In the period between the two World Wars, frustrated ramblers and access campaigners looked for ways to overcome these seemingly implacable obstacles. There had been the rallies and trespasses, of course, most publicly on Kinder Scout, where the mass trespass had made national headlines and highlighted the woeful lack of access to the Peak District’s moorlands. But for one journalist, walker and activist, there was another ploy.
Tom Stephenson was the ‘open-air correspondent’ for the popular Daily Herald national newspaper. He wrote a now famous, double-page feature entitled ‘Wanted – A Long Green Trail’, which appeared in the newspaper on 22 June 1935. This was the first time that an idea for a walking route the length of the Pennines had been properly aired. Reading the article today, it seems likely that Tom and probably others had been considering such a route for a while. As my own walk progressed, I would learn much more about the self-effacing and remarkable Tom Stephenson, creator of the Pennine Way and tireless access campaigner.
The spur for Tom’s article was a letter that the paper had received from two American girls asking for advice about a ‘tramping holiday’ in England. Tom explained to readers that the Appalachian Trail and John Muir Trail stretched thousands of miles through the girls’ homeland but that England had nothing to compare. Instead, despite the popularity of walking in England, our own hills were ringed with what he called ‘wooden liars’ – notices declaring that the land was strictly private and that trespassers would be prosecuted. He invited the reader to consider how, little more than a century before, people were walking unhindered along old Roman roads, pilgrimage routes, shepherds’ trods and drove roads, criss-crossing the hills for a variety of purposes, but now many of these routes had been lost and access closed off. Ramblers might pour into the likes of the Peak District every Sunday to enjoy good open-air recreation, but their freedom to roam the hills and moors was severely curbed. The answer, Tom artfully suggested, was ‘something akin to the Appalachian Trail – a Pennine Way from the Peak to the Cheviots’.
Walking a long distance for recreation and fun, as opposed to doing it for work, a religious pilgrimage or because you had no other transport, was something that had actually begun in continental Europe some years before. As Colin Speakman explains in his 2011 book Walk!, the Westweg (West Way) had been developed in the Black Forest of Germany in 1900 by the Black Forest Society, and before long other popular trails emerged and similar networks grew in places like the Vosges. Young Germans (who called themselves Wandervögel or ‘wandering birds’) poured out of the cities to explore the countryside. They began to enjoy a growing and ever more intricate system of marked paths linking one walkers’ hostel to another, the paths often depicted by no more than simple splashes of paint on a tree trunk or rock.
This idea of purposefully creating a waymarked long-distance walking route soon spread to Sweden, then crossed the Atlantic to America, where the 265-mile Long Trail was established in Vermont, stretching from Massachusetts to the Canadian border. However, the Appalachian Way (or Trail), completed in 1937, was the first long-distance path that really captured the national imagination and whose scope (2100 miles from Georgia to Maine) matched the ambition and grandeur of the United States.
While recognising the achievement, Tom Stephenson was keen to ensure a sense of proportion for any such route along the Pennines. In his Daily Herald article, he painted a picture of how the Pennine Way might look: ‘This need be no Euclidean line, but a meandering way deviating as needs be to include the best of that long range of moor and fell; no concrete or asphalt track, but just a faint line on the Ordnance Maps which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land.’
He outlined a likely course, which with the exception of Boulsworth Hill and Pendle Hill was uncannily like the final agreed route, and in a nod to the prevailing royal jubilee he suggested it could be called the Jubilee Way or Georgian Path. The name was clearly of less importance than the overriding desire to secure a public foothold in these forbidden lands. The idea of the Pennine Way had arrived.
3
HEBDEN BRIDGE – MALHAM
Tom Stephenson’s big idea
The next morning I sat in the kitchen of a terraced house in Hebden Bridge. It belonged to a small woman in what I judged to be her late 60s or early 70s, who I had never met until the previous evening, nor was I ever likely to again once I had left. As I sat quietly, she busied herself preparing breakfast, humming gently as she stirred the scrambled egg and checked the toast. I looked round the neat but homely room, at the postcards on the fridge door and a vase of fresh flowers by the window. There was a small pile of ironing on a chair by the door and a few cookery books on a shelf. Outside, some children walked past noisily on their way to school. And as I sat there at the kitchen table, surrounded by all the trappings of everyday life, but an everyday life that belonged to a complete and utter stranger, it struck me that bed and breakfast is a most peculiar arrangement.
Mind you, if bed and breakfast is by definition peculiar, that’s nothing compared to the phenomenon that is the Pennine Way B&B landlady. After I had arrived the previous afternoon, weary and slightly footsore, I went through the customary greetings and then made the grievous mistake of imagining I could simply walk down the tiled corridor towards my room still clad in boots and rucksack. After all, my boots were clean after walking through the town and my pack was completely dry. Short and slight but with a commanding voice that could probably be heard the other side of the valley, Miss B announced that boots (whatever their condition) were to be removed before entering the premises. That’s perfectly fine, I thought, as I sat outside the back door on a bench evidently provided for that purpose. A wide, shallow tray lined with newspaper was produced, on which I was invited to place my boots. I then stood up and shouldered my pack, but was promptly informed that rucksacks were not allowed to be worn when inside the house but instead had to be carried in the arms in a forward position. I stood, slightly stupefied, wondering what on earth I had let myself in for tonight. I had visions of being stood over in the bath by this officious lady instructing me how to scrub my back. Sensing my bewilderment, Miss B relented and explained that she had had too many pictures knocked off the walls of her narrow landing by young men wearing ‘enormous’ rucksacks. I finally made it to my room, clutching my rucksack before me, and opened the door in trepidation, fearing what other house rules I might inadvertently break.
In the end, I must say I warmed to Miss B. I learnt that she had been providing bed and breakfast for Pennine Way walkers on and off for over 30 years (‘but I only open in the summer months – you shouldn’t be walking it at other times’); and despite her stern manner, delivered in the style of a short-tempered maths teacher, I think she may have developed a soft spot for walkers. We chatted over breakfast and she told me she had had a serious operation at the beginning of the year and wasn’t going to do B&B this season. ‘But then Pennine Way walkers began ringing up to book for the summer and I just couldn’t turn them down.’
Half an hour later I said goodbye and, armed with her hand-drawn map showing me the best way to regain the trail above the town, I left the home of a complete stranger to walk 16 miles to that of another.
Miss B is just one of many Pennine Way accommodation providers who have developed a special bond with the walkers who periodically stagger through their doors. The Pennine Way Association’s indispensable accommodation guide first appeared in 1971 and