The following morning, as I prepared to go down to breakfast, there was a distinctive smell in the house, an almost medicinal odour that seemed faintly familiar. I presumed Susan had been cleaning the kitchen or unblocking the drains. Barry was already seated at the breakfast table, a sheepish grin on his face. As the odd smell intensified, he pushed back his chair, unclipped his sandals and raised his bare feet. Ugly great blisters covered almost all of his toes and one of his heels in great weals, the like of which I’d only seen in photos in first-aid books. Barry had evidently been treating the blisters with an antiseptic powder, and presumably before that they had been liberally sprayed with some sort of industrial-strength solution – hence the all-pervading smell throughout the house. It awakened dim and not altogether comforting memories of bathrooms and communal changing rooms from my youth. Susan came in with plates of bacon and eggs and promptly went back out. I told him to put his revolting feet away and we tucked into breakfast.
So how on earth had he managed to get this far with such debilitating injuries? Didn’t they hurt? He explained, with a wink, that he had a ‘well-stocked’ first-aid kit, by which I think he meant that there were perks to being a paramedic. He mentioned the strong painkillers that he’d been taking since day 1, plus the various foot ointments, lotions and second-skin dressings that now adorned his beleaguered digits. I got the impression that his first-aid kit not only accounted for a significant proportion of his rucksack weight but also probably contained items that were kept under lock and key in most dispensaries. When we finished breakfast, I asked to look again at his bare feet, oddly fascinated that blisters could appear in such dramatic shapes and sizes, one of them spanning several toes, and wondering at what point the patient should be hospitalised. My feet, in comparison, were blister-free and in decent shape. I took a couple of close-up photos, which made Barry hoot with laughter and Susan, who had come in to clear the table, scuttle back to the kitchen once more. Looking back at those photos afterwards, I marvelled at how he carried on. The pain might have been dulled by pills and the toes cushioned with artificial-skin dressings, but it clearly still hurt. Evidently grit and determination count for much on the Pennine Way.
However, the emergency treatment seemed to be working, at least for now, because when we set off together Barry kept up a reasonable pace with only the trace of a limp. As we made our way slowly through the fields and along the lanes, I gently began to coax his story out of him and understand more about his motivation for walking the Pennine Way. It transpired that he’d fairly recently broken up with his long-time partner, and acrimoniously too, so I immediately assumed that plunging off head first into something as different and extreme as the Pennine Way would provide a welcome distraction and perhaps a chance to recover some self-esteem. But Barry didn’t labour the point and I sensed there was more to it than that. In conversation over the next few miles with this sociable, gentle man, one or two more pieces of the jigsaw emerged and slotted into place. As we stood above Lothersdale and gazed down at the village tucked away in the fold of the hills, and to the moors peeping over the horizon, he spoke about how all he could see from the window of his town centre flat was the side of another house. He told me how, as a paramedic for the last few years, he was regularly called out to people our own age who, through drink, drugs, smoking or obesity, were killing themselves before his eyes. Then when one of his own close friends, an ostensibly healthy 40-something, suddenly dropped down dead, it really shook him. ‘I told myself, you have to live life, make the most of this one chance you’ve got. But when I told my daughter I was going off to walk the Pennine Way she said I must be mad, at my age!’ He chuckled, but with a look of resolve.
At Lothersdale, Barry decided he would take a breather. Since I was keen to press on, we said our goodbyes and I climbed up to the bumpy open top of Pinhaw Beacon. Suddenly new vistas were revealed as the ground fell sharply away to the lush green fields of the so-called Aire Gap, the first of three distinct geological breaks in the Pennine chain. To the west, the distinctive outline of Pendle Hill filled the view, while ahead the Yorkshire Dales were beckoning and the Pennine Way was about to go through one of its most exciting transitions.
It’s useful to have some basic understanding of the rocks that underpin the Pennines, in order to grasp how it’s translated on the surface and what that means for the walker in terms of visible scenery and likely conditions underfoot. Until now, I had been walking largely on gritstone and shale, over rounded moorland covered by thin, harsh, acidic soils, water-retaining peat and blanket bog, an environment that supports only a few plant species. Soon I would switch to limestone, a light and permeable rock created by the deposits in a shallow sea 300 million years before. In a limestone environment, most of the surface water disappears underground and the thin, turf-covered soil is punctured by cliffs and rocky scars. A few prominent peaks, such as Pen-y-ghent and Ingleborough, stand proud due to their harder caps of millstone grit. Further north, a volcanic injection of dolerite into the rock strata created the distinctive Whin Sill, today visible as a highly resistant dark rock that forms the crags of High Cup Nick, the waterfalls of Upper Teesdale and the high points of Hadrian’s Wall. In the far north are the older Cheviot Hills, with their hard and resistant granite core, which also owe their height and shape to volcanic activity.
All that was to come. For now, the Pennine Way dropped steadily towards the leafy fields around Thornton-in-Craven and, for the next few miles, traversed a landscape of very small grassy hills known as drumlins, formed out of glacial deposits. A waymarked path peeled off to the left heading for Earby, a mile and a half off the route and an unwarranted diversion for Pennine Way walkers if it wasn’t for the presence of a small youth hostel.
One of the enduring charms of Pennine Way youth hostels is their sheer variety. In contrast to the busy modern hostels at Edale, Malham and Hadrian’s Wall, you also get the likes of Earby, located in the back streets of a former mill town between Burnley and Skipton. The 22-bed, self-catering hostel is a modest and unremarkable terraced cottage and the sole reason it’s a hostel is that it’s the former home of Katharine Bruce Glasier. She was a Quaker and early campaigner for women’s rights, co-founder of the Independent Labour Party, together with Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, and altogether a remarkable all-round social reformer. After her death, the house was bought with donations to a memorial fund and presented to the YHA in 1958. When the hostel was threatened with closure, Pendle Borough Council stepped in to save the property, then leased it back to the YHA. It’s typical, quirky Pennine Way.
This short westward extension to Earby might have had a precedent, back in the days when the Pennine Way was simply a provisional line on a map. The original plan was for the Pennine Way to reach Malham by a slightly more westerly route, via Widdop Cross and Wycoller. The grouse moors around here were, like those of the Peak District, among the most fiercely guarded in the Pennines in the 1930s; and in fact it wasn’t until the Open Access legislation of 2000 that you could legally access much of Boulsworth Hill for the first time. This was undoubtedly in the mind of Tom Stephenson when the idea for a continuous walking trail the length of the Pennines was first aired in his ‘long green trail’ article. What could be done to unlock these private moors so that the public could walk them in freedom?
Tom was born in Chorley in 1893 and spent his early years at Whalley, just a few miles away from where I was standing, on the far side of Pendle Hill. He stayed in full-time education until the age of 13, which was quite rare for a working-class Lancashire lad in those days, then began work in textile printing. Despite the (illegal) 66-hour week, he managed to escape the calico factory and, on the first Saturday after starting work, climbed Pendle Hill. It was a transformative experience and one that inspired his lifelong love of walking and the countryside. In his memoirs, Forbidden Land, he wrote: ‘Across the valley were the Bowland Fells; and away to the north Ingleborough, Pen-y-ghent and the other Pennine heights, all snow-covered, stood out sharp and clear in the frosty air. That vision started me rambling, and in the next sixty years took me time and again up and down the Pennines and