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

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Mind you, by all accounts, Black Hill’s bad press was once well deserved. Writing in 1968 in his Pennine Way Companion, Alfred Wainwright described the summit as a ‘desolate and hopeless quagmire’ where the peat was ‘naked and unashamed’. The vegetation had been completely eroded so that the trig point was marooned in a soft bed of glutinous peat and only survived because it was built on a small island called Soldiers’ Lump (named after the army engineers who originally surveyed the hill). To physically reach it entailed a dirty and potentially dangerous adventure, as Wainwright himself found out when he became completely stuck in the peat bog. He was rescued by the efforts of his walking friend and a passing national park warden who managed to pull him free.

Half a century later, the summit of Black Hill is almost unrecognisable. The fact that I had reached the top sooner than anticipated, and that I was simply wet rather than covered in bog, is testament to the fact that a slabbed path runs up to and beyond the trig point, which itself now sits on a neat cairn in the middle of a small paved area. More remarkable still is that in all directions there is vegetation: coarse grasses, heather, bilberry, cotton grass and rushes. There are wet patches, of course, as you would expect on any Pennine top, and its sense of bareness and bleakness will never be to everyone’s taste, but this is a hill with a new lease of life. It’s a far cry from that degraded, boot-sucking sea of exposed peat that once gave Black Hill the darkest of reputations; and it recalls not just the low point in the Pennine Way’s fortunes, but the moment when the path’s very existence came under threat.