Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  The wind keeps gusting and the rain keeps driving, and I keep thinking that the weather will ‘blow itself out’ – it’s an expression I’ve heard – as if the same technique used to extinguish oil-well fires could be applied to meteorological conditions. But to the west more and more dark clouds keep on massing above the horizon. A small plantation comes and goes, and once out in the open again it occurs to me just how exceptionally empty and unpopulated this part of the world is. So far I’ve seen only eight other people, one of whom was filled with straw. Quite rightly we get anxious about the natural world being concreted over, and about loss of animal habitat and the unstoppable spread of the urban environment. Unarguably we have gone too far. But for those looking for rural seclusion or a place where they might go properly bonkers without anyone else either knowing or caring, then fear not, because a great many opportunities and possibilities still exist, especially in Northumberland.

  I get whatever shelter I can under a pair of birch trees at the side of a single-track road and eat a soggy sandwich, then cross a field of rough grass towards a low, flat water-meadow, one of those unsung but transforming sections of the Pennine Way where one world hands over to the next, where half a dozen foxgloves and tall, flowering thistles are positioned like torches or flares either side of the track, which leads towards a high, shadowy entrance formed of larch, through which a planted wood is entered. Where, despite the man-made artificiality of it all, I suddenly feel comforted and assured. Stumps of old trees are footstools upholstered in velvety green moss. Pine resin is the first thing I’ve smelt for hours. Except at the very top where their tips bend and flex like fishing rods in some mad struggle, the evergreens absorb the bruising gusts and deafening surges of wind, so there’s nothing but static and stable air at ground level where I walk. And somewhere above me, where their coats are thickest and fullest, the trees have absorbed all suggestion of rain, so down here it’s dry and cushioned, every footfall received and relaunched by a thick mattress of spongy, brown needles. A form of twilight gathers under the canopy, a cloistered stillness, and sometimes the patterns of upright timbers form alleyways or avenues, heading off through the forest towards an open glade or sunlit grove. I imagine deer, furlongs away, ears tuned already to the clumsy juggernauts of my boots and the heavy industry of my breathing, safe in the knowledge that at any moment they can simply melt away. Then without warning the trees stand aside and a small wooden gate opens onto the wide, wind-blasted expanse of Haughton Common, and as I emerge into its tremendous emptiness, I’m surprised by how quickly my mood can change on this walk, how many reversals of spirit take place during the course of a day. Half an hour ago I was saturated and glum, chunnering to myself about the pointlessness of the whole project, dreaming up an excuse to quit. Then came the tranquillity and calm of the woods, and now this plain, this prairie of papery bleached grass, each blade like a palm cross, shaking and zithering in the air-storm. In fact the wind is so powerful and so absolutely and directly against me that I have to almost cycle into it, lifting my knees then pushing back against imaginary pedals, dropping into the lowest gear. And the further I climb the more adamant it gets in its opposition, as if a whole North Atlantic weather front has come bursting through the collapsed dam of Bellcrag Flow, pouring through the gap, so that any progress is progress upstream, against the flood, into the rapids, with boulders and logs of hard air piling into me and knocking me sideways. It should be torture, but it’s exhilarating, ecstatic, a frenzied initiation or hysterical reacquaintance with the great outdoors. And I think: this is why I came, to stumble into the unexpected, to feel the world in its raw state. I open my mouth to shout MORE, but the force of air just rams the word back into my mouth and down my throat. Halfway up the hill there’s a four-sided sheepfold housing a handful of stunted trees that appear to have endured this sort of thrashing and flaying for hundreds of years. Pilloried, they are, and lashed, twisted into knots and bent out of shape, yet in spite of the scorn and the punishment, or possibly because of it, they cling on, alive. I push past them, shouldering through the torrent of air, and notice now that my clothes and boots are completely dry, and see how the sun has rived open a gap in the sky, and that other cracks are opening up in the cloud base, and tears roll down my face, and not just because of the wind blasting against my eyes, or even the sudden light.

  Kielder Forest comes to an end on a down-slope facing due south, and the path can be seen meandering onwards between Greenlee Lough to the right, sharp and cold-looking in that harsh, scrubbed brightness which often follows rain, and Broomlee Lough to the left, above a hump of moor. I crouch down under a wall to rummage around in the rucksack for a sandwich, but my hand can’t penetrate further than the geological layer of Mars Bars about a third of the way down. A ruminating heifer peers over the wall to observe my lunch break. As the sky keeps clearing, I see what appears to be a thick, dark line in the distance, all the way across it, in fact, as if the horizon had been drawn by a child using a black crayon or a pencil. In ten minutes the mirage doesn’t fade, but gets stronger and more vivid, the line now a definite feature, a bold and continuous edging or hem, like a stroke of heavy eyeliner where the sky meets the earth. It’s not until I flip the map over and unfold it a couple of times that I realise I’m looking at the leading edge of the great Whin Sill, rearing up out of the ground in the north-east of England and baring its teeth at Scotland. And not just at that formidable volcanic extrusion, but at the famous barrier running along its crest, namely Hadrian’s Wall. If the Great Wall of China can be seen from space then perhaps I shouldn’t be so surprised that a comparable feat of engineering is visible from just four miles away, but even so, it’s an unexpected and impressive vision.

  *

  Before I made this trip I read most of the available Pennine Way literature. All of it suggested that for reasons of weather this is a summer-only journey, but also advised that national holidays are best avoided due to the amount of ‘traffic’ on the Way, as if what should be a reflective and contemplative experience might be marred by the sheer number of walkers. One guide book and several websites put the number of people ‘doing’ the Pennine Way each year as high as a hundred thousand. But while it is true that I have only been going for four days, already I can say with a certain amount of confidence that such estimations are bullshit. Here I am, slap bang in the middle of the high season, and I am virtually ALONE. Admittedly most people walk south to north and many give up at some stage, making these northern reaches the quietest – only the die-hards and the oddballs get this far. Nevertheless, a drop-out rate of about 99.9 per cent would be required for the mathematics to make sense. On the first day I passed seven walkers, five on the second, none whatsoever on day three, and so far today only two. Up in the Cheviots, after getting lost, I was elated to finally clap eyes on another human being, a solitary walker in blue waterproofs about a mile off, heading my way. I rehearsed a few relieved lines of conversation, imagined a handshake perhaps, maybe even a celebratory swig from a hip flask and a bit of man-to-man backslapping. Eventually the distance between us shortened to a hundred yards, then ten, then just a few feet, at which point the stranger grunted an incomprehensible sound from somewhere under his rain hat, sidestepped me on the path and accelerated away up the other side of the valley. The Pennine Way might be the first, the mother-of-all, the Route 66 and the Trans-Siberian Railway of long-distance walks, but it is also an unglamorous slog among soggy, lonely moors, requiring endurance and resolve. As such, it faces stiff competition from those newer leisure trails rich in car parks, information centres, tea shops, gift shops and conveniences of all kinds, with celebrity-chef restaurants and four-star accommodation along the route, plus significant termini at each end, such as national borders or the sea. In comparison with those ‘boutique’ walks, the Pennine Way is forty days in the wilderness.

  Except, that is, on Hadrian’s Wall, where most of the above-mentioned facilities can be found, and which forms a substantial sectio
n of the increasingly popular (if unimaginatively entitled) Hadrian’s Wall Path, stretching from the Solway Firth to the Tyne Estuary. As a consequence there are PEOPLE, thousands of them, either milling about on the milecastles for photographs, or picnicking at the viewpoints, or striding along the ramparts attended by children, grandparents and dogs. The Wall is a wonderful thing, quite breathtaking in its ambition and construction, and to walk beside it seeing England roll away smoothly to the south and Scotland rise and swell to the north is to feel its purposes and its implications rather than just understand them as history and archaeology. But among so many other human beings all of a sudden, I can’t help feeling a little bit crowded, then even a mite superior, irritated by the presence of so many civilians and amateurs trespassing on my pilgrimage, staining the purity of my mission. So I don’t bother with Housesteads Roman Fort, aka Vercovicium, a detour of only a few hundred yards, on the basis of it being a tourist attraction therefore inappropriate to my higher status. I can also see that it’s swarming with school parties and day-trippers. Instead I get my head down and turn directly west, marching forth, looking up only now and again to acknowledge the view or to study the ultra-vivid lichen growing on the south side of the Wall, every blotch and bloom like a green country or green continent on the square grey map of each stone. The other thing I notice, on the far side of the wide valley running parallel to the Wall, is a white dot, travelling at great speed. I wonder at first if it’s an optical problem on my part caused by so much exposure to the wind and the rain, a kind of Pennine snow blindness, or the hiker’s equivalent of ‘seeing stars’ brought about by dehydration and exhaustion. But I rub my eyes and it’s still there, still travelling at an implausible rate of knots, sometimes lengthening, sometimes shrinking to a small point of light, like an electron, I think, a scrap of pure white energy speeding across the ground like nothing I can understand or explain. As it draws level with me, perhaps half a mile distant, I realise it must be a dog, a single white dog, but no one around seems remotely interested in why a dog should be running hell-for-leather across the middle of nowhere, neither chasing or being chased. And now it seems to be made of liquid, so fluent over walls and across streams, morphing and transforming as it passes through fences and stiles. On it goes, until it dissolves altogether into the backdrop of hills. I scan the whole circumference of the horizon and the entire bowl of the valley for an anxious dog-owner or irate farmer following on tractor or quad bike, but there’s no one at all, and now nothing to say that the creature even existed, just a mirage in the mind of a tired man whose daily exertions don’t usually extend much further than daydreaming or reading a book.

  *

  Along here the path and the Wall coexist, so I’d have to work pretty hard to get lost. Turn left and I’d roll down the hill, turn right and I’d plunge down the cliff face into a quarry or pond, so the map is only needed to identify and name-check features and landmarks, such as Vindolanda Fort and the small settlement of Bardon Mill, then Haltwhistle beyond it, and the confluence point where the Allen meets the South Tyne, their direction of flow just enough to remind me I’m walking uphill. At Peel Crags a group of mean-looking cows are sulking and skulking by the gate, so I track up over the top of the rock face and emerge in the middle of some kind of fair or country show. Thirty or forty 4x4s and pick-ups of varying size and configuration have pulled up on the grassed area beyond the car park, plus umpteen vans and horseboxes with their tailgates down. Next to the coffee and cake stall a trestle table covered by a plastic awning displays several gleaming silver cups and engraved salvers. In areas penned off with plastic tape, men and women are standing with their dogs while a chap in a tweed suit and tweed hat looks into each animal’s eyes and holds up their tails for inspection. The dogs in this section are lean and wiry lurchers or greyhounds, and give the impression of walking in high heels as they trip and totter around the site, gazing in fear or adoration into their owners’ faces. Trusting entirely to stereotypes and presumptions, the owners themselves seem to come from the upper or lower tiers of society but there are no obvious representatives of the middle classes: a woman in a herringbone skirt, posh wellies (i.e. with a buckle on the side) and a Barbour jacket stands next to a man in shellsuit and trainers with prison tattoos on his neck and a roll-up in his hand. On the other side of the gathering, dozens of people are leaning on the bonnets or even lying on the roofs of their vehicles, binoculars to their eyes, gazing down the long U-shaped valley to the east, apparently staring at nothing, until I see with my naked eye another one of those white dots, then a second and a third, moving at great velocity towards us. Several of the observers put down their field-glasses and go to stand behind a cordon of tape, then begin wailing and ululating or banging meal-tubs or metal dishes with sticks and other utensils. The white dots disappear for several seconds, then emerge from a thick patch of green bracken, unmistakably dogs now, beagle-shaped hounds, tearing up the slope towards us. The finishing line is a length of rope draped along the ground, and the first dog hurdles it before bouncing up into its owner’s arms, followed by two more dogs, huffing and puffing but seemingly still full of running, followed by a fourth and a fifth, trotting rather than sprinting, then another dog, weary and spent, who walks across the line and sits down, but all are lavished with praise and rewarded with snacks and bowls of water. I put my hands together to applaud the winner, and one of the runners-up lollops over and promptly guzzles my slice of carrot cake then sticks its long, pink, frothing tongue in my cup of tea.

  ‘Sorry, he loves tea. I’ll buy you another.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I think the dog needed it more than me.’

  The owner of the tea-slurping canine explains that the dogs are Border hounds and this is a meeting of the Border Hound Trailing Association. But it’s a dying art, she says. ‘The young ’uns aren’t interested. With their pit bulls and their Rottweilers.’ Men walk the course in the morning, dragging an aniseed-soaked rag up hill and down dale, then the dogs are released in their categories and classes, some running as far as seven or eight miles. ‘A dog can run in four minutes what a man can walk in half an hour,’ she says, and a quick bit of mental arithmetic tells me that a Border hound could complete the Pennine Way in less than a day.

  ‘Do they ever get lost?’

  ‘No. They all wander home. Eventually.’

  I’m converting this piece of information into a metaphor for my own journey when I notice that one owner is still standing behind the finishing line, scanning the countryside. ‘Come on girl, there’s a girl,’ she shouts down the valley, then shouts again and rattles a bucket, but the landscape stretching out before her remains open and empty. A few minutes go by. Most of the other competitors and their charges have drifted away towards the food tent or the judging arena. Then finally, a white-and-brown dog pulls itself out of the undergrowth about two hundred yards away, walking, limping even, managing to rally, putting in a little sprint for a few yards when it hears its owner’s encouraging yells and the promise of a biscuit, but then slowing again, panting and coughing as it passes me and glancing backwards at the distance behind. Then ten yards short of the finishing line it flops down on the grass, puts its head between its paws, and will go no further.

  *

  There is a not particularly rewarding anecdote relating to the naming of Once Brewed and Twice Brewed, but for the walker on the Pennine Way it is sufficient to understand that Twice Brewed is the pub and Once Brewed, two hundred yards further back, is the youth hostel. I’d kill for a shower and a kip, and through the glass doors I can see the Tombstone standing upright in reception, waiting by the counter. But the youth hostel doesn’t open until four thirty, so I mooch about in the visitors’ centre, consoling myself with a vended hot chocolate and pretending to admire the model legionnaires in the glass case.

  There isn’t a reading today; it’s the World Cup final so I’ve given myself the night off, and as a concession to football fans the landlord of the Twice Brewed has
placed a portable telly in the windowsill of the lounge bar. I wander in there for kick-off and sit down next to a Dutch family, who seem to understand that it is their country’s duty to play the part of beaten finalists in this competition and accept the narrow defeat as if it were part of an ongoing national tradition. I’m obviously expending energy faster than I can accumulate it; all day I eat vast quantities of carbohydrates, fat and sugar, but I know from my belt that I’m losing weight. I order a Henry VIII-size platter of meat and more meat and a bucket of chips, followed by a whole sponge cake sitting in a bath of custard. I also think that watching a World Cup final in a pub without alcohol is not only contrary but bordering on the perverted, so I break my vow of temperance, and it is under the effect of several pints of local bitter that I meander back along the B6318, also known as the Military Road, aiming to slip into barracks before curfew.