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

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The last 20 miles or so had reminded me how the South Pennines have a surprisingly rich literary association. Near the path back at Standedge there had been a memorial to Ammon Wrigley, a local poet from Saddleworth, little known today but in the early 1900s he had a large and enthusiastic following. The Calder valley, and in particular Mytholmroyd and Heptonstall, was the stomping ground of the young Ted Hughes, whose poetry captures the sparse Pennine landscape in much the same way that the Brontë sisters evoked the mood of the windswept moors a century earlier. As I’d noted a few miles back on Heptonstall Moor, from a purely scenic point of view these rather bare and bleak uplands are no match for the preceding Peak District or for the Yorkshire Dales that follow; but for many artistic types, and evidently some Pennine Way walkers, this very emptiness gives the South Pennines a special character. It’s as if the sheer desolation fires the imagination and the wide and rather featureless horizons unlock some creative spark. As Ted Hughes observed in his poem ‘Pennines in April’: ‘Now, measuring the miles of silence/Your eye takes the strain’.