Walking Home along the Pennine Way

Several years ago, Christine went to a conference in Liverpool and I tagged along. The day she gave her paper, I took the train to Edale, a village in the Peak District National Park, and spent the day wandering around the moors and valleys. The weather was strange, a mix of sun and snow and rain, but it was March, after all, but I thoroughly enjoyed my ramble. I remember being particularly struck by the tangible evidence of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century enclosures I’d learned about in school–I saw stone houses that had been partially demolished to build dry-stone walls and sheep pens after the tenant farmers had been evicted–and by the eighth-century roadside cross I hiked to. Edale is also the starting point of the Pennine Way, a 431-kilometre walking path across the Pennine Hills, through Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Cumbria and Northumberland, ending in the Scottish border village of Kirk Yetholm. After my day in Edale, I vowed that some day I’d walk the Pennine Way.

English poet Simon Armitage grew up in the village of Marsden, located on the Pennine Way about 45 kilometres north of Edale, and he still lives nearby. Several years ago, he decided that he would walk the Pennine Way. However, since he’s a poet and therefore averse to doing things the way other people do, he walked in the opposite direction from almost everyone else who attempts the journey, from north to south–from Scotland to his home town, in other words, and against the prevailing winds that howl northwards through the Pennines. Armitage also decided that he wouldn’t take any money along with him; instead, he would survive on whatever he earned by reading his poems at prearranged events en route.

The most successful books about walking journeys that I’ve read focus on the comedy created by the narrator’s mistakes–usually because he or she is woefully unprepared. Jack Hitt’s and Hape Kerkeling’s books about walking the Camino de Santiago are like that; Hitt gets lost trying to leave Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port, and Kerkeling finds himself hitching a ride in a tiny van with a farmer and a goat when he can’t manage the climb up the Pyrenees. Armitage’s book, Walking Home: A Poet’s Journey, is filled with similar comic moments: he loses his way in the fog, struggles against the rain and the wind, and meets a variety of interesting local characters. The book’s gentle self-mockery sometimes resolves into lyrical descriptions of the landscape and of the process of walking itself:

Because for the first time on this journey I realise that I’ve developed something of a regular pace, and not a slow one, a pace and also a rhythm of motion that feels very natural in relation to the weight in the rucksack, the ground underfoot, the angle of incline, the fuel in my belly and several other variables related to the scientific principles of bipedalism. At a certain speed everything feels to be working smoothly, the motor purring, the escapement ticking, the cogs turning, everything at its operational best; to slow down isn’t painful but it’s certainly annoying, and I find myself sympathising with those lorry drivers on the motorway who get to within a couple of yards of the car in front, flashing their lights and honking their air horns, who would prefer to plough through the back of a family saloon rather than lose revs and momentum.

Within hours, though, Armitage has reached the top of a mountain and discovers himself lost in dense fog:

I know for certain that if Richard turns back now I will turn back with him, because I simply don’t have the bottle to go wandering into that mist on my own, and if I turn back, all the scheduled readings and offers of hospitality will collapse like dominoes, the whole project will unravel, and I will have failed. . . . Feeling the brunt of the wind, almost an updraught, I’m guessing we’re on some sort of escarpment or ridge, but no matter which direction we walk in we can get no higher or lower, just further into the rocky wilderness, deeper into the milky atmosphere. The melancholy comes over me again, the dismal misery of not knowing where I am, or perhaps losing any sense of who I am, as if the mist is bringing about an evaporation of identity, all the certainties of the self leaching away into the cloud. I don’t cry, but I could easily let it happen, if I wanted to, and I’m close to wanting to.

Despite Armitage’s various moments of terror and confusion, the Pennine Way still sounds to me like a great adventure, although after reading his account of his journey I would approach it with a lot more respect, even trepidation, since my experience puttering around Edale clearly isn’t representative. That’s the great thing about reading books like this one: you get a sense of what the journey might be like and, if you’re lucky, you’re entertained by the personality and language of the narrator, your tour guide. And Armitage is definitely an entertaining character, worth spending some time getting to know, as well as a wonderful writer. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and can’t recommend it highly enough.