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

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For over 30 years, this isolated lay-by has been the location of the legendary Snoopy’s snack van, a mainly weekend phenomenon that appears to be celebrated largely on the strength of the generous size of its bacon butties and the huge, steaming mugs of tea served up to Pennine Way walkers, who are no doubt grateful for a hot drink and a chat. Whether they open the serving hatch or conduct business from the door at the end depends on the strength of the wind, I was told.

Looking back, Black Hill was now more or less clear of cloud, although a little to the east my eye was irresistibly drawn to the 750ft pencil-thin mast of the Holme Moss transmitter, which was erected in 1951. Although pinned down with five sets of steel stays, the 140-ton mast looked incredibly fragile. Beyond the mast a low, grey blanket still enveloped Bleaklow. I sighed deeply. I had got over the first hurdle, seen off the opening test on the Pennine Way. But was this the right way to look at it?

Long before I took that first step at Edale, I decided I had to try to get to the bottom of the popular notion of the Pennine Way as simply a hard, uncompromising slog. The physical and mental challenge, the arduous miles of bog and bare moorland, the blisters and pain. Surely there was more to the Pennine Way than that? But the Pennine Way has always seemed to carry its reputation before it. In his book The Wild Rover, Mike Parker set the Pennine Way alongside the many hundreds of other domestic walking trails and described it as the ‘undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is’. It seems to be the only British long-distance path that everyone has heard of, even those for whom walking for fun is as alien a concept as deep-sea diving or eating snails. In the preceding months, whenever I mentioned that I was going to walk the Pennine Way people tended to respond with terms like ‘long’, ‘hilly’, ‘tough’, ‘rain’ and ‘bogs’. Others offered a shake of the head or a roll of the eyes and in their minds they probably added ‘nutter’.