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

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‘We stock what walkers ask for,’ I was told. ‘Plasters, talc and gas canisters seem to be popular.’ She went on to explain that it has become a community shop for the residents of Higher Colden, and as I stood there agonising between a giant square of flapjack and a tempting sticky bun, there was a regular stream of local people popping in for this and that, or simply to chat. Although Pennine Way walkers are no longer the shop’s mainstay, they remain important to May, a sprightly 76-year-old who still has a regular newspaper delivery round. You can camp for free in the field by the farm, and over the years she has dried boots, sown broken rucksack straps and offered moral encouragement to those wearying of Calderdale’s steep slopes. In the end I bought the enormous square of chocolate-covered flapjack, thick and rich and very filling. It kept me going till teatime.

I finally reached the top of the slope and stepped out onto the high open ground. Ahead of me, the hills broadened out and there was quite a lot of nothing. By this I mean that there were some small, far-off reservoirs, a few farms and clumps of trees, but above all a lot of open pasture and moorland. It felt like a landscape emptying out – but in a nice way – as if the Pennine landscape was pushing back its shoulders after all that built-up stuff and reasserting its more natural self (not that reservoirs and grouse moors are all that natural). I was struck, in particular, by the incredibly open vistas, how the yawning moorland rolled away, one gentle ridge after another. It wasn’t a dramatic landscape in the conventional sense of the word and there were, for instance, no plunging gorges or soaring peaks that grabbed your attention, but the general wash of this bare Pennine canvas was oddly mesmerising. I went back to the words of Tom Stephenson, a man so attuned to the hills of northern England, to see whether he could explain the effect of these moors on the senses. In an interview with Marion Shoard in 1977 (reproduced in The Rambler magazine of February/March 1989), he said: ‘You get the idea of a flat skyline, but you’re up and down all the time. It’s that attraction of them: the long lines, the level lines in the landscape characteristic of a sort of table with a sharp nose … you get the effect of plains receding as far as you can see, as one range of moorland succeeds another. That gives you a great sense of distance you wouldn’t get in the Lake District because you have a mountain interrupting your view in one direction or other.’