‘Which one are you using?’
‘The bible,’ he says.
‘Wainwright,’ says the son.
The father lifts his hand to show me the Pennine Way Companion, with one of Alfred Wainwright’s trademark sketches on the blue-and-white cover, below his trademark signature. ‘Can’t fault it,’ he says, holding it out towards me, the bookmark of his squat red thumb inserted between dog-eared, rain-blotted pages. The son then raises his own identical copy of the book, open at the same place, and when the wind riffles the paper I notice boyish handwriting in the columns and rows of the back pages, numbers and words in blue and red ink, his own personal record of departure times and arrival times and weather conditions, diligently entered in the ‘Reader’s Log’ which Wainwright thoughtfully provided for the more statistically inclined walker. We go our separate ways, but when I glance backwards I notice that the boy has slipped his arm through the hook of his father’s elbow. Then they disappear into the mist. A few minutes later I pass about seven or eight elderly ramblers sitting on a grass bank eating sandwiches, saturated with drizzle, staring into the fog and singing, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside, oh I do like to be beside the sea.’
As far as I can tell Alfred Wainwright was a funny old stick. My memory of him is entirely derived from television documentaries which may have become muddled with Fast Show sketches and episodes of The League of Gentlemen, so he always comes to mind as a somewhat curmudgeonly character, extolling the beauty of one hill while damning the ugliness of another, a man with silver glasses, silver hair under a flat cap and a pipe between his teeth, often picking his way very slowly across some scree slope or boulder-heap in decidedly pre-modern walking apparel, before rendezvousing with a woman called Betty in a misted-up Austin 1100 in a quarry in Cumbria. Wainwright walked the Pennine Way in ‘bits and pieces’ over an eighteen-month period, during two foot-and-mouth outbreaks and in what sounds to have been almost constant rain. At the end of his Pennine Way Companion, dated New Year 1968, he hopes that fellow walkers enjoy the journey but advises against looking for him anywhere along the route, because ‘I’ve had enough of it.’ ‘Characterful’ would be one way of describing the book, though less charitable critics might be more inclined towards ‘chauvinistic’, citing his constant use of the male pronoun, his reference to the ‘brotherhood’ of hikers, his description of the walk as a good excuse for ‘getting away from the wife on some 30–40 occasions’ (only compounded by the asterisked apology, ‘Sorry, girls!’) and his comment that on one day he suffered ‘the ultimate ignominy of having to shelter under a woman’s brolly’. Yet the books are without doubt works of art, and part of that eccentric English tradition in which the oddball amateur working at the personal, local level comes to be regarded eventually as an unparalleled genius with almost universal appeal. In that sense, Wainwright is the William Blake of walking. His dogged obstinacy even resulted in his Pennine Way Companion being formatted back to front, on the basis that the north should always be at the top and the south at the bottom, resulting in his running commentary and accompanying strip-maps beginning on page 171 and ending on page 5. For the traditional walker following the recognised route from Edale’s starting pistol to Kirk Yetholm’s chequered flag this is probably a bit annoying, but for me, matching Wainwright’s contrariness stride for stride, page for page, it is inadvertently convenient. Opposite the iconic handwriting and scrupulous cartography, on the evenly numbered pages, are some three hundred drawings of bridges, stiles, copses, churches, cairns, houses, fences, walls, landmarks and features of every type, which despite being grainy, black-and-white sketches seem to radiate with a sense of precision and texture, and speak of Wainwright the draughtsman, a man determined to make everything as clear and exact as possible but to do so in his own way, or not to do it at all.
*
In my own way I’m making good progress today, despite the fog, or perhaps even because of it, with no view or vista to divert and distract, and that alluring, elusive brightness always just up ahead, tempting me forward at full speed. One becalmed stretch of heath is populated by nothing other than thistles, some purple-headed, others topped with flaring white plumes, a lot of them a good five foot in height, absolutely perpendicular, symmetrical and still, ghostly in the mist, a further discouragement against dawdling or slackening the pace. In fact I am surging on, veritably powering forth, so much so that I’ve crossed the halfway point of today’s section well before lunchtime and an hour later am on the long slow descent into Horton-in-Ribblesdale, with Ribblesdale itself dutifully opening up to the west and its main settlement emerging in the distance, a cluster of houses under the black border of a railway line and beneath the gaping white cavity of a limestone quarry, as if the hillside had lost a tooth. Distance, I’ve come to realise, is not the determining factor in terms of travelling time – it’s all about terrain. Today’s leg is fourteen miles, but much of that is flattened track, mostly downhill, and the wind has followed me all the way. In terms of hours it’s probably the equivalent of an eight-mile walk over two high peaks, and about half the effort. Falling towards Horton I can now see that the quarry is terraced or ‘benched’, and semicircular, like a giant amphitheatre facing the town, and today’s performance includes a man on a ride-on mower cutting candy-striper into the grass on the football field, and a fly-past of several Canada geese. Far from slowing up on approach I seem to be accelerating, speeding down the rutted and water-scored track where rain has dumped the hill’s moraine in great piles on every corner and bend, then overshooting the rendezvous point of New Inn by several hundred metres, crossing the river and following the road all the way to the railway station, which is closed, as is Horton itself, it seems, before doubling back and ping-ponging around the empty streets until I run out of momentum and sit down on a wall. Just then a car pulls up, driven by Veronica. I don’t know Veronica, but there’s a copy of my book Kid placed prominently on the dashboard, next to the tax disc, and this being the pre-arranged signal for our assignation I jump in next to her and we drive off into the sunset. Or, as it’s sometimes referred to, the Lake District.
*
Grasmere is not on the Pennine Way of course, but giving a reading in the cradle of romanticism has been a date on my calendar every year for well over a decade, originally in the Prince of Wales Hotel but now removed to St Oswald’s Church, with Wordsworth’s grave just a few yards away, and his presence everywhere. I think of the reading as marking the beginning of summer, even though it usually rains, and often manage a bit of a ramble the next morning before heading back down the M6. One year, just before dawn, I set off up the old Corpse Road behind Dove Cottage, past the Coffin Stone, and after watching big metallic-coloured dragonflies zooming around above the glassy surface of a small duck pond, I headed directly up the hill towards Alcock Tarn. I had a yellow Labrador with me, which I’d unwittingly adopted for a couple of days. About halfway up the hill I stopped for a breather and let the dog off the lead, and away it went, crashing around in the bracken, chasing through the undergrowth doing its doggy things before eventually running out of steam and padding back towards me to sit panting and slavering at my feet. I’d shinned up to the top of a high dry-stone wall, and was looking back down towards the lake, the surface of which was completely unbroken, lying there like spilt mercury under the brightening sky. And that’s when I saw the deer. And not just any deer but a red deer, a stag, no more than twenty yards away under the lower branches of a chestnut tree, a big beast, side on, in profile, with a constellation of flies fizzing around its nose and another set at its rear end. I was close enough to see the contoured grain of its antlers, close enough even to see the dark, upturned limpet of its eye looking at everything in its orbit, everything apart from me, it seemed, because by some miracle I swear it hadn’t seen me, or heard me, and hadn’t heard the dog either. Neither had the dog got wind of the stag. I’d witnessed its reaction to sheep on several occasions, and knew for a fact it would have be
en exhilarated beyond control at the prospect of a wild deer. But for a few minutes, then a few minutes more, I just perched there on top of that wall, arbiter and sole observer of these two separate worlds, the world of the dog and the world of the stag, hunter and hunted, between which no sound or sight or scent could pass, apparently. And for as long as the event lasted, I felt as if I straddled two entirely distinct dimensions: how else to explain how these two finely tuned creatures with their hyper-receptive senses and hair-trigger nerves could be so close yet so completely unaware of each other’s existence.
Eventually the deer lumbered away up the hill, out of the shadow of the tree and into the morning light, so I could see now the redness of its fur, muted and streaky, like something dyed in blood then washed in water. Just as it crossed the horizon the great candelabra of its antlers became silhouetted against the torch of the sun, still low in the sky, and appeared to catch fire. Then off it went into the woods, igniting each copse and thicket with its flaming horns, spreading the morning as it went.
*
Wordsworth was the poet–walker par excellence. Writing about Wordsworth’s legs, his friend Thomas De Quincey once remarked, ‘undoubtedly they had been serviceable legs beyond the average standard of human requisition; for I calculate, upon good data, that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance of 175 to 185,000 English miles.’ From his sister Dorothy’s journals we can build up a comprehensive assessment of William’s walking habits, and I’m particularly fond of an entry from Monday 14 December 1801 stating that ‘Wm and Mary walked to Ambleside in the morning to buy mousetraps’. By Saturday of the same week, by my rough calculation, he had walked a further twenty-five miles, pottering between errands and engagements in freezing conditions and with snow on the ground. Even in later life, a five-mile round trip to the hardware store or twenty-mile perambulation was hardly a rare occurrence, but these distances should be viewed as a gradual slowing down considering the marathons of his youth, most notably in 1790 when instead of revising for his exams at Cambridge he went walkabout in the French Alps with his friend Robert Jones. They covered some three hundred miles in two weeks; his autobiography in verse, The Prelude, not published until after his death and detailing much of the expedition, takes about the same time to read and would probably extend to the same distance if laid end to end. In the best passages, the blank verse by which Wordsworth describes the journey operates both as an indulgence and a restraint, encouraging a flowing, lyrical style suited to the intoxication of travel and the excitement of youth, but always at a measured and regular pace, so in every way it is a poem which goes by foot. To my mind, the best overview of Wordsworth’s great tour comes in Richard Holmes’s book Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, in which Holmes shadows Wordsworth’s experience of revolutionary France, combining literary criticism, personal memoir and a kind of biographical stalking to produce an altogether new form of travel writing. But the most compelling chapter is its opening one, in which the eighteen-year-old Holmes dons a brown felt hat and walks in the footsteps and hoofprints of Robert Louis Stevenson and his troublesome donkey from Le Monastier to St Jean-du-Gard in 1878, a walk of 220 kilometres through the ‘French highlands’, which Stevenson completed in under a fortnight. For all of Holmes’s encounters with farmers, waitresses, peewits and dogs, there’s a developing sense that his true companion through the Cévennes is Stevenson himself, often in the form of his twenty-three-thousand-word journal, written en route. ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go . . . the great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of life a little more nearly; to get down off this feather bed of civilisation, and to find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.’ That’s Holmes quoting Stevenson. Holmes treading in Stevenson’s footsteps, and a quarter of a century later, me riding on the shirt tail of Holmes.
Horton-in-Ribblesdale to Malham
15 MILES
OS Explorer OL2 West Sheet/South
Wednesday 21 July
I’m not on a literary pilgrimage, and have no presiding poetic spirit to guide me through the Pennines, but as of yesterday evening I do have my own Robert Jones, in the shape of Slug, a friend from college, who came sauntering around the corner of St Oswald’s last night with his anorak tied around his middle, a big grin on his face and nowhere to stay. I blag him a ticket for the reading and a three-course dinner (i.e. give him my meal then pay for my own) but when he starts eyeing the settee in my guest-house room as a possible bed for the night I have to draw the line. Slug is a geography graduate. Just. Despite which, he seems blissfully unaware of the popularity of the Lake District during holiday season, and is lucky to eventually find a vacancy at a nearby B&B. And blissfully unaware that the Pennine Way does not pass through Grasmere, so is surprised when we have to cadge a lift back to Horton-in-Ribblesdale to resume the trail.
‘Have you got any lunch with you?’ I ask him.
‘Not really. What sort of sandwiches have you got?’
‘Nothing you’d like. If we buy some, have you got a rucksack to put them in?’
‘Not really. But I could put them in yours.’
Andy from the Wordsworth Trust drops us in the car park, and I tell him to forget my fee for the reading, not because I’m Mr Moneybags but because it falls outside the terms and conditions of my walk, not to mention beyond its geographical boundaries, and I’m still determined to play by the rules. Then we go looking for a shop.
*
The phrase ‘happy-go-lucky’ could have been made for Slug. He wears the sunniness of his Cornish ancestry (actual surname Slegg) in his laugh and in his attitude, and always seems to land on his feet, no matter what heights he throws himself from or how many rotations he makes during the descent. So it doesn’t surprise me in the least when the only shop open in town is the Horton-in-Ribblesdale Tourist Information Centre incorporating the Pen-y-ghent cafe, stockists of both three-cheese brown-bread sandwiches and walking gear, though he is less fortunate in his choice of rucksack, which we realise later in the day is designed for a small child. The proprietor recognises me and insists on taking a photograph while I sign the visitors’ book, then insists on another photograph but this time with my sleeves rolled up, prompting Slug to ask him if he is a forearm fetishist. As well as his cheery disposition, the other thing I like about Slug is that he doesn’t get all his ideas from the same place, so while he is on the one hand a tree-hugging, hedge-planting vegetarian topiarist who goes on dry-stone-walling weekends and watches Fred Dibnah DVDs, he is also a wisecracking, weird-minded, nocturnal, hedonistic Leeds United-supporting metrosexual south Londoner when he wants to be.
‘Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’
‘Thought I’d surprise you.’
‘How long are you walking for?’
‘All the way. Unless it’s too far. Windermere?’
‘Where are you staying?’
‘Dunno. But don’t worry. You’ll think of something.’
*
Today’s stage is all about two summits, and one of those annoying days when instead of getting on with the job of heading south the Way strikes out in several compass directions, including north, in order to drag the weary traveller over Pen-y-ghent and Fountains Fell, just because they’re there. Pen-y-ghent (possibly translated as ‘hill on the border’) is the smallest of that trio of summits often lumped together as the Three Peaks, Ingleborough being the next highest and Whernside the big daddy at just a few flagpoles short of 2,500 feet. To become a member of the Three Peaks Club the twenty-five-mile route connecting the hills must be circumnavigated in less than twenty-four hours. There’s also a Three Peaks Fell Race where knotty, knobbly, knuckled, pain-retardant people in numbered bibs somehow get around the course in about three hours, and a cyclo-cross version, where similarly formed and attired people do it even faster but with a bicycle on their shoulders.
True to form the summit is covered in mist as we set of
f up the walled, bumpy track of Horton Scar Lane, so we don’t get to see the classic double profile, where the millstone grit cap of the hill juts out above the limestone plinth it rests on. Instead we see what looks to be an almost vertical path heading directly into the clouds, like a ladder into heaven, and about halfway up it a big yellow digger. I recall Colin saying something about working up here today and fancy that we might be in for a round of wine gums or a quick herbal remedy at the very least, but when we reach it the digger is inactive and forlorn, its metal tracks sinking into the soft ground, its long articulated arm propping it against the slope, the giant claw full of dirt and stones. It seems more abandoned than unattended, and utterly incongruous, like the London bus pulled out of Antarctic ice and the Second World War bomber found on the moon – except this is real. When I try the glass-panelled door it swings open, but there are no keys in the ignition, and I even wonder if this is what passes for joy-riding in these parts, hot-wiring a four-ton excavator and ditching it halfway up one of England’s highest peaks. Such thefts usually end in immolation, and the Pennine moors where I live are dotted with the rusting carcasses of burnt-out cars, the make and model unrecognisable in charred, skeletal form, each one an ugly shrine to some act of profitless criminality, the culprits having sloped off to a country bus stop or village railway station for public transport back to wherever they came from. There are no signs of torching here, though in this dampness and in this wind, striking a match to initiate the fire-raising process wouldn’t be an easy thing.
In fact the wind is increasing with every contour; at about 1,900 feet when the route swings due south for the diagonal climb to the summit it’s a loud and continuous blast, furiously opposed to our progress, one of those streams of air that seems particularly directed at anyone trying to go any further, even if the path is so deeply scored it would be difficult to get out of it, let alone lose it. We presume we’re at the top when we arrive at an S-shaped shelter and hunker down in one of its curves, though the wind doesn’t seem to be bothering three Scousers who suddenly pop up from the other side of the hill in T-shirts and shorts and manage to light cigarettes without too much trouble. We chat for a while, their throats full of Liverpudlian fricatives, their mouths full of smoke, which as soon as it leaves their lips is flung backwards at a million miles an hour into the fog-filled north.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 16
