I am writing this in the casual bar of the hey Green hotel in Marsden, <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">Yorkshire</st1:place>. It is Thursday evening under the same threatening, but fortunately not delivering sky I’ve walked under all day. Wednesday wound up being a long day, both of walking and of waiting for my baggage, so I got no chance to write last night. However, I will employ the literary convention of writing my description of yesterday as though I still lacked knowledge I gained today. It’s the way I made bits of this up while I was walking, and I hate to let any of that go to waste.
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I woke up early on Wednesday morning and reorganized all my stuff again so that I could travel from inn to inn with only my smaller bag. The plan was that after the transfer Wednesday, Alan Windebank, who organized my trip, would carry away my huge, yellow bag for long term storage until I get to the end of this through hike. He was also juggling a few other individuals and groups on different outings, so he wouldn’t get my bags to White House Farm in Padfield until between 6 and 6:30. As I understood it, I had 20 miles of rugged walking in front of me, so I couldn’t see any problem. I only hoped he wouldn’t have to wait for me too long before I got there.
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I watched a bit of GM TV news. The sultry weather girl (I mean she was sultry, not that they only put her on to talk about hot weather) spoke in dire tones about a massive low pressure system setting up for a long stay over the Irish Sea, from which it was expected to keep flinging the sort of weather I’d had on Tuesday – alternating rain and sleet storms with intervalsof sunshine all againstthe background of gusty wind. I knew I was ready to cope with that, but I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it off the menu.
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I had to wait till 8:30 for the somewhat surly morning shift to start serving breakfast. (I have no idea why this fellow was working in hospitality, but it must be a very good reason. Aptitude and enthusiasm weren’t involved.) I got tired of sitting in my room, so I took my three Bronte novels bound as one to an arm chair set on a large stair landing and continued to crunch my way through Jane Eyre. There’s no denying there’s some good writing there, even if the prose does have purple veins showing under the skin. I can’t get really engaged in the story. Novels are supposed to be driven by struggle against resistance, and the resistance in this case seems to come entirely from Jane’s exaggerated priggishness.
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In the fullness of time, the breakfast door was unlocked, and I had an adequate bite to hold me for a full day of ordinary activity. I got suited up for all weathers, delivered my bags to Mr Surly, and was finally ready to set out, wishing I’d left much earlier as you may be, too by now.
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By a few days into this, the walking part of this journal may reduce to “I walked to Little Huffing up the Hill” or something like that, but for now, a lot is new and, I hope, interesting.
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The early part of the walk took me across a couple of fields and led me past the hamlet of Upper Booth. Apparently, all these hamlets with Booth in the name are some kind of attraction around here (Eventhe rooms in the Rambler were named for different Booths. Mine was Lady Booth, which might have been some sort of cut at my manhood, but what the hell, it had a bathtub.) I never found out what set the Booths apart from any other cluster of clusters of farms and homes. They’re pretty enough in the way that any carefully tended collection of old stone buildings is pretty. Maybe it’s the walks between them that are special, and the Booths are just useful landmarks. I stopped in the day before at the National Park info center in the hopes of learning, but no help.
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My trail guide suggested that I would be sharing this part of the trail with lots of tourists traipsing between Booths, but I didn’t see a soul for a while. The first recognized challenge of the walk was a steep rise largely flagged or cobbled called Jacob’s ladder. It felt like about 30 stories of an office block with irregular stairs. I took lots of opportunities to admire the brook that remains of the watercourses that had cut that part of the valley. At this point, it’s a fresh stream with lots of little 3-5 foot waterfalls and bits of moist greenery sprouting on both sides.
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Eventually, I got to the top. I’ll give the trail designers this; going up Jacob’s ladder was an accurate if extreme warning of what more there was to come. “If you don’t care for this, turn around now,” is the implied message. I was puffing, but still enthusiastic, so on I went. I turned and saw another walker on the lower bits of the ladder, then turned to continue on the way.
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I lost the trail for the first time by deciding to take a recommended side trail to visit something called the Edale Cross. It’s just a stone cross, signed as a medieval cross by some historical enthusiasts in the 1950s, but later discovered to be a much more recent boundary marker for a royal hunting ground. By now, the 1950’s sign has historic value of its own, so it’s left there. I already knew all this from reading in the guide, so it was pure bravado that made me tack some extra mileage onto a day I was already nervous about completing before sunset.
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The map showed an easy, obvious track heading from the cross to rejoin the <st1:Street w:st="on"><st1:address w:st="on">Pennine Way</st1:address></st1:Street>, and so it did, in fact, begin. I was walking along a stone wall in a rutted, obvious footpath. A lot of the ground on the tops of the hills here is sensitive soil. A few hundred people walking the same trail are enough to create a trench a foot deep which, with time, could easily erode itself into a stream valley fully the size of the one I climbed earlier. Because of this, walkers are asked to keep to any existing track at least until it becomes a full on bog, by which time less well behaved walkers will already have created a side track that becomes the main track. Enough of this can eventually remove entire hill tops, but it takes a good long time. Mindful of all of this, I was making a real effort to stay on what I thought was the track.
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Eventually, the track I was following, confidently on the line back to where the map showed it joining the Way, petered out into a river delta of sheep tracks going in all directions. I used my GPS to follow sheep track after sheep track until I got to a trig point on Kinder Low. (Kinder Low is the name of the broad hill I’d been climbing all morning. It sort of comes as a set with Mam Tor I’d been up the day before – Mother Hill and Child Plateau.)
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At the trig point, I saw my first walkers of the day up close. There were four older men there. Three of them were in red, Mountain Rescue volunteer get ups and were pulling on white, hazmat bunny suits with obvious embarrassment. It developed that all the fancy dress was intended to keep them safe from vile chemicals while they painted the trig point white. The whole point of these things is that you can see them from a long way off and therefore triangulate your position easily. Over time, they weather to match the surrounding stone, making them harder to see. Each of the three volunteers explained this to me, each one also pointing to a far off, already whitened trig point on a nearby height. Whenever the sun hit it, it blazed out brilliantly. It was funny they were so nervous about what they were doing. It made perfect sense. The throwaway paper suits were probably a little much for a small bucket of all weather paint, but the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">UK</st1:place></st1:country-region> version of OSHA regulations are famously extreme.
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The fourth fellow was a civilian like me and I think a local. He was also kitted out for a high walk in bad weather, but in less techy, more thoroughly worn gear. He looked as though he’d been walking the hills for years, maybe originally because he had to, but now that he had outlived the necessity to be up there, he still wanted to. He was deriving a lot of amusement from the mountain rescuers, and had, I inferred, been having some fun at their expense before I walked up. I sat on a rock and rested for a little until the walker I’d seen below me on the ladder walked up from a slightly different direction than I did and asked for help getting back to the way.
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Seen close to, I recognized him as someone I’d walked past at Hollins Cross the day before and who’d been at breakfast at the Rambler. We hadn’t greeted each other on the trail the day before because the weather was particularly awful when we passed, and we’d only said a brief good morning at breakfast largely because the incidental music being played was a sickening assortment of soft rock love ballads. Two strong men were nervous even making eye contact in that atmosphere, let alone speaking. I got to overhear his directions, and so could walk off on my own as though I’d always known the way. I eventually overtook him resting on a rock and joined him for a chat.
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Turned out he is a Nederlander staying for a short break at the Rambler and doing various circular walks in and around Edale. He’d done more distance walking than I had including some strenuous stuff in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iceland</st1:place></st1:country-region>. He gave it as his opinion that I looked knackered already, proving that the Dutch learn their English from the English. I assured him that I recover quickly. We went on to pass and repass each other for a few miles. I was moving a little faster but pausing for photos and to fiddle with my GPS and maps more often. Eventually, we parted ways as he walked down to start his circle back and I kept on across the high ground.
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