The Pennine Way (Gargrave to Tan Hill)
In September I spent three days hiking about 80 kilometres of the Pennine Way, a famous long-distance hike through the Pennine Mountains in northern England. The whole route is over 400 kilometres, but I just had three days, so I chose a section with a starting point readily accessible by train, booked pubs to stay at each night, and set off by myself.
The first day I walked from Gargrave, a village outside of Skipton near Leeds, to Horton in Ribblesdale. The first day was by far the hardest of the three. I had been anxiously refreshing the weather forecast in the week before setting out on the walk, and was disappointed when it had been painfully accurate: a morning full of cloud and drizzle with patches of heavy rain. Not really wanting to think about walking 35 kilometres in the rain, I just got started and hoped that my new waterproof gear would turn out to actually be waterproof.
Walking in light rain is fine. So long as the drizzle can evaporate a little faster than it can arrive, you don’t really stay wet for long and it even adds a certain ambiance to the walk, and certainly means you will have the path to yourself. Drizzle accompanied me to Malham cove (pictured above), which featured in the very first episode of The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.
As I walked north from the limestone pavement however, the drizzle slowly began to get heavier and heavier, until I found myself walking through very exposed terrain, without even a tree in sight, in full on driving rain. It quickly became very unpleasant. There was nowhere to seek refuge, no chance of turning back to somewhere warm, nothing to do but press on and hope it will ease up.
I began to get a little disheartened at the thought of walking a further almost 20 kilometres in driving rain by myself, including several very exposed sections at altitude. I began to feel a little anxious, like maybe I’d taken on a bit more than I could actually accomplish with this walk, the self-doubt kicked in, the “what am I doing here in this freezing field in the rain so far away from my family”.
At the height of these unpleasant feelings I ran into John.
John was in his late sixties, an ultra marathon runner, who had retired last week after a thirty-five year career as an economist in the health sector. He’d spent months preparing for the Pennine Way, which he was walking in its entirety, and looked serene, headphones in, in shorts, almost gliding through the scenery.
I stopped him, an impulse that I surprised myself with, and we began to talk, and I ended up walking alongside him for the rest of the day until we reached our destination for the evening.
I would usually say I prefer to walk by myself, but in this instance John’s company immediately lifted me out of my funk of self-doubt and into a great mood. I immediately recast my situation as astonishingly fortunate, remembered how long I had been waiting to get out for a walk like this, and how beautiful the scenery was, even in the rain.
As John and I came down off the summit of Fountain Fell, a rather forboding mountain covered in bogs and old shale mine shafts and peaty moorland that was shrouded in a very thick mist, just as I was thinking to myself how I would have felt quite frightened to have walked it by myself, the clouds parted, and then disappeared, within seconds. In descending ten metres, my visibility went from 100 metres to 50 kilometres, the sky from grey to blue, and in front of us was Pen-y-Ghent (pictured above), the butter-pat shaped lump that we were about to climb to finish off the day, with some technical scrambling towards the peak that would have been dangerously slippery in the rain.
“The pleasures of walking,” John said, and offered me one of his Eccles cakes.
The village for my second night was Horton-in-Ribblesdale. The village has two pubs. John and I had a couple of pints at the first one before he got the train home, to rest before starting from the same spot the next day. The pub had two rooms: one large one with an open fireplace, which was fitted with a sign saying “No entrance, yes that means you”, and another, smaller, dingier, with black bin bags individually taped to every stool. The owner told us it was to prevent hikers from coming in and getting mud everywhere. She ranted for twenty minutes about hikers and their manners and their mud and their packed lunches. Later on Google I read that the bigger, nicer room was reserved for locals only.
The second pub was the one I stayed at for the night. There was a picture of Nigel Farage behind the bar. I had a pie which was just a stew with a slab of puff pastry whacked on top of it. I slept the best sleep I can remember for a long time.
The next day’s walking was sublime. I left early and walked 22km without stopping and made it to my next village for lunch just as it was starting to rain. The walk was flat and scenic and there were some spectacular views of the Ribblesdale viaduct (pictured above). John had left before me, so I walked alone, but I definitely felt his spirit accompany me throughout the day.
The final day was harder. The weather was constantly threatening. I had originally planned for four days, but halfway through the third I had realised the fourth was not going to happen, it would be icy cold, gale force winds, and rain all day, and I realised I didn’t have to flagellate myself in such a way. I would end the third day at the Tan Hill Inn, the highest pub in Britain, a fitting end to the walk, and then could spend the fourth day travelling home at a leisurely pace and even make it to see the kids after school, rather than arriving at midnight.
I still had to make it through the day first, a tough slog, a very sore toe, unpleasant winds, and a constant mental battle, looking down at my feet to not step in a bog. Great Shunner Fell (pictured above) was beautiful, covered in colourful heather and peat moss.
But by the time I made it to the pub, just as the wind was picking up even further, beginning to howl, I knew I had made the right decision to stop here. I wondered if John would be walking tomorrow, or whether he’d take the day off too. I’d like to think he would rest, would listen to the body that had given him so many long years of access to the pleasures of walking. I sat in my body next to the fireplace, drank a pint or two of ale, muddled my way through a couple of conversations with folks around the bar, and then went to bed early, feeling very content and ready to go home.
Photographs
- The famous limestone “pavement” at the top of Malham Cove.
- Looking towards Pen-y-Ghent from the base of Fountain Fell.
- The Ribblesdale Viaduct.
- Moorland on Great Shunner Fell.