I didn’t take offence. I came to understand what he meant as I worked in New York, dodging yellow cabs and Cagney and Lacey. My America was a psychosis brought on by watching too much TV, formed in film, in the familiar backdrops of endless cop shows.

Leaving Thornton after a couple of days of rest at my brother Doug’s it was difficult to imagine I was in the Pennines at all. The lovingly kept gardens gave way to a farm track which made a straight course across a dismantled railway. The gentleness of the scenery felt more like South Devon.

It was really starting to warm up now. Heat hazes shimmered off the moor tops, fluking and fluttering like the ever present skylarks. The ground held onto the heat, giving it up like electric shocks when I put my hand on a fence post . The air stood still and cackled like a witch.

I climbed. The rolling uphill route leading up to the vantage point of Pinhaw Beacon. Then I came down and climbed once again. My progress, a sine wave of valleys and hills, through a landscape of stone walls and neglected farms. With the sun overhead it was a land without shade and I felt as if I was balancing a great weight on my head. I strode on absorbing image after image of a brilliant summer’s day.

By now I had become very accomplished at reading guide books backwards. I had a copy of a guide to the Pennine Way which had been written as tour going north from Edale. This left me working in reverse as I tried to reconstruct the route. Periodically I would forget myself and turn over a page in the conventional direction and be surprised that the countryside up ahead was just like that which I had just covered. As an arrangement for walking it was a mixed blessing. Although the written instructions were difficult to interpret I always got warning to turn around and take in the view behind me. It also alerted me to the fixed gaze of the guide book user. It allowed me to be surprised by what came next. It allowed me to formulate my own views. I enjoyed the authority that my own observations gave me, though I was surprised at how my perceptions were being shaped by the power of never-never England.

The guide book pointed out that I was coming into ‘Wuthering Heights Country’. This violent brooding land, it stated, plays an important role in the ambience of the novel of the same name. A bleak and windy place of the imagination, a physical metaphor for the brooding passions and resentments of Cathy and Heathcliffe.

In preparation for reaching ‘Wuthering Heights’ I had been singing like Baby Clanger as I sauntered in the sunlight attempting to get the high notes of Kate Bush’s song. I realised I was coming to this hill through the pages of a book, re-interpreted through the words of a song. I reminded myself to use my own eyes.

What I saw on that moor was a totally different place. The burning ‘Wuthering Heights’ of Sylvia Plath’s poem, in fact. What struck me so vividly as I recalled her verse was the way she invoked the sense of heat I felt today. Air that seemed to singe the hair of your nostrils.

I had escaped the clutches of the novelist by falling into the lair of a poet. England was proving difficult to see without interpretation.

Looking across that night from Hebden Bridge at the monument on the top of Stoodley Pike it looked to be a grand affair. Lit-up like a rocket, a fantastic phallus, it celebrated the victory of the British over Napoleon. I thought that it would be a fine place for a celebration. But close up the next morning it was a disappointment. It had stood down-wind of the industrial revolution for the last one hundred and fifty years and now it was filthy. Also, there was not so much as a bush up near the Pike and the base of the monument had served many a desperate walker with a bit of privacy. Stoodley Pike was dirty and smelt of pee. I felt let down as I stumbled on, over the stony moor top.

There is a real sense of waste up here on the flat roof of England. My old mate, Daniel Defoe, had written about it and had nothing but cross words for such an unproductive land. As I walked along, the vegetation became sparser and sparser. The exposed rocks of the path had all been blackened like the Stoodley Pike. The cut masonry looked like it had been in a fire. The deep layer of grime, a lasting memento to just how the dark the satanic mills of England got. I wondered whether I had taken the right route.

The wise men who gave birth to the Pennine Way had taken its route right down the centre of England, by-passing the great Northern cities- Leeds, Bradford, Manchester, Sheffield. So far I had trusted their judgement. I hadn’t walked through a town larger than Hebden Bridge since setting out from Carlisle. Looking south I became aware that I was being led through a corridor of country, a surviving strip of native upland which runs like a vein of ore between Manchester to the west and Huddersfield and Halifax to the east. At times during the next couple of days the path ran right down the western edge of this corridor and I looked down through the murk into Manchester.

Perversely, I found that today I missed city life with its birthday drinks and cakes in the office. I wanted London. I never thought I would ever miss the charms of the kebab shops or curry houses. I took for granted the great cultural mixture that the streets served up to me. Just for a moment it seemed more important to me than wild beauty of the Dark Peaks. When the wind blew it brought with it the smell of the streets. The reek of car fumes soon cured me of my hill-top melancholy. This was my birthday. I was 34.

I was also coming closer to one of the few urban intrusions on the route of the Pennine Way. The M62. A disrespectful smear of tarmac that does away with the Pennines as it ploughs its way through the hills. The motorway crossing is not a lovely spot and its made even uglier by the gangling radio mast of Windy Hill just beyond it. However, the car park by the side of the road had a friendly air about it. A picnicking, hiking air brought about by some walkers, some stationary cars and a delightfully disorganised tea-van.

Tea-vans are one of the gods in my own personal pantheon of the naff-aesthetic. Constructed out of the carcasses of dead caravans they litter country roads like discarded sofas. I should hate them, I tell myself regularly. They are pig ugly, they sell dreadful food and yet I love them. I love everything about them. Some things are just not explicable by logic I guess.

I enjoyed the chat at the van and found that my blues melted away when I got talking to one man who organised walks up the Pennine Way. His speciality was organising trips for kids from Central Manchester. He had been amazed he told me that most of his party did not even know that the Pennines were there. There was nothing better, he said, than the buzz you got when on the second or third day of walking one of the kids wanted to take over the map, wanted to know where they were going. To complete the full 256 miles of the Pennine Way gave everyone of them a sense of achievement, a sense of achievement that I could share.

The last bit of this day’s walking was one of the finest that I did in the Pennines. I wandered off the route of the Way looking for a bed somewhere towards Marsden. I slipped down a path that followed a stream, into a small unmarked clough. As the path descended I was not walking on the moor, but in it, almost underneath it in an eroded valley over hung by heather. From this hidden vantage point I was able to come up on wildlife without disturbing it and realised that the quiet moors were not barren at all. I was glad to realise that my every preconceived notion proved to be wrong.

I had walked further than I intended in the last few days. Fuelled by the weather and the spectacular views of the Pennines, I strode on. Whereas on the East coast sections of the walk I had over-estimated my abilities, here I had granted the Pennine Way too much respect. I told myself that perhaps I was getting stronger, that I was getting better at this walking lark. If this sounds like hubris then you will be pleased to know that I was just about to pay the price.

Any guide book you read about the Pennine Way dwells on the Blanket Bog, on the dreadful peat morasses that are found on the top of Bleaklow and around Soldiers Lump on Black Hill. It is not for nothing that they are called the Dark Peaks; on a wet winter’s day all the books warn that you will sink into the black morass. A bog is a scary prospect for a lone walker so I had planned originally not to cross Black Hill and Bleaklow on the same day.

I set out from the hotel next morning heading uphill at the side of the A62 to re-find the long distance path. However, almost as soon as I found a sign it disappeared. The summer haze, coupled with the tussocky nature of the moors meant that I navigated using a compass more than the map on this stretch of the route. I found it hard to get a fix on the landscape and had to pop up every so often on to a raised bit of peat so that I could peer around me like a nervous rabbit. The moor around me just did not look like the map.

The map, for example, marked a number of small reservoirs but for some reason I could not see any of them. It was only when I got above one of these man made lakes that I realised that the reason why I could not see them was because there was no water in reservoirs.

The last two weeks had seen me walk through some of the wildest parts of the country and much against my expectations it had only rained once. Despite this, most of my journey had been accompanied by the sight and sounds of water. Water is one of the essential elements making up the beauty of this country. The glint of sunlight off Windermere, the chuckling of a small spring that aspires to become the mighty River Tyne and the roar of huge waterfalls like High Force and Cauldron Snout. However, as well as its aethetic contribution, all this water serves a practical purpose too as most of the drinking water for the big cities of the North is collected in reservoirs in the Pennines.

However after years of drought, the reservoirs were drying up and the water shortage was a concern that everyone voiced to me. The lack of water in such a green country seemed to play on everyone’s mind. I heard the same rumour time and again as I marched through the North, that prior to the last water shortage, Yorkshire Water had sold off their excess water to an overseas buyer. Even if this story is just an urban myth then the fact that people are willing to believe it shows how little faith they now have in their water supply.

The true character of the Dark Peaks is an elusive thing. You could not take a photograph of Black Hill and say to people ‘here is an impressive climb’. It’s a dull lump that folds away to a flat top. However try walking up it and the wind will soon start whispering doubts in your ear, hinting at sudden fatal changes of weather and stories of lost walkers. Most of the time it is a place to respect. However, as I came over onto the flat top of Black Hill, rather than experiencing the sinking feeling I expected, my feet felt like they were buoyed up. In fact after a while I noticed that the ground was quite bouncy. Once again the dry weather had helped me and I set off moonwalking like Neil Armstrong.

It was at Crowden that I came to realise that, what I had laughingly called a plan this morning had let me down. It was barely noon and I had already reached where I had expected to be that evening. Full of my own abilities and recklessly assuming that my bouncy castle ride on Black Hill was typical I set off to march a further fifteen miles across some of the roughest terrain in England. Looking back on that decision I think I must have been suffering from adrenaline rush. Things went wrong almost immediately.

Having set off down the side of Torside reservoir I soon came across some small Pennine Way diversion notices that let me know that, due to dam works, my planned fifteen mile hike had just gained an extra two miles. By the time I left the A-road, my right ear was ringing from the grind of lorry engines and the hiss and squeal of airbrakes.

The climb up the side of Bleaklow was my finest moment that day. I burst along on my tide of enthusiasm and climbed quickly up the very steep sides of the hill. Like the Black Hill, Bleaklow flattens out at its top, into one of the strangest environments I have ever been in.

The black soil on the top of Bleaklow is piled up into banks ten feet high which look like they have been sculpted by a warped mind. I found myself walking around in a sombre black maze of twisting folds. I felt like a laboratory rat trapped in a satanic experiment relying on nothing but what I thought was a straight line to get me through. I soon became disorientated and it did not help that my compass was also losing the plot. It settled on what it thought was North for awhile before spinning wildly, shouting its disorientation. Time ticked on and I blundered around getting more and more lost.

For want of something better to do I decided to scout around in ever widening circles to try and find some footprints to follow. The convoluted corridors of the bog were starting to get to me. It had become misty on Bleaklow and I could imagine anything coming around the corners of this trap. This place reminded me of the set of a Doctor Who episode, one of those planets of cardboard on which the unwary human rounds a corner and runs into a Dalek. After what seemed like ages I found the path again and headed off at a trot, aware that the light of the day was running out.

It was noticeable that as I headed down from Bleaklow suddenly the path became crowded and I felt a bit ashamed of my melodramatic mood. Time, however, had marched on while I had mucked about and the sun was noticeably lower in the sky.

From the A57 going south, the Pennine Way has been protected from erosion by being made up of large natural paving slabs which on a fine Summer’s day, looking towards Kinder Scout, resemble the yellow brick road to Oz . Like Dorothy then, I was off to see the Wizard. As I walked this road the sun sank lower in the summer evening sky.

It was only as I laboured up to the start of the rise to Kinder Scout that I realised that I was out of time and I was not going to make it in daylight to the Youth Hostel in Edale. The last section of the Pennine Way, the glorious end to this trail was going to elude me.

I looked about and admitted that it was time to part company with the Way which was about to go east anyway when I wanted to go west. The steep drop down William Clough to Kinder reservoir beckoned to me and I knew it was time to take the low road.

William Clough is a steep slit of a hanging valley that looks as if it was made by a giant swinging an axe into the cleft of Kinder Scout. I wound my way down its centre, crossing and re-crossing the tiny stream that had really produced this massive cut in the rock.

I had to admit that it was sensible to be going down at this point of the day but as I physically lost altitude I also lost the inflated sense of euphoria that I had been building up over the last two weeks. The walk through the North was over. I was leaving the loneliness of the high Pennines.

That evening to celebrate the end of the Pennine Way I order a room service meal and watched the England football team beat Holland from the comfort of a hotel bed.

My dreams that night kept coming back to the guttural gurgle of a small moorland steam, to the loneliness of bird calls and to the breeze that will promise you anything if you are willing to listen to it.

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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004