Walking the Pennine Way: Days Eight and Nine

From Keld, we walked uphill for two hours to the Tan Hill, Britain’s highest pub. It might also be the most surreal – you pass from miles of solitude and open moor to what looks like a small festival site, a field haphazardly crowded with tents, camper vans overflowing from the two carparks, stretching down the single-track road.

Ali described it as a mixture between the Wild West and a busy motorway service station. It’s anarchic, chaotic, and slightly outdated, with a late-night band playing soft rock covers very loud. It also serves Yorkshire puddings twice the size of a human head. Three of them (puddings, not heads) are eaten at our table, along with huge trifles, crumbles and cheesecakes. It’s hard to eat enough on the trail, but we are having a go.

We have a surprisingly good night’s sleep, given the number of drunk young men camping around us, and an early start on the 17 miles to Middleton. The first five are on Sleightholme Moor which I have very little to say about, other than we heard a curlew and saw a frog.

Though it's not me, there will be someone who loves this moor. I'm glad. Every piece of land deserves someone to love it, and someone to fight for it. The term “Nimby” enrages me. We should love our back yards. We should know them, each inch of them, we should be aware of their worth. We should, if necessary, be prepared to fight for them.

And of course, sometimes, we must be prepared to compromise, and to lose what we know is of value in the cause of a greater good.

One of the most under-utilised items in my rucksack is my book, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World by Barry Lopez. Every time I sit down to read, something happens. Last night, outside the Tan Hill, I was joined by Jackie, a very conversational woman who told me all about cottaging in Tadcaster along with some interesting insights on dogging in Sheffield. So it was only today, after we arrived at our B&B (we have gone soft!) in Middleton that I managed an uninterrupted half-hour read.

Barry writes beautifully about how love of specific place offers us agency and joy and hope; it also demands that we face, directly, the reality of the climate crisis. Never has it been clearer - the parched moors, the empty riverbeds, the fires. Never have I known the climate argument to be more divisive and binary. On the one hand, our planet is beginning to burn. On the other, it seems, we are panicking about a hot summer and a few wildfires caused by careless tourists, arsonists and rewilders.

Conversation has to be possible. After Sleightholme, we cross into areas managed by the North Pennines Moorland Group, made up of gamekeepers and farmers. Their interpretation boards explain how their care of the land protects its fragile ecology and biodiversity. That involves releasing thousands of grouse chicks from crates so that they can be shot by paying customers. I look forwards to a day when careful stewardship doesn’t necessitate the industrialised breeding and killing of birds whose bodies are disposed of in “stink pits”.

I want a serious, informed conversation about rewetting, restoring and the virtues of controlled burning. We have to find common ground. tout common ground is the land. Halfway to Middleton we encounter our first bothy, provided by the gamekeepers for walkers. As much as the shelter it offered on a drizzly afternoon, we loved the hundreds of messages written on the walls. We see lapwing, a single wren, we hear more curlew. We walk through Hannah’s Meadow, the nature reserve set up to commemorate the life and work of Hannah Hauxwell – I’m so delighted I could cry. Later, we walk into Clove Lodge, a barn given over to sheltering and feeding and patching up of hikers. Another tiny tuck shop four miles from Middleton provided us with chocolate and Iron Bru - and with the feeling that we were seen and cared about.

Most people are good. Most people want to help each other. Most people would pick someone up when they fall. Tonight, we said goodbye to Ken and Ali, who’ll be walking according to a different timetable from tomorrow. Since we met them as strangers on our first day of the Coast to Coast last year, they have felt more and more like genuine friends. We have not just compared sock rashes and blisters – we have laughed together, we have walked many miles together, we have urged each other on. Walk well, Ken and Ali. Thank you for your socks, your jokes, your kindness and your friendship. See you further down the trail.