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

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As a teenager, I bought a copy of Tom Stephenson’s official guidebook to the Pennine Way. It had evocative photos of wild-looking hill country, dramatic scenes that seemed remote and detached from my day-to-day life. I followed the text across purple heather moors, over windswept hills and alongside the Roman Wall; I studied the map extracts carefully, following the red line as it wove its way amid often tightly packed black-and-white contours, page after page after page.

In my mid teens, I began long-distance walking and discovered the challenge, fun and adventure of exploring paths on my own and with others, but not yet the Pennine Way. It was an ambition, certainly, but still something I kept at arm’s length. Perhaps I felt I wasn’t ready for it, or maybe there was a growing awareness that this famous old path was in a spot of bother: overuse and erosion had given it an increasingly bad press, so that people shook their heads and said it wasn’t worth walking any more.

However, over the years I explored short sections of the Pennine Way on foot and got to know some parts, like the Yorkshire Dales, quite well. I eventually moved to live near its southern end in the Peak District, but still it was there and still I hadn’t walked it all.