At Standedge, more a location than an actual settlement, the route crosses the A62 Huddersfield–Oldham road. In the early years of the Pennine Way, Peter’s Transport Café was a fixture of the hilltop car park, a refreshment stop for lorry drivers and commercial traffic in a pre-M62 era when the trans-Pennine road was much busier. Judging by the accounts of Pennine Way walkers at the time, the café was also a welcome sight for walkers at this remote location; but alas, it burnt down in 1970 and, like the Isle of Skye Hotel, has been consigned to the stuff of memories.
The route was now obvious, direct and mostly firm underfoot, with sections once notorious for their bog tamed by paths of aggregate and slabs. After the cloud and rain of the Peak District, it was now blue skies and sunshine in the South Pennines, bright and incredibly clear. Below me the high-rise buildings of Rochdale looked almost within touching distance, which was both fascinating and slightly unnerving at the same time. Between Crowden and Hebden Bridge, the Pennine hills seem to take a sharp intake of breath: the bare upland spine separating Oldham, Littleborough and Greater Manchester from Huddersfield, Halifax and West Yorkshire to the east is just a few miles wide. It seemed as if the ribbon of undeveloped upland trodden by the Pennine Way was the only thing stopping northern England from turning into one giant retail park or housing estate.
This sense of walking through an almost semi-urban, man-made environment was compounded by a string of small reservoirs. Further afield and off the main Pennine chain, there were a growing number of wind turbines visible. In particular, even as I watched, a large wind farm seemed to be taking shape north of Rochdale, with cranes hoisting gigantic shafts and propellers skywards. But it wasn’t just a visual assault on the senses. The growl of the M62 was first audible at least half an hour away, until eventually the trail dropped down to a cutting below Windy Hill in order to cross the motorway via a high and slender footbridge.
Originally it seems that the plan was for the Pennine Way to cross the M62 slightly east of its present line, following the A672 as it passed underneath the motorway at junction 22; but – the story goes – Transport Minister Ernest Marples (a keen rambler, it was said) insisted that the Pennine Way should have its own footbridge. And not just any off-the-shelf urban design either, but a reinforced concrete three-hinged arch with a span of 220ft, complete with counter-curve and side cantilevers. In other words, the Pennine Way got the sort of elegant and bespoke bridge that the country’s foremost long-distance footpath deserved, which I find very satisfying.
The M62 bridge was completed early in 1971 and Pennine Way walkers were crossing it before the motorway tarmac had even been laid. The Manchester Guardian carried a splendid photo by Robert Smithies of almost 100 ramblers from the Peak & Northern Footpaths Society, who were the first to cross the new bridge on Easter Sunday. The photo was reproduced on the front cover of the Society’s annual report for 1971–72 and shows a line of waving figures stretching right across the new structure, with just bare earth and a couple of diggers below. (Incidentally, when Smithies died in 2006, his obituary in The Guardian described how he enjoyed recounting the background to one of his other Pennine Way pictures – a walker struggling through winter blizzards – which had his editor in raptures. ‘I just drove up the Snake Pass, between Sheffield and Manchester, parked up where the footpath crosses and turned the car heater on,’ he recalled. ‘Then I waited for the first silly sod to materialise out of the snow.’)
Perhaps not surprisingly, this section of the M62 is the highest point of any motorway in England, peaking at 1221ft. And with Scammonden Bridge (the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the UK) and the well-known Stott Hall Farm (where the motorway carriages were built either side of the building, so marooning it in the middle) just to the east, the Pennine Way footbridge is in noteworthy company.
I stood mid bridge and took a photo of the endless stream of traffic 65ft below. A lorry hooted and I waved. I looked down as vehicle after vehicle sped underneath at what seemed to be breakneck speeds. A few drivers glanced up at me, perhaps fearful of what I was about to hurl down on them, or maybe wondering why a fully grown man was spending a July morning taking photos of motorway traffic.
The M62 is just one of numerous trans-Pennine roads that the Pennine Way hops across. Beginning with the Snake Pass and A628 Longdendale highway, there are five other major A roads that cross the Pennines within a few short miles; and at Standedge the railway and canal also go deep beneath the surface. On occasions, walking the Pennine Way seemed like an exercise in geometry, at least at its southern end.
At Blackstone Edge, the modern A58 linking Littleborough and Ripponden is also eclipsed by more historic thoroughfares. For a short distance, the Pennine Way drops downhill on a line of neat dark setts, the smooth grey stones standing out vividly against the grassy Pennine hillside. It was originally a packhorse track that was widened to become a turnpike, although some have claimed that its origins go all the way back to the Romans. It’s certainly a location that has been well documented by travel writers over the centuries, many of whom seemed to find it particularly daunting. As far back as 1696, Celia Fiennes reported that the 1500ft-high hilltop was ‘noted all over England for a dismal high precipice’. Daniel Defoe crossed the Pennines in 1724, referring to them as ‘the Andes of England’, which is perhaps stretching it a bit. He described a tortuous journey in a blizzard over the moors from Rochdale to Halifax, where the wind blew so strong he could hardly open his eyes and snow obliterated the track. Perhaps most oddly of all, it was in mid August.
Already the Pennines were changing and the walk taking on a subtly different character. The trail remained doggedly high but as Greater Manchester finally disappeared from sight and the hilltop obelisk of Stoodley Pike loomed ever closer, the path swung round and the deep green gash of the Calder valley was revealed. I gazed down at Todmorden and at the narrow valley snaking its way eastwards across the Pennines towards Hebden Bridge. A train clattered somewhere deep below and all along the bottom there were mill chimneys and densely packed houses clinging to the lower hillsides, since this was once a highly industrialised place. But they were broken up by extensive clumps of woodland and a lush green patchwork of fields that spread steeply up the hillsides. High pasture could be glimpsed above and there was a distinct feeling that the Pennines were about to raise their game.
A path peeled off to Mankinholes, where the youth hostel, occupying a former 16th-century manor house, has long been a popular stop-over for Pennine Way walkers. Incidentally, if you want to see how a stone-slabbed track beds down over time to become part of the landscape, then look closely at this historic causey path. Also known as the Long Drag, it leads down to the hostel from the moorland top. It was built to provide paid work for men whose families were starving as a result of the so-called Cotton Famine (the severe depression in the Lancashire cotton textile industry in the early 1860s, caused in part by the American Civil War, which halted the regular supply of imported raw cotton bales).
Closer to hand, though, there is a monument that dominates the view: as hilltop edifices go, Stoodley Pike is an impressive sight. Work started on a permanent memorial on this spot in 1814 to mark the defeat of Napoleon. It was promptly stopped when he escaped from the island of Elba and was completed when he was finally finished off after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Unfortunately, in 1854, the whole thing collapsed, supposedly after being weakened by an earlier lightning strike, and a more lasting, solid version was built. Someone also had a sensible afterthought and a lightning conductor was added a few years later. I’d read that it also came under threat of demolition in World War II, when there were concerns that it might be used to guide German bombers. However, it still stands today, a 120ft-high needle-shaped point partly coated in black soot. There’s an outside balcony 40ft up, which offers even better views, but to access it you have to run the gauntlet of an internal spiral staircase covered in broken glass in the near darkness. I fished out my head torch to help me find my way and soon I was leading a merry gang of ramblers and sightseers into the gloom.
If the Peak District grouse moor owners and their gamekeepers were staunchly against allowing ramblers greater access to the Pennine tops, then the water companies who owned large tracts of moorland in the South Pennines were equally resistant. Although the last two reservoirs I had passed, White Holme and Warland, were in fact built primarily to feed the Rochdale Canal, most of the reservoirs in this area were