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

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We spent most of the evening in their house, both before and after the meal, talking just as if we were at home. Mrs Burnop even asked us what we would like to watch on the television … such luxury.

The Pennine Way deliberately bypasses Hebden Bridge, because when the route was originally plotted there was little to attract walkers. Early in the last century, it was a prosperous mill town, famous as the centre of the trade in fustian (thickly woven cotton cloth with a short nap or pile, like corduroy and moleskin); but bust followed boom and by the 1960s it seemed to be in terminal decline. Some industry limped on, but shops were empty, houses were being pulled down and the valley was littered with redundant and dirty mill buildings. In his 1967 book A Guide to the Pennine Way, Christopher John Wright describes the scene: ‘This very narrow gorge of the River Calder has cotton manufacturies, clothing mills and dye works crowded into the valley, and the smoke and smell of industrial effluent fills the lungs.’