Читать книгу Great Mountain Days in the Pennines. 50 classic hillwalking routes онлайн

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Here the walk leaves the Pennine Way, which presses on eastwards to Cauldron Snout and into Teesdale. To continue to Backstone Edge, about-face to ascend the easy grassy slopes north-east of Narrowgate Beacon, which has overlooked much of the route thus far and is crowned by a large cairn.

From the beacon there are two choices: one (shown on the map) to pursue an intermittent gritstone edge around the lip of the high moors; the other to tackle a section of bogs, giving way eventually to heather and tussock grass. A clear day in winter, when the ground underfoot is frozen in its grip, may well be the best time to tackle these featureless moors; following prolonged rain is certainly the worst.

The immediate objective of both routes is the trig pillar west of Seamore Tarn, a lonely sentinel in an austere landscape made auspicious by its position on the watershed of Britain, for here the waters of Little Rundale Tarn gush westwards to the Eden and on to the Solway, while those of nearby Seamore and Great Rundale tarns empty to the North Sea. The highest point of Backstone Edge lies a short way north-east of the trig, marked by a cairn of large boulders.