Читать книгу The Pennine Way - the Path, the People, the Journey онлайн

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Visibility was down to just a few feet and it was cold, wet and hostile. And this was early July. I carefully followed the path past the trig point on Kinder Low and along the rocky edge of the summit plateau to Kinder Downfall. A couple of fellrunners appeared momentarily out of the gloom, then were instantly swallowed up by it once again. Soon I reached the Downfall, a narrow chasm where the Kinder river gurgles over a rocky shelf, tumbling down the steep rocky hillside far below. In really fierce conditions, the wind is funnelled up this defile and can blast the water high into the air in vertical plumes of spray; and in exceptionally cold winter conditions, the water freezes over the rocks in a white waterfall, providing ice climbing for the seriously intrepid.

When the Pennine Way was officially opened in 1965, the route from Edale to Kinder Downfall was not along the valley to Jacob’s Ladder and around the outer edge of Kinder Scout, as it is now, but directly up the hillside and then across its boggy and featureless centre. From Edale village, walkers headed straight up the steep slopes of Grindsbrook Clough beyond the Old Nags Head – a 1750ft rocky scramble beside a lively stream. Just minutes from the start, this must have been a baptism of fire for most long-distance walkers carrying a full pack. If they managed it without mishap, the next challenge was negotiating the bog. There are plenty of hair-raising stories of walkers not just sinking into the oozing peat but getting totally disorientated by the myriad peat hags, especially when the weather closed in. And this was just the opening challenge on day 1 of the Pennine Way. It was as if it had been deliberately designed to weed out the ill-prepared and uncommitted. One experienced Pennine Way walker described this first stage to me as ‘a real granny stopper’.