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

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There’s certainly something about these stark and deserted moors that touches you. Already I felt it, even if I wasn’t entirely sure what it was, let alone had the eloquence of Emily Brontë or Ted Hughes to express it. For 50 years, the Pennine Way has shone a light on our relationship with high and open country, on our basic need to have access to natural and uncluttered spaces where we can be challenged like this. It doesn’t matter whether we walk the Pennine Way for a fortnight, a day or even just an hour or so. Even up here, sandwiched rather ingloriously between Burnley and Bradford and where the endless slopes of heather and acidic grasses can sometimes verge on the drab, this path is our portal to another world. It’s an interface between people and landscape, and a reminder that there are other things in life besides email, shopping and celebrities.

I wasn’t finished with the Brontës quite yet. Dropping down sharply to Ponden Reservoir, I paused to admire Ponden Hall, a 17th-century farmhouse that’s reputed to be the Thrushcross Grange of Wuthering Heights. After climbing back up even more steeply, I strode out across Ickornshaw Moor and realised I really was on my own. There was absolutely no one around. A skylark trilled somewhere above me; in the far distance, a faint whine could have been a chainsaw; but otherwise there was just me and an awful lot of silent and rather featureless moorland. I stopped to have a break, resting my back against a stone wall and staring out in an unfocused way across the open slopes. Just an hour before, the moorland had been positively teeming with life above Haworth, and yet here, in the middle of July, the Pennines seemed utterly empty. The same had been true this morning around Walshaw Dean Reservoirs. It might not be the pristine wilderness experience but in these pockets of the unfashionable lower Pennines there were snatches of solitude that I hadn’t really expected.