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

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Already the Pennines were changing and the walk taking on a subtly different character. The trail remained doggedly high but as Greater Manchester finally disappeared from sight and the hilltop obelisk of Stoodley Pike loomed ever closer, the path swung round and the deep green gash of the Calder valley was revealed. I gazed down at Todmorden and at the narrow valley snaking its way eastwards across the Pennines towards Hebden Bridge. A train clattered somewhere deep below and all along the bottom there were mill chimneys and densely packed houses clinging to the lower hillsides, since this was once a highly industrialised place. But they were broken up by extensive clumps of woodland and a lush green patchwork of fields that spread steeply up the hillsides. High pasture could be glimpsed above and there was a distinct feeling that the Pennines were about to raise their game.

A path peeled off to Mankinholes, where the youth hostel, occupying a former 16th-century manor house, has long been a popular stop-over for Pennine Way walkers. Incidentally, if you want to see how a stone-slabbed track beds down over time to become part of the landscape, then look closely at this historic causey path. Also known as the Long Drag, it leads down to the hostel from the moorland top. It was built to provide paid work for men whose families were starving as a result of the so-called Cotton Famine (the severe depression in the Lancashire cotton textile industry in the early 1860s, caused in part by the American Civil War, which halted the regular supply of imported raw cotton bales).