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

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Funding also came from the water utility companies, for whom discoloured water washed off the eroded peat costs millions of pounds to treat each year. There were separate initiatives to replant clough woodlands on the edges of the moors and a community science project to help people better understand moorland ecology, since research into moorland conservation techniques was integral to the Moors for the Future programme.

If you’re wondering how relevant all this is to a walk along the Pennine Way, then read Wainwright’s description of Black Hill in the 1960s in Pennine Way Companion; or look at photos of walkers floundering on Kinder Scout in the 1970s and 80s. There are still visible scars on Featherbed Moss where successive Pennine Way walkers tried to dodge the worst of the bog (the average ‘trample width’ here was measured at over 170ft); and even the first mile out of Edale across the grassy expanse of Grindsbrook Meadows on the original route was once eroded into so many parallel paths, thanks to the tread of walking boots, that Gordon Miller described it to me as the Pennine Way motorway – three lanes north, three lanes south.