*
I feel I am at the end of my tether
and don’t want to go on any longer.
Not like those climbers on Malham Cove –
dipping backwards for their bags of powder,
reaching upwards for the next hairline fracture,
hauling themselves from my binoculars.
And without enlargement they take on the scale
of last night’s stars in Malham Tarn,
inching upstream as the universe tilted, mirrored
till we burst their colours with a fistful of cinders.
I follow a line
from the base to the summit, waiting
for something to give, to lose its footing,
for signs of life on other planets.
Malham to Ickornshaw
16 MILES
OS Explorer OL2 South Sheet, OL21 North
Thursday 22 July
Today is a saunter, but a very long one, and tomorrow is the same distance again. I break this news to Slug via the old footballing cliché that ‘there will be some tired legs out there’, but with his toy rucksack full of finagled sandwiches and ‘borrowed’ drinks he seems up for it. We’re also joined by Carey, a curly-haired reporter from a walking magazine who is writing an article about my trip, who looks like a young Jim Morrison and has brought with him a vintage box camera that doesn’t work. I smile for the failed photograph, trying to imagine myself next to an advert for a trekking holiday in Costa Rica and the latest Bill Oddie-endorsed waterproof gaiters. Walking magazines have become a lot sexier over the last decade, Carey says, but also admits that the average age of readership is still the other side of sixty. Retired people, essentially, with time on their hands and the purchasing power sometimes referred to as the grey pound.
‘Will I be your cover girl?’
‘Centrefold.’
The walk south to Gargrave is a waterside stroll. After being fed by various sikes and streams, Malham Beck swells into the River Aire, and the path on its east bank winds through flowery meadows and past the classic Dales scenery of humpback bridges, cute cottages, trellises hung with sweet peas, stone-built barns, limestone walls, ancient iron gates and fields full of alpacas. Somewhere between Kirkby Malham and Airton a dozen men in cricket jumpers and white tracksuit bottoms come towards us from a bend in the river. They look like the stereotypical village cricket team: the tall one, the short one, the skinny fast bowler and the overweight wicketkeeper, the bank-manager captain who’ll open the batting, the tattooed big hitter with the grass-stained trousers, the old spinner and the young lad who’ll play if they’re a man short. Why a village cricket team should be walking along a Yorkshire riverbank at ten o’clock on a Thursday morning is not clear, and is never explained, but they say hello and we say hello back, and they walk on, a full complement and a twelfth man in search of opposition, ghosts maybe, some legendary local side lost in a storm but who still wander this floodplain once every blue moon, looking for a game. A bit further on there’s a show-jumping arena, and for Carey’s benefit I jog around it, hurdling the fences in a clockwise direction, except for a refusal at the fifth, a high five-bar gate with a steep ramp on the other side. As I cross the finishing line he clicks away with his malfunctioning Leica.
Carey bows out at Gargrave. We walk on, past several shops which carry my picture in the window, like a wanted man. There’s another one on the door of a repair garage, and another on a bus shelter. In three gardens along the main street I’ve been made into a placard and planted among geraniums, like a Tory councillor looking for re-election, and the several posters tied to the railings of the village hall give me the look of a returning war hero. I keep my head down till we get beyond the last house, but I’ve been spotted in the main street, and Professor Glyn Turton catches up with us just before we reach the railway line and pass beyond his jurisdiction. Glyn has organised tonight’s event and is ‘a bit worried about numbers’, which in organisational jargon usually implies that apart from himself and possibly two or three reluctant members of his immediate family, there will be no one there. But his explanatory comment, ‘With Fire Regulations and so on,’ gives me cause for hope. He has also heard that I have a ‘travelling companion’ with me who doesn’t eat meat. I nod my head and point to Slug, who is in the far corner of a field blowing seeds from a dandelion clock, and I apologise for any inconvenience. Glyn assures me that it isn’t a problem, and tells me that even as we speak his wife is scouring the shops of Gargrave for edible vegetables. Then having seen us across the parish boundary, he heads back into town.
On we go. More fields. Innumerable gates to open then close again. No consistent path so a lot of map-reading and guesswork. No real views, landmarks or features, but undeniably pleasant, easy on the eye and the feet, a clear day. On we go, agreeing, disagreeing, bragging, bullshitting, confessing, remembering, playing A–Z goalkeepers to kill the time, Almunia, Barthez, Corrigan, having lunch on a canal near a double-arched bridge, Dudek, nothing for E, Félix, striding through Thornton-in-Craven or Craven-in-Thornton, lagging behind, taking the lead. We walk through a farmyard which could just as easily be a junkyard; farmers might be the gatekeepers of the countryside but some of them aren’t half messy. Grobbelaar, Howard. Nothing for I. Great clumps of meadowsweet either side of the path. Jennings, Kahn, Lehmann, Maier, nothing for N, nothing for O. A proper track by the name of Clogger Lane, then a cattle-grid. Nothing for P, nothing for Q, Rimmer, Shilton, Trautmann. Climbing again, and a good view of Pendle Hill, Lancashire’s very own Ayers Rock, or Uluru, shouldn’t we say. Nothing for U. Van der Sar. Then the oddly named Cripple Hole Hill leading to the oddly named Robert Wilson’s Grave. Who was Robert Wilson? Answer: Bob – goalkeeper for Arsenal, thank you. And so on and so forth, until Yashin, and last but not least, Zoff.
It could be coincidence, to do with walking under the hem of a cloud and feeling the sudden coldness of its shadow, but climbing Elslack Moor there’s a definite sense of leaving the North Riding behind and heading into the West. And it feels like a true distinction, not just a crossing from one administrative region to another over an invisible line, but a sudden and perceptible change in atmosphere and environment, leaving those picturesque villages with their commemorative benches and placid duck ponds and entering somewhere altogether damper, higher and chillier, a transition from pastureland and enclosed fields to the scrubby upland and bare moors that I recognise as my home turf. Limestone seems to harbour an internal luminescence which lends a natural brightness to the Dales, but the gritstone here insists on something darker, as does the grey sky overhead and the ominous presence of Bradford and Leeds just over the next line of hills. The mills are largely demolished or converted into apartments, and the chimneys only stand as monuments to long-gone heavy industries, but through their roots the gloomy heathers and drab grasses seem to tap into the region’s smoggy, soot-blackened history. With every mile the light falters, and the temperature falls, and house prices drop.
By Lothersdale Slug’s had enough, and so have I if I’m honest, but the pub isn’t open, and a couple of seven-year-old lads skateboarding down the middle of the main road point to a gap in the wall where a footbridge crosses the river. There’s a hill. Then another hill. Then another one. All right, not hills exactly but gradients all the same, and after fourteen miles of rambling through relatively flat and gentle countryside, any unanticipated incline feels like Kilimanjaro, not to mention a bloody impertinence. We’re heading for Kirsten and Chris’s terraced house, and only find it because Chris is standing in the middle of the lane waiting for us, along with another man who is taking lots of photographs of my triumphant entry into Middleton, or perhaps Cowling, or maybe Ickornshaw, though he doesn’t seem entirely sure which one is me and which one isn’t me, so he takes a lot of photographs of Slug’s triumphant entry as well, and Slug plays to the camera, waving and smiling in a poet-like manner.
In return for the reading of a poem, Kirsten and Chris had of
fered a cuppa, a piece of cake, use of the toilet/telephone plus any medical attention I might need, but have actually gone quite a bit further and laid on something of a spread. They’ve also laid on several of their neighbours and friends, who are sitting either side of the open-plan living area and seem to extend as far back as infinity, or at least as far as the kitchen. One man presses into my hand a cartoon drawing of an overweight Noel Gallagher in walking gear communing with a sheep, which I realise after a few moments is meant to be me. Another man offers to give me a book, possibly of his own poems, and looks crushed when I tell him I can’t carry the extra weight. It feels like they’ve been waiting for me all day, lovely people who’ve gone to a lot of trouble and expense to make me feel welcome, and I can’t help thinking that now I’ve arrived I must be something of a disappointment, with barely enough energy and social grace to say hello to everyone, let alone tell a fascinating literary anecdote or recite ‘Albert and the Lion’ with a knotted hanky on my head. ‘Who’s the other one?’ I hear a woman whisper, pointing at Slug with the toe of her shoe, and the man next to her just shrugs his shoulders. To make things worse I read a poem called ‘Gooseberry Season’, which I had always thought of as a parable-style poem about a man whose crimes of selfishness and arrogance meet with a just and appropriate punishment, but which in these circumstances sounds little more than the misjudged tale of an innocent, wandering stranger brutally murdered by redneck hillbillies. I want things to be right, because Kirsten and Chris and their kaleidoscope of friends seem like my kind of people, and given another couple of beers I could probably rise to the occasion. But Glyn is sitting in the corner with his car keys in his hand and his coat on, mindful of his wife’s venison stew reaching its climax in the oven several miles away, alongside Slug’s specially procured nut roast or lentil bake. And not only has Glyn worked tirelessly organising tonight’s reading, he is also the Bearer of the Tombstone, which in Top Trump terms is the boss card.
*
Sir Gawain sets out across the wild, lawless landscape of England with no map other than the stars and no specific location to aim for other than somewhere called the Green Chapel, to keep an appointment with a green knight who has promised to behead him with his impressive axe. Like the Odyssey, it’s one of the great journey poems, and like Odysseus, Gawain has to overcome many obstacles and endure much hardship along the route. He battles with bulls, bears and wild boars, wrestles with serpents and snarling wolves, and is pursued by giants over high ground. He also tangles with wodwos, which are ‘satyrs or trolls of the forest’ according to Tolkien, a man who knew a thing or two about mythical woodland creatures, and who made one of the earliest transcriptions and translations of the poem. Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Wodwo’, from his book of the same name, is a monologue by some form of zoomorphic beast not sure of its identity or its place in the world, though in a
letter to his friend Daniel Huws in 1967 Hughes mischievously suggests that Wodwo, in middle English, means orang-utan. Gawain must face his destiny on New Year’s Day so travels during wintertime, bedding down in absolute blackness under frozen waterfalls, the rain and blizzards piercing his armour and chain mail. Knowing how cold and wet I’ve been walking the hills in several layers of waterproof and windproof fabrics during British summertime it’s uncomfortable to think of making any kind of journey in December dressed only in a metal suit. On the outside of his shield he sports the endless knot, the gold five-sided star which stands as a token of his virtue and faith and as a reminder of the code of honour he must live by as a Christian and a knight.
Gawain’s ordeal is a self-imposed test of physical and psychological endurance, and it is a test that he fails, first by abusing the hospitality of his host in respect of some ill-gotten gains, and secondly, with his head on the block and the axe-blade falling towards his neck, by losing his nerve. In recognition of his failure, and as a mark of his humility, Gawain returns to Camelot promising to wear a green garter or sash across his body for the rest of his days, a practice which is subsequently adopted by all the knights of the Round Table, and ppwhich some say is incorporated into the iconography of the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Britain’s highest chivalric honour. So in Gargrave Village Hall it is not for no reason, as they say, that I read from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I think I will complete the Pennine Way: the end is only a few horizons away now, and barring giants, serpents and the odd orang-utan, it feels like only a matter of time till I go striding into Edale with my reputation as a walker confirmed once and for all. But on the social side of things I can’t help feeling that I haven’t quite lived up to expectations, or more particularly that I have taken more than I have given, as in the astonishing £545.78 (and ten francs) crammed into the bulging sock by 178 of the good people of Gargrave, in exchange for what – a few poems, a bow of the head, and goodbye. There’s also a Pennine Way badge in the sock, in the shape of a shield, which I’m not entitled to yet, and maybe this is my green sash, to be worn on my rucksack for evermore, ‘a sign that his honour was stained by sin’. The microphone isn’t working so I have to shout. At the book-signing afterwards, an old farmer in a tweed jacket and a flat cap says to me, ‘Son, tha looks buggered.’
Ickornshaw to Hebden Bridge
16 MILES
OS Explorer OL21 North Sheet/South
Friday 23 July
I wake early, and when I open the curtains, the window frames a square of pure blue sky. I’d given up on the summer. Discounted it as a possibility. So even though a few months of decent weather per year should be a right rather than a privilege, today feels like an unexpected bonus and a welcome surprise. I manage to launder more change at the pub; it must look as if I’ve been raiding piggy banks or breaking into parking meters, but the landlady at the Mason’s Arms doesn’t bat an eyelid when I heave a carrier bag full of money onto the bar and tip out several hundred pounds’ worth of gold and silver coins. Slug is asleep in one of the outside rooms and I have to bang on the door till he emerges. He’s still enthusiastic about the walk but is limping slightly and concerned about holding me up. I tell him not to worry, because much as I like him I can’t let an injured friend jeopardise the project at this stage, and that if he does suffer some kind of catastrophic breakdown up on Keighley Moor I’ll either put him out of his misery with as little pain as possible or leave him there with a KitKat and a whistle.
‘Do you know that song “Two Little Boys” by Rolf Harris?’ I ask him.
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Well forget it.’
*
We’re picking up where we left off yesterday. About a dozen of us leave Middleton, or Cowling, perhaps, or maybe Ickornshaw, including Kirsten and Chris and their daughter Marie, with a cuddly toy under her arm and still in her pyjamas and dressing gown, who probably wonders why she’s part of a group of people traipsing across fields and climbing over walls before breakfast. In a German accent infused with Yorkshire vowels, Kirsten points out the small terraced cottage with a plaque on the wall where Philip Snowden was born. The first and three times Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Snowden converted to the left after being asked to present a paper on the dangers of socialism. At some point in his parliamentary career he was also MP for Colne Valley, the constituency in which I grew up, and went on to sit in the House of Lords as a viscount. Snowden came from an austere Wesleyan and Temperance background, and was a teetotaller himself, but full of drive and dreams, and I have a personal, partisan interest in people who have taken on the world in their own unexpected way, having emerged from unremarkable dwellings on unspectacular Yorkshire hillsides. In fact I’m sleeping in one such house tonight, birthplace to one such person, but that’s still sixteen miles and two moors away.
The Cowling contingent drop off one by one, Chris turning back with sleepy Marie over his shoulder, the amateur paparazzo from yesterday capturing my triumphal crossing of the A6068 before declining the hillside ahead to return home, and Kirsten offering her hand to say goodby
e, but because she is from continental Europe and because I’m a modern man not discomforted by such cosmopolitan gestures I kiss her on both cheeks instead. And then I blush.
We are now a party of six, comprising history teacher and local historian Rob, Anna who has organised tonight’s reading, her husband Johnny and their sheepdog Bet, the ailing Slug, and myself. The path goes through some galvanised sheep-wrangling contraptions then up alongside a series of sinister-looking sheds, which Rob thinks are not grouse-shooting huts but chalets of some type, to be enjoyed by the good people of Cowling. Why they would want to trudge half a mile out of their own village to sit in a creosoted cabin isn’t clear to me, but I like the idea that a desolate Yorkshire moor should have its own version of beach huts, and there is in fact an area of moor just a mile or so further along the Pennine Way named on the map as The Sea. Landmarks along this stretch come in the form of stones, including the Maw Stone, the Cat Stone, Little Wolf Stones and Great Wolf Stones, and further over to the north-west, the Hitching Stone. Said to be Yorkshire’s biggest boulder at over a thousand tons, it was flung here from Ilkley Moor by a witch, and has a hole all the way through it which, if blown at a time of national crisis, will summon King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table from their graves (I made that last bit up but the witch thing is true, obviously). The other notable sight is the line of wind turbines above Oxenhope, latter-day foes to any would-be Don Quixote.
Johnny has ‘given up on shoes’ he tells me, when I ask him why he is walking barefoot. And not just given up on them for the purpose of this walk but generally, in life, or at least where circumstances allow. I walk behind him along a boggy length of path, watching the peat squelch and rise up around his heels, then follow his tracks across a line of causey paving, his footprints slender, naked and primitive-looking alongside the stamp of dirty big walking boots. To ‘feel’ more of the walk Anna has also given up on shoes, and doesn’t seem at all bothered by the thick mud and squashed sheep pellets oozing between her toes. Across the summit of the moor we must look like a line of Hare Krishna followers. All we need are the orange hoodies and a couple of bells.
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 18
