Thwaite, when we clomp through, seems all rental cottages and tea shops, and the noise of our boots as we walk stride for stride up the narrow main street sounds intrusive and exaggeratedly yobbish, enough to bring every hanging basket and quaint chimney pot crashing to the earth. At a stile just outside the village, Colin proudly points out one of the solid oak Pennine Way signs which he himself commissioned. To prove its robustness he thumps it with the heel of his hand, and it trembles momentarily before resuming its solidity and stillness, its strong arm pointing unwaveringly west. Half a mile later he bends down and without breaking stride scoops up a yellow flower growing at the side of a wall.
‘Tormentil, good for headaches and hangovers,’ he says, before nipping the stalk between his thumb and forefinger and biting off the head.
‘Well?’ I ask him as he stands there ruminating.
‘Well,’ he says, and we begin the toiling, heavy ascent of the Fell, leaning into the gradient, putting our shoulders to gravity’s wheel. In shape, Great Shunner resembles a splayed horseshoe, and our ascent follows the south-east-facing rim, with Buttertubs Pass to the left under a distant cairn called Lovely Seat. It’s slow going but we’re lured and enticed across one section by a distressed and animated golden plover. I don’t recall ever seeing one of these birds close up, or bearing witness to its ‘goldenness’ in such definition and resolution without the aid of binoculars. Trying to draw us away from a nest or its young, this female keeps flapping into the air then coming down about twenty yards or so in front, peep-peeping conspicuously, wanting us to follow or chase, and because it keeps landing on the path we’re happy to do just that, a win–win situation, the bird believing its diversion strategy has worked, me and Colin glad of the company and the encouragement. It takes us to an area which, if it were on a golf course, would be cordoned off with ‘Ground Under Repair’ notices, thirty or forty square yards either side of the path which Colin has sown with Natural England Upland Grass Seed Mix to combat the effects of erosion, and the seeds seem to have sprouted. He shoos a few sheep away from his unlikely and implausible garden, and when I say to him that growing grass up here must be like painting the Forth Rail Bridge, he just shrugs, tears open a Mars Bar and strides on.
‘This stone needs re-laying,’ he says a little further along a length of causey paving, or, ‘I’ll have to come back and mend that,’ where two or three planks of duckboard have rotted away. It’s impressive that someone should take such a detailed interest in this remote place, noting the slightest defect or evidence of disrepair, and nothing short of amazing that he can talk about little patches of ground and small sections of the path as if they were a uniquely different terroir from the last or the next, in a landscape which to my eye consists of nothing but undifferentiated wilderness. On the grassy bank above a peat ditch he waits for me while I stuff my coat into the rucksack and refold the map, lying on his back, bare knees in the air, like one of those adult-kids in Blue Remembered Hills, agreeing with me that there are worse jobs in the world, belly-laughing through a mouthful of chocolate. In fact every time Colin turns around he seems to have something in his mouth, be it a wild flower, a turkey sandwich, a handful of wine gums or a stalk of grass. ‘Can’t beat a bit of sugar,’ he says ripping into a packet of Starburst, and I have to admire a man who finds time in his life for both chemically derived chewy fruit sweets and naturally occurring herbal remedies. He strides ahead again, the stone flags burping and squelching under his big boots, until we begin the final scramble to the top. On this steep ascent, Colin’s handiwork includes a long stair-carpet of coir matting to hold a crumbling peat bank in place, and several new steps, built around or to the side of some original steps which look medieval, or at the very least a couple of hundred years old.
‘Are they ancient?’ I ask him.
‘Yep.’
‘When do they date back to?’
‘Nineteen-eighties.’
*
We eat on the summit, in the cross-shaped, stone-built shelter with wooden beams to sit on, and take the north-facing seat, out of the wind. I feel as if we’ve really accelerated to the top at a brisk pace, but time and distance are hard to gauge in these climes, and a couple who we passed just outside Thwaite, slower and heavier units than ourselves, are only ten minutes behind us, and crack open a tin of biscuits in the next booth. I can’t see them, behind the wall, but I can smell their coffee, and can hear their giggling and the sound of chubby fingers prising bourbons and custard creams out of the plastic packaging. Someone else appears from nowhere, a woman walking a dog, then a couple of hikers, and suddenly all four bays are taken, although no words are exchanged, and we all get on with our lunches and snacks and mobile-phone conversations in the privacy of our own right angles.
Colin points out certain hills to the west and north, the panorama becoming more apparent as the cloud cover begins to fragment and sunlight brings distant peaks into sharper focus. Broad moorland ranges extend one way, punctuated by distinct and isolated prominences, with the more dramatic, clustered and unmistakable presence of the Lake District forming a serrated horizon to the west. He says, ‘Cross Fell looks clear. Be lovely up there today.’
The path leading south from the summit is an obvious lane of bright green grass, like a strip of turf flanked by rougher and darker vegetation, and beyond the plateau the way ahead is straightforward to the eye – a steady descent down the spine of a wide but tapering spur pointing directly into Wensleydale. You could close your eyes, curl in a ball and roll from here, and you’d probably end up in the right place. Colin powers on, his giant boots driving straight through puddles and bogs like some robust, heavy-duty military vehicle, with me dancing around in his wake, trying to island-hop between clumps of grass and slippery stones down a track which seems to double as a stream. As on the way up, he points out little areas of his own handiwork or makes a mental note of future repairs and projects he might undertake. We’re looking at a stand of dark green trees above Cotterdale, home to a colony of red squirrels, apparently, when a comedy troupe of a dozen rooks comes bowling and barging along the valley side, flapping and cronking, a kind of pantomime funeral party being tumbled and flustered by the wind, then being utterly upstaged and outnumbered by a squadron of twenty or so golden plover flying in formation and at dizzying speed overhead, turning together in an instant then sweeping south until they become little more than a glitter of gold-dust in the far distance before disappearing into the sun.
Eventually we stumble off the track, via Bluebell Hill, and onto the bridge by the Green Dragon pub, which owns or at least acts as the tollgate for Hardraw Force. Hardraw is England’s highest waterfall, highest only in the sense that it is the highest above ground, apparently, a distinction I can’t really begin to understand, though not something which unduly troubled Wordsworth when he visited here. Writing to Coleridge in 1799, he reported that, ‘After cautiously sounding our way over stones of all colours and sizes, encased in the clearest water formed by the spray of the fall we found the rock, which had before appeared like a wall, extending itself over our heads like the ceiling of a huge cave, from the summit of which the water shot directly over our heads into a basin, and among the fragments wrinkled over with masses of ice as white as snow, or rather, as Dorothy said, like congealed froth. The water fell at least ten yards from us and we stood directly behind it.’ So with Wordsworth having left his literary stamp on the place, and having already splurged on waterfall superlatives at High Force a couple of days ago, I decide to give it a miss, and head straight towards Hawes village along an old, slabbed path which follows the top edge of a sheep pasture, which was once a golf course. After crossing Haylands Bridge, where two young boys are attempting a high-wire act on the wall above the river, I say goodbye and thank you to Colin, who marches off towards a building under the trees with muddy Land Rovers parked outside, which he refers to as his office, though I can’t imagine Colin ever being content to push a pen or prod a keyboard for mo
re than a few minutes every day, and surely his real office is not a room in a building at all but the great outdoors, or at least that part of it occupied by Great Shunner Fell. I wish him luck. I wish him Kisdon Cottage.
Hawes’s reputation for old furniture emporiums and pastry outlets seems entirely justified looking through the shop windows on the main street; I don’t need a Victorian nest of tables or a Belfast sink right now but I can’t resist a pork pie, even though I’m within half a mile of a meal, and I’m still wiping the crumbs from my mouth when I knock at a big house like a rectory or vicarage in what might be a suburb or satellite of Hawes, if a market town of twelve hundred people is allowed such a thing, and watch for signs of movement through the stained glass in the door. I’ve never met Ann Pilling but I’ve read her poems, and I’ve seen the books Henry’s Leg and Amber’s Secret on my daughter’s bookshelf. She says, ‘You’re early,’ having opened the door, looked me up and down and figured out that the stubbly, wind-burnt, pastry-speckled face must belong to Simon Armitage, her guest for tonight. ‘And filthy,’ I tell her. Following her instructions I park my boots in the porch and strip off as many peat-coated, sweat-stained layers as is decently possible, then follow her through to the back of the house where several women are grouped around a teapot or toasting their backsides on the cooking range. I think I know them all, or some of them, but I’m too befuddled by walking to recall where or when I’ve met them before, or to remember their names, or understand why they should all be gathered in Ann Pilling’s kitchen. I gobble down a sizeable lump of sponge cake before a tour of the house leads me to my bedroom, a large high-ceilinged room with big furniture and a vast fireplace to one side with the words ‘Lord Keep My Memory Green’ carved in the stone above it. After a bath I fall asleep in a four-poster bed, the canopy overhead keeping the rain out of my dreams. Then wake about an hour later, listening to Ann’s husband, Joe, issuing parking guidelines outside in the yard, and hearing the growing chatter of voices downstairs. I lie on the bed for a while longer, watching five starlings perched on a set of telephone wires outside the window, like notes on a page of sheet music, and try to hum the tune, until another car arrives and pomps its horn, and the starlings scatter. Then I brush my teeth, tug a comb through my hair, glue on a smile and gather up my poems.
I have to admire Ann for throwing open the doors of her house to the general public. I wouldn’t. Chairs have been arranged in rows in the drawing room, right to the very front, so I have to scootch back against the mantelpiece to find room to stand and read without treading on someone’s toes or sitting in their lap. Not that I leap about or anything, or even move, or even take my eyes off the page. It is, from a visual perspective, little more than a man in a creased shirt holding a book in his hand for three quarters of an hour. But in terms of my requirements it’s completely quiet, there being no shortage of silence in this part of the world, and intimate, and friendly, and I’m touched that fifty people should venture out to a private house in a distant corner of North Yorkshire on a damp Monday night to hear poetry, some from as far away as Burnley and Leeds. In what feels to be a trusting and confessional atmosphere, and thinking again of journeys, both psychological as well as literal, I read a poem called ‘Roadshow’, set in Cornwall at the time of the 1999 eclipse, when St Ives was like Bethlehem at census time, with neither a meal nor bed to be had for love nor money. On hearing there was a Radio 1 roadshow being held on the rugby field at the top of the town, and still clinging to the idea that we were young and in touch, we decided to walk there, even though my wife was heavily pregnant and the lanes were narrow and steep. It took a good hour to climb the hill, hearing the drums and guitar chords and seeing the pulsing lights on the horizon, stopping every hundred yards or so to sit down and draw breath. But the very instant we crossed the touchline the show came to an abrupt end, and suddenly there were several hundred youthful, beautiful and energetic people swarming past us in the other direction, hungry for action and life. It was the end of one thing and the beginning of another, a complete coincidence and the perfect metaphor. It was a poem.
It’s not until I finish reading that I notice out of the corner of my eye the overspill crowd, half a dozen of them sitting on an assortment of chairs and stools in the hallway, and another four or five peering through the banister rails, like children who’ve crept downstairs after bedtime to spy on the grown-ups. They might be clutching teddy bears or sucking their thumbs. Or yawning. Or asleep.
Hawes to Horton-in-Ribblesdale
14 MILES
OS Explorer OL30 South Sheet, OL2 West
Tuesday 20 July
After handing over a stretched and bulging sock containing a staggering £247, Ann and her women wave me off and I set out along the road, creep through the field where the vet was trampled to death by cattle last year, hop over a gate and follow Gaudy Lane past Gaudy House Farm towards the edge of the moor. Which is not gaudy at all, either in shape or form, but blotted out by heavy mist, and even though I’m happy, excited even to be walking alone and to have the day to myself, all that elation evaporates as soon as I climb above four hundred feet, where I am absorbed by clouds. I lose the path very quickly, but I’m too miserable to worry about it, and eventually stumble across a few old footprints in the mud, then a line of worn grass through a bit of a heath, then a stile and eventually a sign, and without trying or particularly caring I’m back on track. Days in Cloudland can be a test of nerve and intelligence, especially on high ground or across remote and dangerous terrain, but on sections like today, a relatively straightforward traverse between two dales with towns anchoring each end of the line and none-too-distant roads on either side, they’re a test of imagination. Because without a view, the whole enterprise is pointless, a futile schlep, hours of visual confinement with nothing to see apart from your own feet, and nothing to do apart from carry on. The mist also exhibits properties of false hope, most notably a mirage effect, where sunlight seems always on the point of breaking through and where brightness and clarity seem always within reach, just beyond the next veil of fog, just a few steps ahead, the feeling that at any moment, particularly while ascending, you might emerge, like a rocket escaping the earth’s atmosphere, and be rewarded with a 360-degree view of a billion cubic miles, and stand eyeball to eyeball with the sun. It’s a cruel trick. One of the guide books talked about the mysterious and beguiling Snaizeholme Valley, which according to the map must be down to my right as I trudge up the muddy ditch of West Cam Road, but the only mystery is whether or not it exists at all, being nothing but grey mizzle. At times I’m navigating more by a sense of sound than anything else, my ears following the wind as it traces the surrounding topography, implying a hill to the south or a sudden falling away of the land to the north, then bringing the roar of a waterfall, or running water, then the call of an invisible kestrel, and the sound of restless trees, full of rumours and whispered oaths, hundreds of them, close by but hidden from sight.
From nowhere a young man in blue waterproofs appears then disappears after granting me only a millisecond of eye contact and without saying a word. As well as being surprised how few people there are on the Pennine Way, I find it extraordinary how many of them don’t want to chat or even exchange a few pleasantries, and simply power past with their heads down and their hands in their pockets. In fact I’ve been keeping a record of hikers heading in the opposite direction, making prejudicial assumptions about their motivation based entirely on physical appearance and general demeanour. Here’s the tally so far:
The Last Hurrah 24
The Exuberance of Youth 9
The Call of the Wild 17
She’s Left Me/I’ll Show Him 16
Bear Grylls/Ray Mears Box Set 9
Julia Bradbury 4
Midlife Crisis 11
Finding Myself 2
Away with the Fairies 1
Unclassifiable 26
Where I fit into this taxonomy of walking types I wouldn’t like to say, just as I c
an’t find the right category for the father-and-son team who come plodding up Cam High Road just after Kidhow Gate, although they are certainly my favourites so far. In the cloud I don’t see them till they’re a few yards away, the boy wiry and blond, about ten or eleven, in combat trousers and with a penknife clipped to his belt, his father overweight and scarlet-faced, stripped down to his vest, out of breath under a heavy pack. But there’s an aura around them which is more than just steam or mist, the boy looking adoringly up at his dad, the dad staring proudly ahead, the son proving to the father that he isn’t too young and the father proving to the son that he isn’t too old. And I like them even more when they stop for a chat, the dad reeling off their itinerary so far, the boy echoing his every word, verifying every fact and figure, every spot-height and distance, regurgitating his encyclopaedic knowledge of the Pennine Way after swallowing it whole.
‘Plain sailing down to Old Ing,’ says the father. ‘About five miles.’
‘Five and a quarter,’ the son chips in.
I tell them that the mist is bad all the way to Hawes, but the father says it won’t be a problem if they stick to the guide book.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 15
