Collected Musings of a Hill Wanderer

Upon pondering my progress along the Pennine Way, I started to look at how things might pan out from a logistical point of view, the further north that I continued. Once the section between Littleborough and Marsden is out of the way (hopefully soon), things extend beyond the realm of the day trip and overnight stays, weekend trips even, become de rigeur. The land also gets wilder as you continue north, a joy for the hill walker but a challenge for users of public transport like me. And unfamiliarity with an area adds to that. Because I have been that way more than a few times, the Yorkshire Dales sections shouldn’t prove to be too much trouble until I get beyond Ribblesdale. Hawes, Thwaite and Keld will be new to me but that’s an attraction in itself, seeing new places and enjoying scenery afresh. It will also mean exploring the transport options and they seem to extend from the east. The same applies to Teesdale though Dufton is accessible from the Settle-Carlisle railway, at least on foot. Between Alston and Bellingham, the Newcastle-Carlisle railway and assorted bus connections help access to Alston, Hadrian’s Wall and around. Beyond Bellingham, things require even more care with Byrness having limited transport options though they do suffice with good planning.

However, all that still leaves a 27 mile section before Kirk Yetholm is reached. There are mountain refuges along the way so purchasing a lightweight sleeping bag such as PHD’s Minimus or Piqolo has come to mind. I also got to wondering if there were any ways to split the marathon journey into more manageable chunks, especially as I am not trying to do the entire Pennine Way in one go. That this is not straightforward becomes obvious when one peruses a map; as one goes north along what becomes the Scotland-England border, the sparsely populated Scottish side is evident to the left and it is a good distance to habitation on the English one. For example, crossing the Cheviot from Wooler and continuing from there is next to a twenty mile day. Ingram and the hamlets of Upper Coquetdale (accommodation is provided in Alwinton and Harbottle but it does not come cheap) may help but long walk-ins are involved from these too. This is wild country alright and I believe it to be the crux of the Pennine Way so that overnight stay in a refuge seems to be the best way to overcome it. Anything has to be better than a one day (up to 14 hours walking at my speed) marathon.

Sunday was forecast to be dry and sunny so it was a matter of seizing the opportunity and deciding where to walk. In the end, I plumped for the continuation of my Pennine Way adventure. I left the section between Littleborough and Marsden for another day and tackled the section between Burnley and Haworth. However, I actually did my walk in the reverse direction due to public transport logistics. In fact, when I was first drafting this post, it was fast becoming a public transport rant so that was put elsewhere so as not to ruin an account of what in fact was a pleasant walk and it is the walking that I will always remember rather than any transport frustrations. I once had a planned trip to Wales scuppered by a train cancellation so I headed up to the Lake District and it is the memorable evening in the company of the likes Loughrigg Fell, Grasmere and Rydal Water of which I will always have the strongest recollections. That was far from being a disappointing day.

Getting away involved catching the first bus from Macclesfield to Manchester. From there, the railway got me to Keighley with changes at Leeds and Shipley and another bus got me to Haworth. I suppose that I could have travelled on the Keighley and Worth Valley railway but I stuck with my original plan, even if I caught a Transdev Keighley & District bus for the last leg with only moments left to its departure.

Haworth is certainly a charming spot but it is not its rustic appeal that attracts the visitors but its Brontë connections. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to linger there but there was enough Brontë-this, Brontë-that and Brontë-the-other to give me the general idea. In fact, the Brontë theme was to pervade for a lot of my walk.

It took longer to find than it should but I picked up the Brontë Way and followed it until I left it to join the Pennine Way just east of Upper Heights farm. On my journey to that point, I had ambled over Penistone Hill and crossed the Brontë bridge at the foot of the Brontë Falls. Yes, there is a danger of Brontë overload here and I wasn’t finished yet. My trot up the Pennine Way was to take me to Top Withins, the site of the ruins of which is supposed to have inspired the fictional Wuthering heights in the eponymous novel. There is a plaque erected here by the Brontë Society declaring to the same effect.

I left the literary connections after Top Withins to continue into wild country with broad moorland and big skies. There were wind turbines on the horizon but I didn’t care, though I normally carry strong reservations about the siting of the things. It was not long until I was in reservoir country again; on the way out of Haworth I passed Lower Laithe Reservoir and caught a glimpse of Ponden Reservoir by which a future northbound Pennine Way excursion would take me. Now I was encountering the Walshaw Dean reservoirs, whose company I would have almost until I met the next public road. By now, the evening light was glorious and I had to stop myself becoming engrossed in photographic exploits at the expense of my getting home that night; I think that I may have a photo that tries to portray Walshaw Dean Middle Reservoir as if it was a natural lake rather than the man-made construction that it is.

The nearest public road saw me leave the Pennine Way at the spot where I left it on my previous visit to the area and I was to retread my footsteps on part of the Mary Townley Loop of the Pennine Bridleway until I reached Worsthorne. More reservoirs (Widdop, Gorple Lower, Gorple Upper, Hurstwood; yes, there are a lot around here alright) were passed on what was a surprisingly fleet footed trek to Worsthorne, a village with a pleasant atmosphere on the edge of Burnley.

Worsthorne proved to be the end of walking adventure for the day but my travelling continued. A useful Transdev Burnley & Pendle service carried me to Burnley bus station. My journey continued from Burnley by train to Crewe with a change in Preston. From Crewe, another bus got me home. It might be better if I had less waiting to do, then I would have got home an hour earlier, but it was a still a satisfactory end to a satisfying day.

Postscript: This was also the first hill day for my new Osprey Atmos pack and it seems to have performed well. Apart from a little soreness at the end of the day, my back is none the worse and my shoulders were spared the usual torment applied to them by its Eurohike predecessor. So, a little more breaking in and it looks as if this one will go on and on. I’ll just have to try to stop it getting too muddy…

The prospect of a fine sunny day on Sunday had me heading off to Haworth so that I could take in another section of the Pennine Way. Part of my journey involved catching a train between Manchester and Leeds, normally a straight forward manoeuvre as there are frequent trains between the two cities provided by First TransPennine Express. However, the 10:49 got delayed by a technical fault but communication was next to non-existent as to what was happening; the sight of TransPennine Express staff huddled away from passengers did nothing to add to the company’s reputation for customer service. Parking an out of service train in the station didn’t help either, especially when it was at the same platform as an outbound service for which the train forming it was delayed. Luckily, there was a train at 11:12 but passengers were left standing outside the doors of that for a while before they were opened to let them on and the same applied to the 10:49 when it finally did arrive. The delay to door opening could be justified for the 10:49 because Siemens staff were taking a look at it and a staff changeover could have been the cause in the case of the 11:12. Engineering works were preventing trains from reaching Manchester Airport that day so all the staff changeovers could have been happening at Piccadilly instead. Granted these extenuating circumstances and the fact that it was a Sunday morning, the whole impression still reeked of laggardness; it was hardly a good advertisement for that rail industry and that’s a pity because it continually needs it. Thankfully, it was all a brief frustration as I got my train to Leeds and got to Haworth as planned, even if we did pass Wakefield along the way thanks to another set of rail engineering works. Nevertheless, the timeliness of the 10:49 would have helped me get to my destination earlier to start my walk but all ended well anyway.

The Sunday train service between Manchester and Macclesfield at the extremities of the day do pose a challenge for anyone wanting to go away for the day. Of course, the mindset is probably that people go away fro the whole weekend and not just Sunday. However, because I am learning to drive, my Saturdays are taken up so this is not always possible at the moment.

The two directions that I would find most useful are precisely the ones with the late start/early finish problem. The first train for Manchester is at a laggardly 10:26, not much good for getting anywhere, and the last train to Macclesfield was at 20:58 until last weekend but a 21:56 thankfully starts from next weekend. Then, to add to the restrictions, engineering work makes services start later or finish earlier.

At the heart of this is Northern Rail’s continual refusal to fill in the gaps in the timetable and their leaving Virgin to run almost all of the services; their Manchester-bound trains start from London and Birmingham and southbound trains from Manchester are headed for the same destinations and, in some cases, beyond. Instead, Northern run local stopping services at times that do not make sense for Macclesfield and perhaps for the other places that the same trains serve. It would be interesting to hear their logic for this: is it the provision of connections for long distance express trains? I have shared the actual times below to help you see what I mean.

While it would be better if an hourly local service ran on Sundays like what happens on other railway lines in the Northern Rail area, I have taken a more pragmatic stance in some armchair timetabling to which I have turned my mind (see below). I was in communication with Northern Rail a while back and made the suggestion that they should cover the part of the day that Virgin doesn’t but nothing seems to have happened apart from Virgin running a useful later service. Maybe I need to try them again, this time with the specifics of my timetable idea rather than the vaguer intimations that I made previously.

I now have got a replacement for my Eurohike pack: it has turned out to be Osprey’s 1380 gram Atmos 50 after all my musings on Karrimor and Gregory packs. Mind you, I still have my eye on the Gregory Z55 for multi-day trips so my heavyweight Karrimor Cougar may yet get retired as well. That said, I have been tweaking the Karrimor’s adjustable back in light of the Osprey’s fit to see if it performs any better.

Returning to the Osprey, when I went looking for an Atmos 50 on the online stores that we have in the U.K., almost every single Atmos 50 pack that I saw available was in red and grey. This might now be changing: I have since spotted a blue Atmos 50, my preference because I think bright red to be a little loud, on Snow+Rock’s website. In the U.S., I think that the colour availability is better.

Having seen that Atmos’ features were to my liking and that some good words written about it on OutdoorsMagic.com and BackpackingLight.com, I decided to see if I could get one in my choice of colour and fit (it’s medium back length for me). Alan Sloman also is using one that he ordered from the U.S. for his Big Walk from Land’s End to John O’ Groats to raise money for Sue Ryder Care who looked after his late father and he seems to be getting along fine with it (at least, it’s about his sore feet and beer drinking that we keep hearing…). My search started with my getting in touch with Osprey Europe who said that Snow+Rock and George Fisher should have what I was after. When I enquired Snow+Rock said they would have to get a blue one on special order, while George Fisher were expecting a delivery of Osprey packs, blue ones included. In the end, I ordered from George Fisher and the Atmos was with me in a matter of days, and very nice it is too.

It’s all very well for something to look good but it has to function well also so I loaded the pack up with a 12 kg weight to give it a good work out and tried it around the house to get some idea of how it performs, going up and down stairs as well to see how it would behave going up and down a hill. Of course, the real test would be to take out in the great outdoors but I want to see how things go in case I needed to send it back. In any event, I don’t think that muddy rucksacks can or should be returned and you can’t be too careful while out and about, hence the apparent madness of wearing a rucksack while going around my own home.

The first impression that I had when I put it on was how good the fit was. The weight in the sack was supported by what seems to be a solid hip belt with no folding apparent, a complaint levelled at other packs when you load them up, and it doesn’t compromise freedom of movement either. The shoulder straps function well but the hip belt reduces the amount of load that they need to carry, a relief to someone who has suffered from sore shoulders thanks to near useless hip belts (all they did was to strap the sack to your body). The curved back system, designed to improve ventilation, is also comfortable and having tried it a few times, it does seem to be getting more comfortable each time.

On the volume front, the pack also performs and the I found no problem so far with the curved back system impacting on what I can carry. The pockets on the back of the pack also work well with the big one taking overtrousers and a map case very easily; it’s very useful to have both near to hand. Speaking of having things near to hand, both wand pockets are handy places to put water bottles and the hip belt pockets are a neat touch. I still use a film camera and they make useful places to put rolls of film so film changes can be done without having to take the rucksack off. There is also a place to take a hydration bladder but my use of water bottles and the wand pockets mean that I may never use this feature.

All in all, the pack seems really well designed and I look forward to taking it out and about. If there is any omission, it is the lack of a rain cover but George Fisher sent a me a rucksack liner with the pack and use of that along with a spot of care on the packing front should see me through. Even though I don’t plan on walking in downpours, it has happened but thankfully not that often. In any case, I have always been able to dry out afterwards. Let’s see how things progress from here.