The authors suggested a number of ways to counter these problems, including taking vitamin B supplements, using salt on your food and taking a supply of ripe oranges for liquid and sucrose/energy (but not too many as they can act as a laxative!). And there were four additional tips: take a companion; avoid thinking of the days ahead and concentrate on tonight’s objective; pack a good pair of trainers so you can switch from your boots on drier ground or if blisters develop; and use Vaseline on sore patches on your feet in conjunction with stretchy plasters.
The article was written over 30 years ago but the message is still relevant: walking 268 miles in less than three weeks across rough ground in all weathers is an extreme and in most cases unique challenge to the human body, so it pays to do more than simply program the GPS and buy a decent pair of boots by way of preparation.
Mike Imrie went on to walk the Pennine Way a dozen times and for a decade was membership secretary of the Pennine Way Association, so it’s fair to say he knows a thing or two about the art of completing a long-distance challenge on foot. He wrote an equally interesting follow-up article (called ‘Health Revisited’), this time for the Pennine Way Association’s newsletter in spring 1995, in which he looked at how to achieve the right balance of vitamins and minerals in a long-distance walker’s body (in particular, B vitamin complex and vitamin C). As befits a nuclear scientist, it was typically well researched and extremely comprehensive and is worth tracking down to read in full.
However, for northbound walkers contemplating day 2, he and Dr Smith had some crumbs of comfort. They suggest that if you set off from Edale and make it as far as Malham, then your body will have largely adapted to the new regime and you should have overcome any initial problems. And they offer this concluding observation: ‘If you complete the walk despite suffering you will be twice the person you were. If you give up you will be diminished. Good luck!’
2
CROWDEN – HEBDEN BRIDGE
Repairing the green trail
Longdendale wasn’t exactly alluring the following day, murky and uniformly grey with moisture heavy in the air. It was one of those mornings, I told myself, where you simply have to get up and get going without too much thought in between. I crossed a former railway line that now forms part of the east–west Trans Pennine Trail, a coast-to-coast walking and cycling route from Southport, near Liverpool, to Hornsea, beyond Hull. It was as deserted as the lifeless reservoir below, one of five (Bottoms, Valehouse, Rhodeswood, Torside and Woodhead) that occupy almost the entire valley floor. The only activity seemed to be on the far side, where an endless stream of vans and articulated lorries were growling their way along the A628, which links Manchester and the M1 via the high and bleak Woodhead Pass.
Once clear of Longdendale, I slithered up the damp hillside into the cloud above Laddow Rocks. The sodden undergrowth made short work of my dry trousers. I waded through a stream where the slab bridge had partly collapsed and tried to negotiate several patches of spongy ground and bog, before finally embarking on a paved section that marked the long, gradual ascent of Black Hill. My feet were sodden and squelching and all I could see was wet, lifeless moorland. It was not a great start to day 2.
I plodded on for a bit, then decided to call a halt and maybe cheer myself up with a chocolate bar that had been earmarked for a likely afternoon treat to head off flagging energy levels; but much to my surprise I realised I was nearly at the top of Black Hill. I stopped by the trig point and, as I poured a cup of coffee from my flask, the thinning clouds finally parted and a little watery sun shone through. This was better. I celebrated by eating some chocolate anyway; and my spirits were raised further by a short but good-natured chat with a passing walker, a local man, who told me that in his opinion Black Hill was a fine place and unfairly treated by the walking guidebooks.
Mind you, by all accounts, Black Hill’s bad press was once well deserved. Writing in 1968 in his Pennine Way Companion, Alfred Wainwright described the summit as a ‘desolate and hopeless quagmire’ where the peat was ‘naked and unashamed’. The vegetation had been completely eroded so that the trig point was marooned in a soft bed of glutinous peat and only survived because it was built on a small island called Soldiers’ Lump (named after the army engineers who originally surveyed the hill). To physically reach it entailed a dirty and potentially dangerous adventure, as Wainwright himself found out when he became completely stuck in the peat bog. He was rescued by the efforts of his walking friend and a passing national park warden who managed to pull him free.
Half a century later, the summit of Black Hill is almost unrecognisable. The fact that I had reached the top sooner than anticipated, and that I was simply wet rather than covered in bog, is testament to the fact that a slabbed path runs up to and beyond the trig point, which itself now sits on a neat cairn in the middle of a small paved area. More remarkable still is that in all directions there is vegetation: coarse grasses, heather, bilberry, cotton grass and rushes. There are wet patches, of course, as you would expect on any Pennine top, and its sense of bareness and bleakness will never be to everyone’s taste, but this is a hill with a new lease of life. It’s a far cry from that degraded, boot-sucking sea of exposed peat that once gave Black Hill the darkest of reputations; and it recalls not just the low point in the Pennine Way’s fortunes, but the moment when the path’s very existence came under threat.
By the mid 1980s, it was clear that sections of the Pennine Way were in serious trouble, principally where the heavily used path crossed fragile, peat-based moorland, and especially in the Peak District and South Pennines. After years of official inaction, the case for some sort of intervention was now irrefutable.
In 1987, the Peak District National Park Authority and the Countryside Commission established a three-year management project to examine ways to repair the worst-eroded sections. They had found that, since a survey in 1971, the width of the path had widened dramatically in certain places as successive walkers tried to avoid the exposed and glutinous peat, which of course only made the erosion worse. What was once a 6ft-wide path on Black Hill had increased to 71ft across, while between Slippery Moss and Redmires to Blackstone Edge the width of bare path had grown by a staggering 900 per cent!
In the first phase of the project, led by Molly Porter, various techniques were trialled, some with more success than others. Since digging out the peat to the bedrock was not a realistic option, most techniques involved floating an artificial path on top of the soft surface. There were wooden duckboards, strips of black plastic matting anchored to the ground, elaborate raft paths that floated on geotextiles, and even sheep’s wool. Chestnut fence palings, wood chippings and brash were laid in long lines to try to provide a firm walkway across the peat. Most succumbed to the harsh Pennine weather and actually became eyesores and tripping hazards, so were later removed, but it was valuable experience and lessons were learnt. Some techniques were truly experimental, such as the construction of a short path on Snake summit consisting of expanded polystyrene blocks covered with loose stone. It was based on road construction methods over deep peat sites in southern Norway, which effectively allowed the highway to float. Initially the results were very encouraging, but heavy downpours and poor drainage made the blocks too buoyant and caused them to split, so that the path began to wobble alarmingly, much to the consternation of passing walkers.
In 1991, Mike Rhodes was appointed as project manager. Reflecting on some of the highs and lows in a report ten years later, he described the time when he was walking alone to his car on the Snake summit one winter’s afternoon after a site visit. ‘It was going dark, it was misty and I was tired from the miles of dodging slurried peat bogs. Suddenly, without warning, I found myself up to my waist in cold liquid peat. I clung to a tussock, hauled myself out and sat there, soaking wet and stinking of rotting vegetation.’
Mike later became Access and Rights of Way Manager for the Peak District National Park Authority. He told me that, 30 years ago, the conditions were so bad that it was make or break for the Pennine Way. ‘In the mid 1980s it got to the stage where the impact of the Pennine