Of all the long-distance trails in the British Isles the Pennine Way, 256 miles (412km) along the backbone of northern England, is pre-eminent. The first to be opened as a National Trail, to some it’s the best; it’s certainly the best known and it’s arguably the hardest.
Anyone who completes the Pennine Way will refute the suggestion that it was easy. It isn’t. It requires fitness, determination, good humour and adaptability because your walk won’t go smoothly all the time.
There will be days when you wish you’d never crawled out of bed, but there will be others when you feel invincible, when you can walk all day and arrive at your next stop, raring to go.
The Way takes you through most of the inland habitats of flora and fauna in this country and you’ll see a wonderful variety of plant and animal life. You’ll start with a testing trudge over the peat moors of the Peak District and continue into the South Pennines past such milestones as Stoodley Pike and Calder Vale. You then move into Brontë country and will pass Top Withens, said to be the Wuthering Heights of Emily’s novel.
Your path continues past reservoirs and windswept moorland until Lothersdale, the last former mill town, now a village with an incongruous factory chimney. The bedrock now turns to limestone and you enter the lowlands of the Airedale Gap where a delightful riverside walk leads to Malham.
The climbing resumes, up onto Fountains Fell and Pen-y-ghent and then down into Horton-in-Ribblesdale in Three Peaks country, a land of wide skies and magnificent views. Through Swaledale the Way continues, where Hawes and Keld lead to lonely and deserted Baldersdale: the halfway point.
Passing Teesdale’s churning waterfalls, the Way then breaches the North Pennines to behold the stunning glaciated chasm of High Cup and thereafter the homely village of Dufton. Here begins the much-dreaded traverse of Cross Fell, at 2930ft/893m the walk’s highest point.
Gradually descending from the wilds of the North Pennines you reach Hadrian’s Wall, archaeologically and historically one of the most evocative places in Britain. Along with High Cup, the walk along the Wall is one of the most outstanding days on the trail.
North of the Wall you enter the vast forests of Wark and Redesdale, eventually reaching the village of Bellingham. One more day to the lonely forest outpost of Byrness is followed by the suitably climactic 27-mile (43km) slog over the Cheviots to the end at Kirk Yetholm.
An unexpected bonus of the walk, particularly for city-based walkers, is the pleasing time-warp effect evoked in some villages; Garrigill being a good example.
Here you’ll enjoy a kind of Blytonesque rural British apogee: the tranquil village green surrounded by the pub, the post office/shop and a church.
For some the walk changes their lives. Certainly completing the Way proves there’s nothing you can’t do once you set your mind to it and, however you do it, the Pennine Way stands supreme.
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