What was especially noticeable was the lack of people. A solitary runner, a post van and a couple of tractors were the sum total of life for the best part of two hours that morning, as I made my way by path and lane via Graining Water and the trio of Walshaw Dean Reservoirs. I paused on the far side of the middle one to read some large and evidently VERY IMPORTANT public notices. Huge boards, in vivid colours, shouted warnings at me that cold water kills, bathing was prohibited and there was a danger of falling along the bywater channel. I didn’t even know what a bywater channel was, but walking along it sounded risky. In fact, I found out that it was simply an artificial trench running alongside the main reservoir to carry away excess water, and I found this out because the Pennine Way now ran beside it.
Beyond the reservoirs, the path took to slabs as it gradually made its way up to the top of the hill. However, unlike some of the newer paved routes that I’d been treading over the last couple of days, this one was laid as long ago as 1989 by Calderdale Countryside Service and it was interesting to see how well it had bedded down, with vegetation fringing the stones all the way along. New moorland vistas now opened up ahead, with Haworth and Keighley over to the right. But the main attraction was much closer to home. The trail descended to a ruined building, variously called Top Withins, Top Withens or simply Withins. The main part of what was evidently once a small, simple dwelling was roofless and sat in isolation next to a couple of trees towards the top of the moors. In any other situation this would be just another neglected and unremarkable old building, slowly decaying year by year; except here small knots of people all over the hillside were making a beeline for it, following waymarked paths from Haworth that even included signposts in Japanese.
A prominent plaque fixed to one of the walls explained that the building was associated with the Earnshaw home described by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights. Erected by the Brontë Society in 1964, the plaque and its carefully chosen wording interested me as much as the dilapidated building. It was a masterclass in non-committal. ‘The buildings, even when complete, bore no resemblance to the house she described. But the situation may have been in her mind when she wrote of the moorland setting of the Heights.’ The notice finishes with the slightly irritable comment: ‘This plaque has been placed here in response to many inquiries’. You can almost hear the author of the notice sighing.
There wasn’t too much to see and I felt slightly out of place among couples in white trainers and sunglasses. I wondered what they expected to find there, and whether they felt their three-mile trek across the moors from Haworth was worth it. I did consider making the reverse trip, perhaps nosing round the Parsonage Museum for an hour; but the sun was shining and I thought I’d really rather be up on the moors on my own than jostling with holiday crowds in a busy tourist village.
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’.
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.
Again, returning to Marion Shoard’s article in The Rambler magazine, I found that Tom Stephenson had summed it up well: ‘There’s a silence that you can almost hear. The wind in the different kinds of vegetation: you hear that in different tones – a whisper or a rustle on the ground, the heather and so on. There’s the sound of a curlew, the plovers, the little plaintive peep peep, and the snipe drumming in season. They’re all part of the attraction. Then there’s the different shades in the vegetation: grey-green, grey in winter with the heather sooty black. It’s surprising what different tones you get in the landscape. I like the moors at all times of year. The Pennine moors are even more colourful in winter than in summer.’
I spent the night at Cowling, an untouristy Pennine village just off the trail on the A6068. There seemed to be an unending stream of traffic heading from Burnley to Keighley, or Keighley to Burnley, including huge wagons that made the pavements shudder. My B&B was tucked away just off the main street, a short terraced row where Susan and Sandy couldn’t have done any more to make a footsore Pennine Way traveller more welcome. As soon as I arrived, I was ushered through the kitchen and sat down in the tiny back conservatory amid the geraniums and wellies, a cup of tea and slice of home-made lemon drizzle cake thrust into my hands whether I liked it or not. Where had I walked from? How did I feel? What was the weather like? Susan, in particular, was a keen rambler herself and empathy flowed in waves. Cowling might not have been the prettiest place I stayed in, but the welcome at Woodland House was certainly among the warmest.
A couple of hours after I arrived, another Pennine Way walker plodded wearily through the door. I’d already encountered Barry several times on the trail since Edale,