Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  A few weeks before I set off I made a list. Two lists, in fact:

  Not Afraid Of Afraid Of

  Solitude Loneliness

  Bulls Bullocks

  Farmers Farmers’ Dogs

  Rain Fog

  Darkness Blackness

  Criticism Humiliation

  Strangers Weirdos

  Fatigue Blisters

  Distance Time

  Getting Stuck In Getting Lost

  And now, after just a few miles of solo journeying, it looks as though I’ve sleepwalked my way across that no-man’s land between the left- and right-hand columns, and pretty soon will have to face down at least two of those fears, and possibly four. It all goes wrong somewhere near Windy Gyle, or Split the Deil as it’s also called. Somehow, I have got it into my head that today’s journey is a long slow curve in a vaguely south-westerly direction, without any particular deviation or divergence. I’m also guilty of appalling, amateurish complacency. Yesterday, I’d simply followed in the footsteps of people who know the Pennine Way from back to front, so the map and the compass had stayed in the bottom of my rucksack all day. This morning, I’ve been striding forth at the same cocky pace and with the same casual attitude, imagining that I would be ushered and guided by the kindness and companionship of the land itself. But the land doesn’t care, not one jot, which is why it has delivered me halfway down a boggy moor along a path which is becoming narrower and fainter with every step, and which eventually fragments into half a dozen vague and wispy sheep-trails, like the frayed end of a rope. The GPS unit, also at the bottom of the rucksack, underneath two rounds of beef sandwiches and three slices of treacle flapjack, was only bought as a toy really, or as a last-gasp, never-to-be-used safety measure, like a maroon or cyanide tablet. I spread the great picnic blanket of the map on the wiry heather, power up the device and watch as it blinks and meditates, scanning the heavens before locking on to a signal. Then through a combination of the most sophisticated satellite technology and the ancient, incontrovertible laws of trigonometry, it pinpoints my position on the planet to an accuracy of, at worst, ten metres. But of course I know better. I’m utterly convinced that I should be heading towards a plantation about three miles directly ahead, and towards the very inviting valley beyond it, so off I go, for another mile or so, by which time there is no path whatsoever, and no stile or gate in the very stern-looking fence that stands in my way and stretches off as far as the eye can see both to the left and to the right. The hills which only twenty-four hours ago seemed so noble and benevolent are now mountains, intimidating and unforgiving, looming rather than rolling, multiplying in size and number, becoming angrier under darkening skies. Standing among them, the only person in a vast and empty landscape, I feel both utterly insignificant and intensely scrutinised at the same time. I think about home. I think about Raoul Thomas Moat. True, I’m only lost in the sense that I have gone wrong, and I could easily walk back the way I came. But then what? Even from Clennell Street it’s another seven or eight miles to Alwinton, with all the inevitable ignominy and indignity of having failed at the first hurdle. Plus the Tombstone is now in Byrness, and so is tonight’s reading. The sound and sight of rain landing on the open map could easily be mistaken for falling teardrops. And yet, and for reasons that I can’t explain, I continue to prefer my own judgement over that of the compass or the GPS, both of which are obviously BROKEN and USELESS. Clearly, all I need to do is to match the topography with the cartography, but infuriatingly the hilltops do not announce their names in big letters, and the valleys between and beneath are similarly unidentifiable. As if wrangling the map in the increasing wind wasn’t enough, I’m also wrestling with a pair of elasticated over-trousers and a waterproof jacket, and my hat is being blown down the hill on the other side of the fence. And now running seems like a good idea. Running after the hat. Running after the map. Running to the top of the hill to see what lies beyond it (more hills, as it turns out), running to the bottom of the hill to pick up a stream (there isn’t one), and finally running all the way back to Windy Gyle, where sitting down is now a better idea than running, because I’m out of breath and upset. The only place to get out of the wind and rain is the lee side of Russell’s Cairn, which I’d ignored earlier on the basis that if you’ve seen one cairn you’ve seen them all, and it’s only while sheltering beneath it that I spot another path, the right path, scored through the thin topsoil into the bedrock, dipping away to the right then rising again across the valley, looping from one peak to the next into the distance. A minute later, when I find a marker post with the initials PW on it, I don’t just want to hug it, I want to marry it and have its children.

  *

  There’s a Mountain Refuge Shelter after Lamb Hill, like an oversized garden shed or an ironically positioned beach hut, with a little veranda, a small gate across the door to prevent infiltration by sheep, and a grandstand view of the unfolding emptiness. I’m damp, chilly, shaken up and in a bit of a sulk, so I don’t even open the visitors’ book to read the comments, let alone write a poem in it, which had been my ambition at the beginning of the day. I don’t eat either, even though it’s the only place for lunch on a ridge-walk like this, the peaks being too cold and windy, the troughs being too miserable and wet. I just want to push on. It’s illogical, but I feel as if I’m late and need to make up for lost time. The path jogs sharply to the west then turns south. I know this because I have the map out now, in its waterproof case. It hangs from my neck on a length of string, occasionally catching the breeze and slapping me in the face. Then there’s a tramp through pathless doldrums to the west of Wedder Hill, a mossy and boggy heath where the air becomes still and silence descends, until I feel almost becalmed. Again, it’s satisfying to find a signpost at the far end, after refusing to be sidetracked by the trails left by quad bikes delivering cattle feed, or those arcane paths through the rushes and grass made by mountain hares. After delivering the Tombstone, Sarah has walked up from Byrness to reel me in, and finds me eating a banana on a wooden bridge, being buzzed by a squadron of horseflies who hadn’t tasted human flesh until ten minutes ago and couldn’t believe their good fortune when my hot red face and ripe bare skin came hoving out of the distance.

  We pass a sign pointing to nowhere with the word Heartstoe on it, and a less ambiguous notice saying DO NOT TOUCH ANY MILITARY DEBRIS, IT MAY EXPLODE AND KILL YOU. Just after noon I’d watched several dark green vehicles moving along a sinister, unmapped road in a far valley, and all day the noiselessness of the hills has been punctuated by the pounding of exploding ordnance, with plumes of white smoke rising from the southern horizon, vibrant and distinct against the grey clouds. Persisting with the military theme, I’d been expecting some kind of impressive stronghold or towering citadel at Chew Green, but despite the Roman Fort’s five-star review in many of the guide books I don’t even know that I’ve walked across the tumbled remains and scattered earthworks until it’s too late, and I’m not going back. The massif of the Cheviots is behind me now, and in the distance lies a flatter, gentler, calmer prospect. I have walked across an entire range, and although the Cheviots are not the Alps and I am sans elephants, for a moment or so, I am Hannibal. Thereafter, the descent into Byrness is impatient in its directness, the path rapidly losing altitude as it plummets through chest-high bracken, descends a rocky escarpment and pushes aside the ordered ranks of spruce and pine which stand in its way as it makes for the metalled landing strip of the A68.

  *

  The village of Byrness isn’t much more than a few houses at the side of the road, though marked prominently on the map are a phone box, a church, a hotel and the local sewage works, so it could be argued that not only are life’s basic necessities adequately covered, a few luxuries are also catered for. The community developed as workers’ accommodation at the time when the forests and reservoirs of Kielder were being planted and built, and has somehow managed to maintain an existence long after its original purpose. Cars and lorries hammer along the
main road next to the tidy, mown square criss-crossed by footpaths, which is giving a passable impersonation of a village green. White terrace-cottages frame the square on three sides, and if Byrness could be thought of as a Monopoly board, then Joyce and Colin are clearly in the lead, because as far as I can tell they seem to own most of it. Their unpretentiously named Forest View Walkers’ Accommodation does what it says on the tin. It’s also run with the sort of regimented orderliness usually associated with the armed forces, and perhaps because she was anticipating the arrival of a wounded soul from one of hiking’s frontlines, Joyce has billeted me in the disabled annexe, a kind of cottage hospital without a nurse. She leads me up the concrete ramp and points out the newspaper (last week’s Observer) where I can park my boots, and the ‘wet room’ where I can shower and sit on the toilet at the same time, should I be so inclined. The bedroom is accessed by a sliding door, wide enough to admit a wheelchair, and wide enough therefore to admit the Tombstone, which looks like it has been sinking into the mattress for most of the day, its ponderous weight causing the eiderdown to rise up around it. I lie next to it for a while in the fug of my own fumes and the stickiness of my cold sweat, contemplating the significance of a disabled suite in a hostel whose only clients are walkers on Britain’s most difficult trail. Because even with a fully functioning set of limbs and organs I’m already knackered, and it’s only day two.

  Colin isn’t much in evidence – I wonder if he’s convalescing after manhandling the Tombstone through the house and hoisting it onto the bed. So when I’m feeling more human and have made myself presentable, it’s Joyce who gives me the guided tour, although the number of notices on every door, cupboard and available surface mean that things are pretty self-explanatory. In fact there’s so much signage that I have to wonder if Joyce and Colin also have their own printing company, or at least keep the nearest laminating business in handsome profit. ‘No Dogs Beyond This Point.’ ‘No Boots In The Hostel.’ ‘Please Open The Window In The Morning To Ventilate The Bathroom.’ Every room comes with its own set of instructions, warnings and forfeits, including one sign forbidding residents from drinking their own alcohol in either the grounds or the building, the penalty for flouting this law being instant eviction without refund. The communal kitchen is spotless, with a place for everything and everything in its place, and a plastic card saying exactly where that place is. Joyce has achieved a Level 2 Award in Food Safety; I know this because the certificate is pinned on the notice board. In the fridge, every item carries a price tag, including Laughing Cow cheese at 15p per triangle and big-ticket items such as the 45p yoghurts. But the retailing highlight is the self-service arcade in a cupboard under the stairs, selling all manner of foodstuffs and sweets to entice the weary walker. Much of the stock is reminiscent of a bygone age, like the tins of chopped ham or oxtail soup, or the little jar of beef spread, and the whole display is both quaint and artful, comforting and disquieting at the same time; I could be looking at the back wall of a sixties corner shop in a museum of social history, or I could be in a Cork Street gallery being baffled by a Damien Hirst installation. Purchases are made via an honour system, and seeing me eyeing the gold ingot of a Crunchie bar, Joyce hands me a credit slip and a biro.

  I’m shown the drying room where some serious-looking kiln-like machine is exuding fierce quantities of arid heat (‘This Room Must Be Kept Closed At All Times’), then to the room where I’m to give the reading, a residents’ lounge with four leather settees and a wood-burning stove.

  ‘Perfect,’ I say, meaning that it has a door that closes and no pool table.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it is Byrness.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘Although someone who left this morning is coming back to hear you, and a man telephoned to say he’s driving up from Bath and not to start without him.’

  *

  Nine people come to the reading. By which I mean the nine people sitting in the residents’ lounge attend a poetry reading whether they like it or not. This includes a father-and-son team from Wales doing the Pennine Way in three stages, a woman from Kelso who was (of course) born in Huddersfield and knows my mother, and a truly magnificent wiry old boy from County Durham who has walked 230 miles in seven days carrying not much more than a pac-a-mac and a packet of mints. I’m thinking of the audience as small but international, though Joyce dismantles this notion by pointing out that her two German guests have stayed in the kitchen. Joyce doesn’t attend the reading herself, even though I sense she would have liked to. Instead she hovers outside, popping in every now and again, taking orders for drinks and nibbles. Colin, I assume, is nursing his hernia or spellchecking signs in the office. After the poems, the conversation turns firstly to the dangers posed to walkers by horseflies, or ‘clegs’ as they are sometimes known, which can bite even through heavy fabric and are only dissuaded by Avon Skin So Soft, the repellent of choice not only with foresters and trawlermen but also with British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, apparently. Then secondly to sheep ticks, those hook-mouthed bugs which hang around in bracken and ferns, whose one ambition in a short and lonely life is to bury their head deep into the soft tissue of any passing creature, hikers included. One person says they only occur in areas where there are deer, another that they can only be removed with a naked flame (though the proposer of this theory admits that on the one occasion when he attempted such a procedure he was left with both a sheep tick and a nasty burn), and a third person that the bodies can be removed by twisting, but this leaves the head of the creepy-crawly impaled in the flesh, which can then enter the bloodstream. A doctor in our midst pooh-poohs this notion, impressively pointing out that sheep ticks are an essentially subcutaneous infestation, and more easily removed when dead, when the insect no longer has the power to cling on with its teeth, though he will admit that a decapitated sheep tick can become septic if not extracted, and that a living tick can grow to the point where its legs can be seen wriggling about under the surface of the skin, and that Lyme disease can follow, followed by death.

  Takings for the evening are £32.50 plus a betting pen. I fall asleep listening to the news on a transistor radio. Raoul Moat is now cornered on the banks of the River Coquet, caught in night-vision binoculars and the crosshairs of several police marksmen, and with his own gun nestled under his chin. His mother is reported as saying that he would be better off dead, a position, surely, from which there is no desire to return. To complete the picture, tragi-comedian Paul Gascoigne has travelled ‘all the way from Newcastle to see Moaty’ with a can of lager and a chicken dinner, to offer counselling and advice.

  Byrness to Bellingham

  15 MILES

  OS Explorer OL16 West Sheet, OL42 West/East

  Saturday 10 July

  Because of her dedication to the cause, and for running a no-nonsense, shipshape operation, and for trusting that a poetry reading can take place in the middle of nowhere against all the odds, and for the packet of ham and Branston sandwiches wrapped in clingfilm with an extra chocolate biscuit on the side, I have become a big fan of Joyce. I give her a hug before I leave, then she straightens her hair and sets off into the dining room to clear the tables. The man from Bath turned out to be the poet Matt Bryden; with his girlfriend Camilla and their shaggy grey lurcher, Jess, they have made the valiant several-hundred-mile drive not just for the reading but for today’s walk. They don’t know how they will get back here tonight to pick up their car, but in a spirit of great optimism and talking like some dyed-in-the-wool countryman with a thousand years of experience under his belt, I tell them not to worry, something will turn up, someone will help out. ‘It’s like that in these parts.’

  The trail strikes south-east out of Byrness, towards a campsite and over a little bridge, running parallel with the road and jinking either side of the River Rede, fresh and lively this morning after a downpour in the night. The sun makes fleeting appearances between the long, low clouds, illuminating the crowns of trees overhead, occasionally
spearing through the branches and leaves and striking the ground at our feet. We walk on under the canopy, young beech and birch trees loaded with last night’s rain, showering us as we brush past. Sometimes the river veers away, presenting a grassy bank in the open air – a good place to picnic or pitch a tent – then swings back into the woods, forcing the path to choose a route through sodden, knee-high sedges. It’s easy and enjoyable, a classic English footpath meandering among broadleaf trees and summer flowers with the sound of running water never far away, the day full of promise and possibility, the legs willing, the mind eager and the flask still hot, and it is to be enjoyed while it lasts, because after just a couple of miles, at somewhere called Blakehopeburnhaugh, the Way kicks to the right. The new direction brings with it a new terrain, new weather (it’s drizzling now) and a new map, most of it jade and emerald in colour, scored with the dead white veins of Forestry Commission tracks and inscribed with millions of tiny dark green Christmas trees – the OS insignia for a coniferous plantation.

  During my childhood, holiday destinations seemed to be chosen more for their imagined ambience, or even their names, rather than for any specific leisure activity. ‘We’re going to Mull,’ my dad would say. Or, ‘This year, what about Devon?’ One summer we went to Inveraray, where there was a hill at the back of the guest house and a loch in front, so for two weeks we went up and down the hill in the rain, or played in the water, and as far as I remember it wasn’t a problem, although spotting the big black fin of a basking shark on the first day made us nervous swimmers. Sometime in the early seventies we went on a camping trip to Northumberland. There were some monuments here and there, apparently, which would be enough to keep us occupied for a fortnight. But the only memory I have is of midges, unlimited in number, each one ferocious and insatiable. We arrived in the evening and had to wear plastic bags over our heads while we put the tent up. The midges also provided a kind of curfew, ensuring that as daylight began to fade, everyone on the campsite would retreat under canvas or lock themselves in the car. Ten years later, having had such a wonderful time, we decided to go back. Using the same dog-eared road atlas we drove to the same place, only to find that in the intervening years it had become submerged beneath many billions of gallons of water which formed the largest man-made reservoir in Britain, nestled within Europe’s biggest man-made forest. As well as providing an infinite supply of liquid refreshment for the region’s midge population, Kielder Water was built to service the heavy industries of England’s north-east coast, but by the time the reservoir was opened those industries had all but disappeared. Some claim that Kielder is not only a white elephant but an environmental calamity, the monoculture of Sitka spruce and its lookalikes signalling the end of biodiversity and effectively carpeting over what was once a rare and treasured moorland habitat. Those with vested interests argue otherwise, that the forest provides sanctuary for endangered wildlife such as red squirrel and raptors, that it offers endless recreational facilities, and that the reservoir, in a warmer world with an uncertain meteorological future, is a well that never runs dry.