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

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Perhaps the strangest sight, from the early 1970s, was a man that Gordon encountered walking down Grindsbrook Clough who said he was finishing his Pennine Way walk from north to south tossing a caber the whole way. ‘He was wearing a kilt but had a proper rucksack and boots,’ recalled Gordon. ‘He seemed entirely normal and rational, except for the fact that every few strides he was heaving a small telegraph pole in front of him and said he had been doing that all the way from Scotland.’

Beyond the Snake Pass is Bleaklow, a huge, lofty morass of wet and inhospitable moorland that is every bit as inviting as its name. Dutchman Gerard de Waal, writing about his Pennine Way walk in the 1980s, describes Bleaklow as an ‘indeterminate wilderness of peatbogs’ and tells of how he and his companion frequently became submerged up to their waists. For such an unpleasant and presumably hair-raising experience, his description of how they extricated themselves is remarkably composed and matter of fact. ‘When it happened – it is always unexpected – we kept calm. We found, by experimenting, that you should not try to withdraw one leg at a time because the full body weight applied on the other leg will make you sink further. Another real danger is that suction will remove your boot, leaving you in a terrible predicament. The practical answer was to bend our bodies forward until they were supported by the ground. And, like members of the Amphibia, we then crawled out of the peat inch by inch, leaving the burbling ooze to settle.’