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

29 страница из 86

My conversation with James was given added poignancy by the arrival of two other Pennine Way guests that night. They traipsed in wearily and wetly some time after 7pm, having taken the best part of nine hours to cover the 15 miles from Edale. Both in their 60s and evidently ill-equipped for a long-distance walk, the two men had got lost on Bleaklow and had walked half way to Glossop before working out where they were.

Later on, in the pub at Padfield, I gently tried to coax more of their story out of them. How, for instance, had they been navigating? It turned out that one had been using a mapping program on a small hand-held electronic device. Some sort of GPS? No, just a free download from a website; but the rain had got into it and apparently the thing hadn’t loaded properly anyway. What about a guidebook? Surely they had a Pennine Way guidebook between them? The second man fished a small, rather soggy hardback volume out of his pocket and passed it to me. It was Wainwright’s Pennine Way Companion, the once popular if somewhat idiosyncratic guide to the trail written by the famous fellwanderer just three years after the trail was officially opened. Since the 1990s, the book had been revised several times to take account of route changes, new paved sections and so on. I flicked to the front to check which of the recent versions they were using and was astounded to see that it was an original copy, published in 1968. They had been navigating using out-of-date maps and an uncorrected route description that was almost as old as me. I didn’t see them at breakfast the next day and learnt later that they had given up that morning.