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

37 страница из 86

In 1991, Mike Rhodes was appointed as project manager. Reflecting on some of the highs and lows in a report ten years later, he described the time when he was walking alone to his car on the Snake summit one winter’s afternoon after a site visit. ‘It was going dark, it was misty and I was tired from the miles of dodging slurried peat bogs. Suddenly, without warning, I found myself up to my waist in cold liquid peat. I clung to a tussock, hauled myself out and sat there, soaking wet and stinking of rotting vegetation.’

Mike later became Access and Rights of Way Manager for the Peak District National Park Authority. He told me that, 30 years ago, the conditions were so bad that it was make or break for the Pennine Way. ‘In the mid 1980s it got to the stage where the impact of the Pennine Way on the Peak District moorland was so severe that it threatened the Pennine Way’s actual existence. It was a choice of either making a major intervention and spending a significant amount of money to make the route sustainable – or close it. At one point the National Park Authority was even discouraging people from using the trail.’