For over 30 years, this isolated lay-by has been the location of the legendary Snoopy’s snack van, a mainly weekend phenomenon that appears to be celebrated largely on the strength of the generous size of its bacon butties and the huge, steaming mugs of tea served up to Pennine Way walkers, who are no doubt grateful for a hot drink and a chat. Whether they open the serving hatch or conduct business from the door at the end depends on the strength of the wind, I was told.
Looking back, Black Hill was now more or less clear of cloud, although a little to the east my eye was irresistibly drawn to the 750ft pencil-thin mast of the Holme Moss transmitter, which was erected in 1951. Although pinned down with five sets of steel stays, the 140-ton mast looked incredibly fragile. Beyond the mast a low, grey blanket still enveloped Bleaklow. I sighed deeply. I had got over the first hurdle, seen off the opening test on the Pennine Way. But was this the right way to look at it?
Long before I took that first step at Edale, I decided I had to try to get to the bottom of the popular notion of the Pennine Way as simply a hard, uncompromising slog. The physical and mental challenge, the arduous miles of bog and bare moorland, the blisters and pain. Surely there was more to the Pennine Way than that? But the Pennine Way has always seemed to carry its reputation before it. In his book The Wild Rover, Mike Parker set the Pennine Way alongside the many hundreds of other domestic walking trails and described it as the ‘undoubted alpha male of the pack, the toughest, hardest bastard there is’. It seems to be the only British long-distance path that everyone has heard of, even those for whom walking for fun is as alien a concept as deep-sea diving or eating snails. In the preceding months, whenever I mentioned that I was going to walk the Pennine Way people tended to respond with terms like ‘long’, ‘hilly’, ‘tough’, ‘rain’ and ‘bogs’. Others offered a shake of the head or a roll of the eyes and in their minds they probably added ‘nutter’.
In their 1980 guidebook to backpacking, Britain at Your Feet, David Wickers and Art Pedersen were pretty blunt about the Pennine Way, calling it ‘a 250-mile wet slog up the middle of England.’ They described how ‘the going is rough and can be a real body wrecker … there are exhausting hours to be spent bog hopping across the peaty plateaux, just like wading through a giant squelchy grow bag. And the weather can be truly violent, with low flying rain clouds, sleet that comes hard and horizontal, and pea souper mists that can brew up within minutes, even on the gentlest of summer days … there are certainly moments when you have to convince yourself it is doing you good, and when the very idea of the Pennine Way being a public “footpath” seems an utter euphemism.’ You get the impression they didn’t like the Pennine Way very much.
Of course, walking along the top of the Pennines is always likely to have its challenging moments, whatever route you take and however you choose to walk it, and that’s what distinguishes it from the Cotswold Way or Thames Path. The Pennines are a high, often remote chain of hills, the western facing slopes in particular prone to rain, and where there’s peat underfoot the ground is always likely to cut up. Long-distance walks are about experiencing the elements, moving slowly through different natural landscapes and being outdoors. And they’re about testing your mettle. But how far does testing your mettle mean that a walking trail should be so exacting as to make endurance rather than enjoyment the watchword?
More than almost any other UK walking trail, the Pennine Way seems synonymous with sheer physical challenge. The South West Coast Path may be much longer (630 miles compared to the Pennine Way’s 268 miles) and the overall height gain much greater (115,000ft against the Pennine Way’s 37,000ft, give or take a bit), but you rarely go half a day without dropping down to a village, café or beach. When you set off for a day on the Pennine Way, on the other hand, in most cases you don’t see a shop, pub or café until nightfall; and if you camp you might not see one at all.
As I walked north to Scotland, I pondered the question of toughness and challenge and talked to others about it. Where precisely do you strike the balance between maintaining the trail’s sheer physical (and mental) test and making it sufficiently accessible so that enough people feel both inspired and capable of attempting it? Reading accounts of early trail completions in the 1960s and 70s, I was struck by the fact that most people seemed to accept the boggy and sometimes treacherous conditions underfoot as simply part of walking along the top of the Pennines. It might not have been altogether pleasant at times, but coping with it was part of the adventure.
So was it right to tolerate the sort of erosion that I’d already heard about in the Peak District or could (and should) the path be better maintained but still remain a walking challenge? After all, a walking route that is so long, high, exposed and remote is surely challenging enough, regardless of the surface beneath your boots?
The Pennine Way’s creator had a clear view on this. In an article in The Great Outdoors magazine in April 1993, journalist Roly Smith quoted from a conversation that he had had with Tom Stephenson in 1976. Did the scars on the landscape caused mainly by the feet of Pennine Way walkers upset the route’s architect? ‘No, it doesn’t offend me in the slightest,’ Tom replied. ‘The way I see it is that this route has given so much pleasure to so many thousands of people who perhaps otherwise might have not ventured on to the hills. That is what I wanted in the first place, and when I see young people enjoying themselves on the Pennine Way, it makes it seem worthwhile.’
Others have pointed out that the relatively small cost of repairing a stretch of worn footpath, when compared to the cost of building just a few yards of new road, for instance, is a price worth paying, especially when you factor in all the physical and mental benefits associated with taking exercise in the outdoors. A well-used and eroded path is evidence that people are walking it and want to walk it, so the argument goes.
However, 50 years on and attitudes have shifted. It might still be just as important to encourage young people onto the hills, but it’s no longer acceptable to sit by and allow such obvious environmental damage to take place. I suspect, too, that many outdoor users are increasingly aware of their individual impact and uncomfortable with the notion that their own feet are damaging the very same wild and beautiful landscapes that they come to enjoy. And such damage, too. A full condition survey of the Pennine Way in 1989 showed that for the trail south of the M62 (including all of the Peak District), the average worn or trampled width was found to be 40ft; but on the summit plateau of Kinder Scout the trample damage spread up to half a mile wide!
As I left the Peak District, on the newly laid causey paths amid recovering moorland, I really couldn’t see that there was any other option but to repair and renew, even up here where by rights it should be wild and untouched. Indeed, I even felt a faint sense of hope that amid so much wider ecological destruction that we have been wreaking on the planet for the last couple of centuries, we still have it in our gift to step back and, through purpose, ingenuity and hard work, rectify the damage. Either way, the Pennine Way had been pulled back from the brink.
I turned my back on Black Hill and that soggy first day and headed off down the increasingly sunlit Wessenden valley, now on a firm and inviting track past a string of small reservoirs. At the top, by the roadside, was a National Trust interpretation board that explained how this part of Marsden Moor was once known as the Black Moor because it was covered by soot from the surrounding mills and factories. It also featured an old photo of the long-vanished Isle of Skye Hotel, which once stood near this spot, describing how day trippers used to walk up to this lonely moorland pub for ham and egg teas.
The building has long since gone, compulsorily purchased and demolished in the 1950s by a water company for fear that their nearby reservoir water would be polluted; but the pub lives on in the local name for the A635 (the Isle of Skye road), as well as in the name of the annual Four Inns race, for which it is the starting point. This long-running team competition is held around Easter and involves a 45-mile non-stop walking/running route over the rough moors of the Dark Peak, linking four pubs: the Isle of Skye (site of), the Snake Pass Inn, the Old Nags Head at Edale, and the Cat and Fiddle on the moors to the far west. Of course, two of these pubs are on the Pennine Way, and the Snake Pass Inn just off it. The winning teams often take as