01 May 2022 A Pennine Way encounter

I’ve not long returned from a multi-day hike through the Lake District with Alex Roddie – a superb bash across 18 Wainwrights in fine weather. While we hiked, I spent a lot of time reflecting on other, bigger hikes, including the one that continues to call me back to long trails: the Pennine Way. Here’s a memory from my 2018 Pennine Way.

To the man on the A635

When we met, you teased me with a hint of the challenges that lay ahead of me. I was hiking the Pennine Way. You were stealth-planting rowan trees.

We met on day two of my sixteen-day walk. Already, the route had unleashed a sample of its casual savagery: I hadn’t enjoyed a good view or an easy step for more than twenty-four hours. On both days I had climbed from a valley floor into roiling grey cloud, and remained there while I trudged towards a perpetually invisible horizon.

My guidebook had promised me expansive views. Instead, the Pennine Way had revealed itself to me as a muffled soundscape of trickling streams and waterfalls, each only briefly relieving the monotony and silence of my lonely little circle.

I had set off early from Crowden, making a dispiriting trudge up and over Black Hill and on towards Wessenden Head. You appeared there, on the other side of the A635, emerging from a porridge-grey bank of drizzle and fog. You stopped, waved, and darted across the road, a blur of blue cagoul and good cheer.

I remember your firm handshake, your saturated walking gear, and the ancient canvas rucksack decaying on your back. Something shapeless, wrapped in a black plastic bin bag, protruded from the top of the bag. “See this bag,” you said, jerking your thumb up at the refuse sack. Raindrops trickled off the plastic in thin rivulets. “I’m doing a bit of guerrilla planting. It’s a rowan. I planted its brother and sister by the clough. No harm done, if no warden sees me.”

“The clough?” I asked.

“Dean Clough.” You stared at me. “You’ve just come over it, no?”

I had a vague notion of my having stepped across a narrow trickle of water that ran away into a ravine whose claggy edges and unseen bottom had lurked half-hidden in the fog. I couldn’t recall seeing rowans there.

I suppose I should have asked you what compelled you to sneak through the murk, furtively planting rowans. Instead, we fell to talking about the path. “I tried the Pennine Way myself,” you said. “It was 1970, I think. Made it three days. My left leg was completely swollen.”

You laughed at my startled reaction, wished me luck and marched on. I watched as your silhouette grew indistinct, until it dissolved into the fog.

You were the first person I met on the trail, and our meeting popped into my mind often in the days ahead. I thought of the warmth with which you greeted me, as someone who knew all too well the challenges that lay ahead. I wondered how you came to feel so absorbed by the landscape—and so driven to add to it.

And I wondered, naively, how your leg came to be so swollen you were forced from the trail. This last question would answer itself with painful force. As the Pennine Way wound its way across bog, mire and heath, the terrain sometimes seemed intent on rebuking my faltering progress.

Mud—inanimate, ankle-deep, boot-sucking mud—would become an especially implacable opponent. On my way across otherwise bright green fields by East Marton, the mud sapped my energy so much I yelled obscenities at it, as if my anger could force it to offer easy passage. No such luck: to wet boots I added the fury of blushing cheeks, as a group of elderly walkers traipsed past me, politely ignoring my rant.

Pain went with the Pennine Way like red berries with rowan trees. When I reached the half-way point—a featureless stretch of peat moorland near Tan Hill—my callused feet, sore shoulders and sunburn bore witness to the toll the trail had taken on me. Only a barn owl, out hunting in the early evening, lulled me from my pained introspection, a white spectre that called me on uphill to rest.

Your own short-lived attempt on the route should have warned me what to expect. Injuries are so bound up with the Pennine Way’s bogs and fells, they might as well be marked on maps, tracing out each walker’s own landscape of infirmities.

At times, I found myself envying the brevity of your own hike, as though your injury represented good fortune; more than once, I wished I’d had your luck—a good excuse to abandon the trail, after enduring its worst excesses. And, more than once, I pitied you as I revelled in the Pennine Way’s many glories: a fireside pint in The Stag, exhilerating rain-lashed dashes over bare fells, the huge wide views of Scotland from the Chieviots. You reminded me that long hikes strike a balance between pain and happiness, and that only when the path is entirely behind us do we really feel the deep joy of knowing we have pitted ourselves against ourselves—and won.

When I reached the end of the trail in Kirk Yetholm, kissed the Border Hotel’s stone wall and wept, you stomped back into my thoughts. You were the only would-be Pennine Wayfarer I met who had crashed out of the trail and felt able to smile about it. I wished I could have marched back to that damp road crossing to offer to guide you through it all, knowing we’d both be proud of every step we took.

For a moment, in a circle of fog, you entered my adventure, and I entered yours: quests that took us on to Scotland or downhill to plant a rowan by a peat-stained stream. In that brief span of time, you helped me to appreciate the hike’s beauty through the lens of your own wistful misadventure.

One day I will revisit the Pennine Way. Maybe I’ll bump into you then, on that same lonely Yorkshire road. But if I’m not so lucky, I promise I’ll pause by that rebellious trio of rowans, and thank you for setting the tone for a hike whose pains and joys continue to inspire me.

Keeping my promises

Every couple of weeks I’ll continue to post an update on my progress with five promises I’ve set for myself.