if you were serious about walking in the Peak District.
Looking around the narrow valley, hemmed in by crags and ridges, it was also clear that Edale is where the really high stuff begins. It signals the start of the Dark Peak, named after the underlying millstone grit that forms the lofty moorlands covering the northern half of the national park. It’s a sombre landscape of largely horizontal lines, bare and unpopulated, most of it above the 1500ft mark and with a peat overlay that can create boggy and uncompromising conditions. But rather than geology, I suspect that the Pennine Way’s departure point owes more to the historical issue of public access, and in particular to the celebrated hill that loomed above me now – Kinder Scout.
It is hard for today’s generation of walkers, including Pennine Way users like myself, to appreciate that within living memory you simply weren’t allowed on over 50 square miles of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow (the next major moorland to the north). In the early decades of the last century, it was reckoned to be the largest area of privately owned land in England from which the general public were completely excluded. A small army of gamekeepers made sure, sometimes robustly, that it was kept that way, so that the heather moors remained the grouse-shooting preserve of the rich owners and their guests. Open access, national trails, definitive maps of public rights of way – there was none of this for ramblers back in the 1930s. The uplands had been effectively privatised following the Enclosure Acts of the 18th and 19th centuries, so that much of the high Pennines was acquired by a handful of wealthy owners who curtailed public access. As workers began to pour out of the burgeoning industrial cities either side of the Pennines every weekend looking for open-air recreation, the sense of injustice grew and ramblers became more militant. Nowhere in the Peak District embodied this sense of public exclusion more than Kinder Scout. Speaking many years after the Pennine Way was eventually opened, its creator, Tom Stephenson, described Kinder Scout as ‘the cockpit of the battle for access’ and, for him, the trail simply had to start here.
Indeed, if there’s a hill in the South Pennines that matches the pre-eminence of the Pennine Way, then it’s probably Kinder Scout. Like the Pennine Way, it has a distinctive character and a reputation all of its own, even a spiritual pull for some people. It isn’t just that it’s high (2000ft), but it also feels seriously big. The summit plateau stretches almost 15 square miles and is made up of giant mounds or waves of dark chocolate-coloured peat, known as hags, and patches of bog and rough vegetation. Dotted about are weirdly shaped tors and it is fringed by precipitous rock edges. On Kinder Scout, you know you’re on something high and expansive that commands respect; but you also know that the Pennine Way goes across it.
Despite the unpromising weather, I made good progress along well-walked tracks to the head of the valley and within the hour I was puffing up a steep, stone-pitched pathway known as Jacob’s Ladder, which was once a well-used packhorse route. It seemed to rise vertically above me onto the broad south-western flank of Kinder Scout and, although I knew the path quite well, I could tell that I hadn’t walked it carrying a full backpack before. I paused at the top, gasping for breath, as the mist and rain enveloped me.
Visibility was down to just a few feet and it was cold, wet and hostile. And this was early July. I carefully followed the path past the trig point on Kinder Low and along the rocky edge of the summit plateau to Kinder Downfall. A couple of fellrunners appeared momentarily out of the gloom, then were instantly swallowed up by it once again. Soon I reached the Downfall, a narrow chasm where the Kinder river gurgles over a rocky shelf, tumbling down the steep rocky hillside far below. In really fierce conditions, the wind is funnelled up this defile and can blast the water high into the air in vertical plumes of spray; and in exceptionally cold winter conditions, the water freezes over the rocks in a white waterfall, providing ice climbing for the seriously intrepid.
When the Pennine Way was officially opened in 1965, the route from Edale to Kinder Downfall was not along the valley to Jacob’s Ladder and around the outer edge of Kinder Scout, as it is now, but directly up the hillside and then across its boggy and featureless centre. From Edale village, walkers headed straight up the steep slopes of Grindsbrook Clough beyond the Old Nags Head – a 1750ft rocky scramble beside a lively stream. Just minutes from the start, this must have been a baptism of fire for most long-distance walkers carrying a full pack. If they managed it without mishap, the next challenge was negotiating the bog. There are plenty of hair-raising stories of walkers not just sinking into the oozing peat but getting totally disorientated by the myriad peat hags, especially when the weather closed in. And this was just the opening challenge on day 1 of the Pennine Way. It was as if it had been deliberately designed to weed out the ill-prepared and uncommitted. One experienced Pennine Way walker described this first stage to me as ‘a real granny stopper’.
Even in the mist I had glimpsed patches of erosion around Kinder Low; but although the boots of Pennine Way walkers had certainly churned up the bare peat since the early days and the route across the middle had progressively worsened, Kinder Scout’s environmental problems are much more complex. Ironically, the same hills that the factory workers from the early 20th century fought so hard to access bear the scars of 150 years of atmospheric pollution, as the toxic smoke from Manchester’s coal-fired textile industry blew across the high ground of the Peak District and left a devastating legacy in the form of acid rain and heavy metals. It killed off most of the sphagnum moss that once covered the peat and acted like a giant protective sponge, and any remaining vegetation was further ravaged by the unchecked grazing of sheep and periodic fires. Ramblers’ boots simply compounded the problem. The water table dropped, the bare peat dried out and either blew away or was carried off by water, and an ecological disaster unfolded. The most badly damaged peat had the same acidity as lemon juice and almost nothing was able to grow on it.
Writer and long-distance walker John Hillaby, who came through here on the Pennine Way in the 1960s, famously referred to the eroded top of Kinder Scout as an example of ‘land at the end of its tether’. In his book Journey Through Britain, he described how all life had been drained out or burnt off, and how any green covering had all but disappeared so that just the exposed banks of dark-brown peat remained. ‘Manure is the analogy that comes most readily to mind,’ he observed. ‘The top of Kinder Scout looks as if it’s entirely covered in the droppings of dinosaurs.’
Although some professed to enjoy the so-called sport of ‘bog trotting’, the worsening conditions on the summit meant that the Jacob’s Ladder path around Kinder’s western edge, first identified as a wet-weather alternative, eventually became the officially recommended route. At the time, and when the new National Trail Guide that appeared in 1990 showed only the Jacob’s Ladder route, there were protests from the Ramblers’ Association and the Pennine Way Council, who claimed that the Countryside Commission was not following correct procedures for varying the route of a national trail and that both routes should still be shown. However, back in 1951, the year the Pennine Way was designated and over a decade before it was formally opened, the Sheffield and Peak District branch of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England held a Local Pennine Way Conference at Edale, where some speakers registered their unease that a waymarked path could be routed across the middle of Kinder Scout in the first place. Might it not compromise the mountain’s wild spirit, some asked, or lead novice ramblers into difficulties?
In the end, of course, the Pennine Way did indeed go up Grindsbrook Clough and across the centre of Kinder Scout, without signposts or a prominent line of cairns; and despite it being switched to Jacob’s Ladder, the original route is still a public right of way (and it’s all designated open access land anyway) so you can still walk it if you choose. But, as I tried to shelter from the gusting rain to check the map, shivering slightly despite several layers of clothing, I couldn’t help but think that the bigger challenge for the novice Pennine Way walker is simply getting over Kinder Scout in the first place.
There were some other ramblers dotted about the Downfall, huddling in slender rock crevices munching soggy sandwiches and looking stoical. I decided to power on through the murk and get off the summit. At the far north-western tip of Kinder Scout, the path descended steeply to Ashop Head and, all of a sudden, I dropped below the cloud line, the rain stopped and at last I could see. Below me, the Pennine Way veered right at Mill Hill on a long, slabbed path across Featherbed Moss. To the left, a path came up a small side valley called