The mist swirls. Wind rattles a few young birch trees next to the toilet block. Raindrops race and collide on the windscreen. It isn’t easy pulling on waterproof over-trousers at the best of times and almost impossible in the front seat of a car, even in a roomy family saloon. And not easy retying my boots, hands scrabbling around down by the clutch pedal, cheek pressed against the steering wheel, or getting my elbows and fists through the sleeves, or zipping up a cagoule. And not easy leaving the vehicle, or standing in front of the pay-and-display ticket machine wondering how much to put in, what time I’ll be back. Not easy to lock the car and set off.
A disused railway line runs parallel to the water’s edge and the road, now used as a cycle path, and I walk along it for half a mile or so, in an odd frame of mind, head down, barging straight through a gang of half a dozen sheep and a ram who wants to stand his ground till the last moment. Straight through a few long and deep puddles I would have circumnavigated or vaulted on happier days. This isn’t really the Pennine Way, which actually comes across the valley above Rhodeswood Reservoir, so I’ve missed out about seven or eight hundred yards of the actual trail, but I’m not in the mood for nit-picking pedantry and petty, hair-splitting rules.
I spot the sign at the gate, walking towards Reaps Farm, where a big ugly dog struts about in a mesh cage, growling and snarling. Then the path veers abruptly and unapologetically upwards, in what feels like an almost vertical ascent, heading into the nothingness of the mist. This is the mouth of Torside Clough. I’d noticed it yesterday from Laddow Rocks, and had taken a dislike to it even from that distance, being uncharacteristically severe and gloomy, even for the Peak District, infolded and secretive, with a fjord-like steepness to the scarred, striated sides and a deeply incised watercourse lurking somewhere at the bottom of its rocky channel. An abyss more than a valley, a long, narrow trench, better suited to some underwater location in the middle of the Atlantic than these moors, home to several unclassified species of sea creature with no eyes, transparent flesh and pulsing, fibre-optic veins. As well as mist, steam appears to be rising out of the gorge, and I catch occasional glimpses of what in this scenario might be tropical ferns of some kind underneath the rocks to each side. The path is stony, hard on the ankles, and where there aren’t stones there are puddles of black water or patches of black mud. I keep climbing, and even though the clough is a cauldron full of cloud vapour and hanging rain, with no visible dimensions, the nausea of vertigo still washes across me, and intuitively I can sense the growing depth and the sheerness of the fall.
Out of nowhere, four apocalyptic hikers suddenly emerge, young lads carrying full packs, pots and pans swinging from their rucksacks, mud-stains right up to their waists. They look like lost and broken cowboys whose steeds have bolted during a thunderstorm. Every part of them drips or glistens with water. They splash past with a few grunts and a quick flash of recognition in their eyes, then dissolve into the mist. Twenty minutes later I pass a couple who look as if they are kitted out to withstand biological warfare or a chemical attack, in big moon boots, chunky thermal mittens, salopettes and quilted anoraks with hoods pinched tightly around their faces, their eyes hidden by goggles, their mouths covered with scarves. They appear then disappear, insulated against the outside world and inoculated against any pleasantries I might want to exchange. The path eventually seems to plateau out but it might just be an optical illusion because walking still feels like an uphill task; either way I must be nearing the head of the valley because the stream is now running adjacent to the track, and in fact IS the track every once in a while. I fish a Mars Bar out of the bag, ‘fish’ being an unfortunately accurate verb in this instance, then I go on.
If ever a signpost is needed on the Pennine Way it is at John Track Well, an actual water well, apparently, though I don’t spot one (and certainly don’t need one), because it’s here that the trail suddenly crosses the stream and sets off at a right angle, bearing due east. Perhaps from the other direction the junction is impossible to miss, but by this approach it is a disaster waiting to happen, and I duly oblige, unable to imagine that such a turning would go unrecognised given the potential consequences of getting lost on Bleaklow. In other words it is not my fault that instead of making a sharp left at the ford I plough on across the moor until the stream fizzles out, and with it the path.
I believe that as a race we have certain instinctive powers, and that one of those powers is the ability to make the correct decision in almost every circumstance. This can apply to all kinds of social and emotional situations as well as to straightforward issues of navigation. But we also have an extraordinary capacity for ignoring those instincts and for convincing ourselves otherwise. Why or how we do it I don’t know: maybe we’ve reached a state of evolutionary complacency, maybe our pig-headedness has won out over our gut feeling, or maybe we just like a bit of drama every now and again. So at some very primitive and elemental level I know that I have missed the turn, but there’s nothing I can do, apart from carry on regardless. The weather is disgusting, filthy. It’s rained many times before on this walk but I’ve never been this wet, as if I’m leaking, water getting in through all the gaps and holes. With each step my feet squelch in my boots, and my underwear feels like it needs wringing out. Holding to what seems like a steady course I find myself after what might be another hour among those weird black dunes of peat, in that eerie lunar landscape of ‘hags’ and ‘groughs’ the guide books talk about. More than anything it looks like the aftermath of a war, the First World War, the ground shelled and cratered, with little rat runs and trenches between the grass-topped hillocks and mounds, some of which are taller than me. The water percolating through and among them is liquorice-coloured, or the colour of stewed tea, edged with a frothy scum. At the base of some of the gullies, sand and yellowy grit forms a light-coloured crust, beach-like and at odds with the general monochromatic desolation.
I come to a kind of T-junction with fresh boot prints going left, from the four horseless men of the apocalypse and two weapons inspectors I passed earlier, presumably. I’m on the right track because I see a sign, then I’m walking on causey paving, though when I’ve calmed down enough to get the GPS out and make sense of the map through the rain-smeared case, I calculate that I’ve somehow managed to bypass both Bleaklow Head and the two ‘kissing’ Wain Stones, the only real landmarks on this stretch. The isolation up here is all-encompassing. Less than twenty miles away in several directions people are sitting in offices checking their emails and sipping their cappuccinos, but that’s a world away. Up here, you might as well be on one of Jupiter’s outlying moons.
*
There are dozens of different terms to describe the act of walking, but the vocabulary now entering my mind tends to come from the less exhilarating end of the spectrum. Right now I am tramping. It is a trudge. A grind. I slog along the ‘drain’ of Devil’s Dyke, crossing Doctor’s Gate, a Roman road originally but also the place where a local apothecary won back his soul from Beelzebub by leaping the dyke ahead of his forked-tailed, horny-headed, cloven-hoofed rival. I wouldn’t mind doing a similar bit of bargaining at the moment, a couple of poems for a few hours of sunlight, a whole book even for just a break in the weather or a gap in the clouds, but where is Satan when you need him?
It’s three thirty by the time I come splattering and spluttering onto the A57, the legendary Snake Pass so beloved by motorbike enthusiasts, day-trippers and couriers of illegal substances. Near its lower reaches sits Ladybower and other reservoirs of the Upper Derwent, home to several pairs of goshawks, the testing site for the bouncing bomb and setting for the film The Dam Busters. At the top, where I am, lies some of the most exposed and windswept moorland in the country, and it doesn’t take much more than a few flurries of snow for the red warning lights down in the towns to start pulsing on and off, indicating that the road is closed. I enjoy the feel of tarmac on the soles of my boots for a few strides, then set off across Featherbed Moss, and miss the path again
by trying a little short cut, hoping to make up lost time, then find it, then lose it once more, then slosh towards a stake in the ground, then on to the next stake and the next, until I reach what I take to be the ‘flint factory’ of Mill Hill, where the route turns ninety degrees from the south-west to the south-east, and where the stakes end. I’m not just wet, I’m saturated, from top to bottom and from outside to in. Waterlogged. And chilly, and shivery. I can feel my body heat leaching away through the damp, clingy fabric of my clothes and being spirited off across the landscape by the nagging wind. And through the weather there’s just enough visibility to see how the path ascends to the final summit of Kinder Scout, not just into grey, drifting mist, but into real black-hearted clouds, malignant, intimidating, a nightmare to enter.
And I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to walk up into that darkness on my own. Can’t let go of the last wooden stake and go wading out into the deep, can’t summon up the spirit of Odysseus or Sir Gawain, or invoke the determination of those mass trespassers who defied shotguns and truncheons to open up this very place to the likes of me, can’t even draw strength from muleteer Robert Kirby and the weight and worth of his war medals, wrapped in a freezer bag in my shirt pocket beneath several layers of sodden fleeces and coats. Twenty years ago I tried to cross Kinder Scout from the other side and couldn’t. It’s as if there’s some membrane of weather or wall of circumstance out there which I can never breach, no matter how I approach or attack it, either from a standing start or from an eighteen-day run-up. I’d come here today to stick two fingers up at this walk by swaggering along the home straight then refusing to cross the line. Instead, it refuses me.
I stand on Mill Hill for another half an hour, looking in different directions, thinking about the 250 miles behind me and the five or six in front, waiting for a break in the weather or some surge of courage to carry me up that hill, through the blackness and into the light on the other side. But nothing changes. Everything stays the same.
So I fail. I don’t finish the Pennine Way. I turn around and go home.
Rambling On
I realised at an early stage on the walk that taking notes with pen and paper was going to be completely impractical, but I was determined to try to keep some sort of contemporaneous record of the journey, so I talked into the voice recorder on my mobile phone as I went along, then made transcriptions in the evening. On that final day, in my confused state somewhere between Bleaklow and Kinder Scout, I’d put the phone back into my top pocket but must have forgotten to turn it off. It was a couple of weeks before I got round to playing it back, but when I did, sitting on a beach in Cornwall, recuperating, it haunted me. The recording lasts for forty-eight minutes and twelve seconds, and consists mainly of splashy footsteps, the sound of rain against man-made fibres, wet ‘waterproofs’ chafing against themselves, and heavy breathing. In and amongst the breaths are some even heavier sighs, several unrepeatable blasphemous expletives, two rhetorical questions of a philosophical nature, and towards the end, a kind of low-level whimpering, followed by ten minutes of inexplicable inaction, with only the sound of the weather in the background, like static or white noise.
I’ve kept the recording. In fact I’ve downloaded it onto my iPod, so every now and again when I’m listening on random shuffle with headphones clamped around my ears I’m suddenly transported back to that desolate and god-forsaken hill. What it doesn’t report is that on the way back to the car that terrible evening, slithering down Torside with the rain still chasing me and the dusk not far behind, I saw a bird on the path which I thought at first was a thrush, then a large blackbird. But before flying off it turned to face me, and I saw the white bib under its throat, and realised it was a ring ouzel, something of a rarity and a bird I’d never seen before. I can’t claim that it made the whole sorry and soggy day worthwhile, but it reminded me that I’d set out in search of experiences rather than conquests, and this was as welcome and as unexpected as any, a metaphorical and literal moment of brightness on an otherwise grey and grim occasion.
If the word recuperate seems a bit strong, then I apologise. After all it wasn’t as if I’d just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan or climbed Everest without oxygen, and during the walk itself I felt fit and healthy and physically capable of making it all the way. But I suffer with a bad back, once diagnosed as ankylosing spondylitis then reclassified as far less impressive ‘lower back-pain syndrome’ during the late nineties. As a pre-emptive measure I started a course of pain-killers the week before I set off. I never felt any discomfort, but didn’t know if that was due to the drugs or the efficacious effects of regular exercise, so carried on popping a few of the little red pills each day, just to play safe. When I’d finished the walk I threw the pills in the bin, and two days later I seized up, and needed the best part of a week in bed before I felt well enough to hobble downstairs and shuffle around the garden in a dressing gown. Had I really walked from Scotland to Derbyshire, or had I just floated along on a cushion of Diclofenac?
*
In many ways, the Pennine Way is a pointless exercise, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular, via no particular route, and for no particular reason. But to embark on the walk is to surrender to its lore and submit to its logic, and to take up a challenge against the self. Physically, I’d assumed I wasn’t up to it, and it turned out I was. Mentally I thought I was more than equal to the task; turned out I wasn’t. My other challenge was to validate myself as a travelling poet, and on the face of it, I succeeded. Over the course of nineteen days I pocketed a grand total of £3,086.42, and read poems to 1,158 people. From that sum, I can also calculate that each venue generated average gate receipts of £171.47, and that each audience member thought my performance was worth £2.66 (though given the number of tenners and even twenty-pound notes slipped into the sock each night by some kind-hearted individuals, I have to concede that a few others thought I was worth nothing). That income, though, is only half the story, because from the other pocket I shelled out for the following:
Complete set of OS maps: £76.50
Complete set of Harvey’s waterproof ‘detailed’ maps: £29.85
Waterproof map-case: £16.00
Guide books: £67.86
GPS system: £85.99
Compass: £19.00
Back-up compass: £19.00
Safety whistle: £2.00
2 compact aluminium poles: £51.98
Mammut Teton GTX size 10 boots: £79.99
Inner socks: £27.98
Outer socks: £60.00
Blister plasters: £4.00
Blister stick: £4.00
Compeed toe-pack: £2.00
Waterproof Gore-tex coat: £89.99
Waterproof cape: £23.00
2 pairs walking trousers: £72.00
Waterproof over-trousers: £24.99
Fleece: £19.99
Gloves: £17.99
Hat: £1.00
Batteries: £14.99
Single train ticket to Berwick-upon-Tweed: £56.10
Accommodation where not provided: £80.00
Meals/drinks where not provided: £72.86
Alcohol where not provided: £52.65
Mobile-phone bill: £33.81
Tips/bribes/bungs: £40.00
All other extras: £29.29
A total of £1,174.81, leaving a net profit of £1,911.61. Still not bad for just less than three weeks’ work, though most days began at eight in the morning and ended at ten at night, which by my calculation implies an overall hourly rate of £7.19, not exactly a fat-cat salary with an investment banker’s bonus. In fact only £1.11 above the minimum wage. Of course it’s true that I had a better time than I would have if I’d been flipping burgers or picking turnips all summer, yet as a career move, it suggests that taking to the road on a permanent basis would be a bad idea. For one thing I’d probably drop dead after about three months, fulfilling my father’s prophecy of being found in a ditch dressed only in a wind-shredded
refuse sack. And for another, reading poems isn’t like doing a milk-round or delivering papers, where services and supplies are provided to the same customers around the same circuit over and over again. To keep selling my wares I’d have to stray further and further afield in search of new audiences, becoming more of a stranger every day, both at home and abroad. Neither does the raw economic data take into account the unquantifiable acts of goodwill and thoughtfulness that came my way during the walk from kind and generous people, gifts of time, effort, experience and expense, without which I wouldn’t have been able even to begin the Pennine Way, let alone complete it (OK, almost complete it). I was made welcome wherever I travelled, never once going without food, shelter, company, or somewhere to rest my head, and maybe it’s on those terms alone that I should judge this undertaking and ask to be judged, because for anyone setting out on an adventure in poetry, be it a long walk or an entire career, could any more validation be expected or hoped for?
Walking Home: A Poet's Journey Page 22
