchester, it’s a commuter town, and thanks to its gorgeous stone buildings, cobbled streets, boutiques, and pretty waterways, it also has a thriving tourist industry.

  For me, the most charming feature of Hebden Bridge was the improbable steepness of its streets. Charming to look at, that is. But when it came to walking out of town, the next morning, to re-join the Pennine Way, those steep inclines were an absolute bitch.

  The seventeen-mile stretch of the Pennine Way from Hebden Bridge to Standedge (pronounced Stannidge) is perhaps the most tedious section of the Pennine Way. It runs across drab moorland, punctuated only by dull streams, unattractive drains, and un-scenic reservoirs.

  End to End blogger Mark Moxon opens his discussion of this section of the Pennine Way with the words: ‘Ye gods, what a boring walk!’ and goes on to say that the bit where it crosses the M62 motorway is probably the highlight of the whole thing.

  I think it’s fair to say that these sentiments are echoed by the majority of Pennine Way walkers. However, Wendy and I were fortunate enough to cross it on a misty day, which lent it a pleasing air of mystery and romance.

  We arrived, late in the afternoon, at a tiny campsite in the grounds of the Carriage House pub, near Standedge. The weather was cold and damp, and our camping pitch was strewn with soggy litter from the previous occupants. So we decamped into the pub until bedtime.

  From Standedge, the Pennine Way heads east across Wessenden Moor, passing alongside a number of small reservoirs, and then bends southward, climbing up through Wessenden Head Moor to the boggy, peaty summit of Black Hill.

  Wainwright, the celebrated fell walker and guidebook author, describes Black Hill as his least favourite place on the Pennine Way. ‘The broad top really is black,’ he says. ‘It is not the only fell with a summit of peat but no other shows such a desolate and hopeless quagmire to the sky. This is peat naked and unashamed. Nature fashioned it, but for once has no suggestion for clothing it.’

  It’s all a matter of taste though. Personally, I like bleak places. I find them exhilarating. And I’m not alone in that respect. Wendy feels the same way. And Thoreau, the nineteenth-century American author, philosopher, and naturalist, went so far as to express a marked preference for the bleak over the picturesque. In his essay Walking, he wrote: ‘My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!’

  From Black Hill, the Pennine Way continues south, and before long reaches Laddow Rocks, an exposed crag that’s popular with climbers. Then the path traverses the side of a steep ravine, with a vertigo-inducing drop to Crowden Great Brook below, before descending into Crowden.

  This was an easy-paced and enjoyable twelve-mile walk until about an hour from the end when the rain began to beat down. The downpour came as no surprise. In this part of the world they have a saying: ‘If you can’t see the fells, it’s raining. If you can see the fells, it’s going to rain.’ But, although the rain wasn’t unexpected, it still dampened our spirits.

  The appearance of the campsite at Crowden did little to revive them. Rivulets of water ran down the leaves of the trees and bushes, glistening beads of water clung to the grass, the sides of the tents sagged beneath the weight of water, and still the rain came down.

  We set up our wet tent on the wet field, and then squatted outside in our wet raincoats and wet over-trousers, heating up a tin of spaghetti hoops and raindrops.

  From Crowden, our original plan had been to continue to the southern end of the Pennine Way, at Edale. But with more rain forecast, and with the hostel and the B&Bs at Edale full, and with no other option at Edale but to camp, we decided that it would be best to abandon the Pennine Way and head instead for the small Derbyshire town of Chapel-en-Le-Frith.

  The following morning, as we squatted outside in the rain, scraping fat black slugs from the wet interior of our outer-tent prior to packing it into our wet backpacks, we felt sure that we had made the right decision.

  Being End to Enders, we had no guilty qualms about quitting the Pennine Way early. For us, it had only ever been a means to an end, and never an end in itself. But still we felt a tinge of regret as we bade farewell to the moors and the mountains. Because, as means to an end go, it had been pretty bloody magnificent.

  I travelled among unknown men,

  In lands beyond the sea;

  Nor, England! did I know til then

  Wha
t love I bore to thee.

  —William Wordsworth, ‘I travelled among unknown men’

  Chapter Six

  Heart of England

  Crowden – Chapel-en-Le-Frith – Hartington – Dimmingsdale – Little Haywood – Lichfield – Coleshill – Henley-in-Arden – Bidford-on-Avon – Dumbleton – Cheltenham – Painswick – Cam – Old Sodbury – Bath

  The sixth stage of our End to End journey took us south along two long-distance walking trails: the Heart of England Way and the Cotswold Way.

  The Heart of England Way runs for about a hundred miles through the Midlands, from Milford Common in Staffordshire to Bourton-on-the-Water in the Cotswolds. It skirts around the eastern rim of Birmingham, England’s second-largest city, and passes close to the city of Coventry. But, despite this, it’s not at all urban. In fact, for the most part, it feels deeply rural.

  Of all of the National Trails, it is – with its woods, pastures, country lanes, canals, orchards, cultivated fields, steepled churches, and sleepy villages – perhaps the most quintessentially English.

  The Cotswold Way is England’s newest National Trail. It runs 102 miles from Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire to Bath in Somerset. For most of its length, it follows the Cotswold Edge escarpment, zigzagging its way between the peaks and troughs of the Cotswold Hills.

  It is absurdly pretty, running through a sculpted landscape so picturesque that it might have been designed by The Walt Disney Company. Among a host of other delights, it boasts exhilarating high-level views, lush meadows sprinkled with cattle and sheep, shady woodlands, and charming villages with houses of honey-coloured Cotswold stone.

  But before Wendy and I could sample any of these delights, we had to spend four days walking an improvised route to the northern end of the Heart of England Way, at Milford Common.

  The first instalment, from Crowden to Chapel-en-Le-Frith began pleasantly enough with a three-mile stretch along the Pennine Way and the Trans Pennine Trail. But after that it was road-walking all the way.

  The highlight of the day came mid-morning when we stopped for coffee and cake in the centre of Glossop. Then it was down to business with a long damp trudge along the A624.

  There’s no campsite near Chapel-en-Le-Frith. So the walk ended with a decadent stay at the Forest Lodge B&B, with a king-size bed, a corner bath, and a hospitality tray stocked with biscuits and chocolates.

  Our onward journey to the village of Hartington was another dull, damp slog. We had intended to walk the first half-dozen miles along minor roads to the spa town of Buxton, and then head off into the moors, along the Midshires Way and the Pennine Bridleway, to Hartington. But the weather was so foul that from Buxton we decided to forget the moors and continue along minor roads, through hilly farmland, to our destination.

  For the last few miles, we were walking into driving rain, which proved more than a match for my battered old waterproofs. By the time we arrived at the Hartington YHA, I was wet through and shivering, and had to stand in a hot shower for a full ten minutes before my teeth stopped chattering.

  I have remarked more than once, in these pages, upon the fact that on JoGLE, as in life, good times never last, and neither do bad times. ‘Weeping may endure for a night,’ as the good book says, ‘but joy cometh in the morning.’

  And at Hartington, joy did come in the morning.

  Hartington is a pretty little village, situated in the Derbyshire Peak District, close to the Staffordshire border. It has everything an English village should have: a history dating back to the Middle Ages, stone houses and cottages, a sandstone church with a fine tower, a village square complete with duck pond, and a seventeenth-century manor house, Hartington Hall, which is now the YHA.

  It’s the perfect place for weary, weather-beaten travellers to enjoy a rest day. And that’s precisely what Wendy and I did.

  And, to cap it all, we had the thrill of posting home fifteen pounds of camping equipment.

  The recent run of cold wet weather, which was only likely to worsen as autumn advanced, convinced us that, as far as we were concerned, the camping season was over. Consequently, we were able to lighten our backpacks to the tune of one tent, two sleeping-bags, two sleeping-bag liners, two sleeping-mats, two travel pillows, and sundry items of cooking equipment.

  Unburdening ourselves of these items lightened our spirits no less than our backpacks. From that point onwards, there would be no more setting up and taking down camp, no more scraping slugs from the inside of a wet outer-tent, no more early-hours trudges to toilet blocks, and no more crouching over a one-ring burner to cook one-pan meals. Instead, it would be hostels and bed and breakfasts all the way – and budget be damned!

  From Hartington, we walked sixteen forgettable miles, along minor roads, and along the banks of the River Manifold and the River Hamps, to Dimmingsdale, a forest area in the valley of the River Churnet.

  That night, we had the Dimmingsdale YHA, a somewhat Spartan but splendidly isolated woodland retreat, all to ourselves. After dinner, as the evening hours rolled pleasantly and uneventfully by, I remember thinking how glad I was that I had agreed to walk from End to End.

  I hadn’t set off upon JoGLE in the expectation that it would give me pleasure and make me happy. I had expected it to give Wendy pleasure and make her happy – and that was a big incentive. But for me, on a purely personal level, it had been about neither pleasure nor happiness. It had been about challenge.

  JoGLE, in some vague sense, had seemed to be a challenging and worthwhile thing to do. So I decided to do it. And, having begun it, it never once occurred to me – not for a single moment – to stop.

  No matter how footsore I got, or how weary, or how wet, or how bored, I plodded on. Not because I believed that enduring footsoreness, weariness, wetness, and boredom would make me a happier person in the long run, but simply because I knew that enduring those things would get me to Land’s End.

  But, against all of my expectations, I discovered that plodding on, day after day, concerning myself only with getting to Land’s End, and concerning myself not at all with trying to becoming a happier person, I had become a happier person.

  The nineteenth-century English philosopher and social reformer John Stuart Mill wrote:

  Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness: on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit . . . Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.

  This profound truth – that you can find happiness only when you’re not looking for it – was expressed with admirable brevity by the English scientist and novelist C.P. Snow: ‘The pursuit of happiness is a ridiculous phrase, if you pursue happiness, you’ll never find it.’

  This is precisely what I had found, and was learning more and more each day, on JoGLE. The quest to reach Land’s End was taking up so much of my time and energy and focus, and was absorbing me so completely, that I had forgotten to ask myself whether I was happy or not. And, as a result, I felt happier than I had done in years.

  The next day’s walk was another purely functional one, designed to get us from Dimmingsdale to the village of Little Haywood, which lies close to the northern end of the Heart of England Way.

  Our twenty-mile route took us almost entirely along country roads with the occasional farm track thrown in for good measure, and was memorable only for a couple of canine-related adventures.

  The first of these occurred when we had to pass through a farmyard.

  I always get nervous when I have to pass through farmyards. On account of the dogs.

  There are a small but significant number of farmers (the few bad apples that spoil the bunch, no doubt) who like to use their dogs to deter walkers from passing through their farmyards, or, failing that, to make passing through as unpleasant as possible.

  And note that I’m not talking about trespassers here. I’m talking about legitimate walkers using public rights of way, including National Trails.r />
  Some of these farmers keep vicious, snarling brutes chained up or caged up, out of sight, in their farmyards. This means that hikers passing that way must either retreat and re-route, or must screw their courage to the sticking place and press on, trusting that the farmer isn’t such an out-and-out psychopath that he’d allow them to be torn limb from limb by free-range Rottweilers.

  Other farmers allow their dogs to roam freely around the farmyard and molest hikers to their doggy hearts’ content. These dogs are never such life-threateningly vicious brutes as the chained-up ones, but are nevertheless perfectly capable of causing injury, should their inclinations ever turn that way.

  On this particular day, our route took us through one such farmyard.

  My heart sank as we drew near and heard the sound of barking. Moments later, not one but three dogs came tearing towards us and then began leaping up against the farmyard gate and barking at us. They were young dogs – border collies –– but quite old enough to bite.

  Wendy and I approached them slowly, hoping, but not really expecting, that the farmer would appear to call them off.

  He didn’t.

  I turned to Wendy and grimaced. ‘What choice do we have? We have to go through . . .’

  I eased open the gate, squeezed through, and entered the farmyard in what I hoped was a suitably calm and assertive manner. All three dogs immediately set upon me: jumping up, balancing their front paws on my chest, and nuzzling and licking me in an ecstasy of delight.

  ‘Quick! Take a photo!’ I said, handing my smartphone to Wendy.

  As she fumbled with the controls, I abandoned myself to their canine caresses. It was a beautiful moment.

  Then, from a wooden kennel close to the farmhouse, Mother emerged. She lowered her head and shoulders in a ready-to-pounce attitude and gave a low growl that said, in no uncertain terms, ‘Leave my kids the fuck alone!’