Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

by Simon Armitage

  In the meadow on the far side I watch a deer vault over a deer-proof fence from a standing start, then cross God’s Bridge in the valley bottom, an ancient arrangement of pillars and slabs not especially worthy of the Almighty, then gain height by walking straight up a rough field with a truly enormous bull wandering alongside us, albeit on the other side of a stone wall. As well as taking an interest in desirable residences and covetable properties on the trail, I’ve also been making a mental note of places that are truly ugly, and somewhere in the next valley I see my least favourite house so far, a dark, uninviting manor flanked by brutalist, breeze-block barns, surrounded on three sides by defunct agricultural machinery and on the fourth by a steep embankment strewn with household rubbish and blue plastic barrels. Shambolic and gloomy animals graze among the junk, including a joyless donkey, two weatherbeaten horses and a handful of dishcloth-coloured sheep. A dog sleeps on the roof of a wheelless and windowless tractor, and to complete the effect, a crow is perched on the off-kilter chimney pot. Out of which, smoke rises, meaning someone actually lives there, and I wonder what Peter makes of such a place, so squalid and desolate in comparison with his own tended and cherished acres. But when I turn around he’s checking the miles and the minutes and the vectors and degrees, and has worked out that’s it’s probably time for lunch. A good time to refuel, in fact, before the assault on Tan Hill, and Paul’s girlfriend has made some ‘Kindness of Strangers’ buns which he is keen to share if only because it lightens his load. As with every day so far, I’ve no idea as to the contents of my lunch box until I open it, and today’s lucky dip contains a slab of your actual Kendal Mint Cake, that legendary item of hiking folklore, almost as much a comedy prop as an actual foodstuff, utterly iconic and virtually inedible.

  A mile or so after Jack Shields Bridge (Peter supplies a more accurate calculation) the track forks, and even though the left fork looks more inviting, the Pennine Way goes right, and the gradient increases, and the weather turns. As well as learning to read the lie of the land and the meaning of the clouds, another arcane skill I’ve developed on this walk is to determine the ground conditions ahead by studying the state of oncoming walkers, and on that front alone, the omens are not good. Two men with big walking packs on their backs are daubed in mud to well above their gaiters, and another solitary walker must have fallen in a peat bog, because one side of his body appears to have been dipped in tar and his face is splashed with dirty brown streaks. A woman in a yellow cape is sheltering under a bridge eating a sandwich, and when I ask her what it’s like further on she just shakes her head, which is Pennine Way sign language for horrible. But before the swamp we have to deal with the wind, which is absolutely raging against us, and which is loaded with a fine vapour, not really rain, but stinging to the eyes and the skin, and at this air-speed, like being spray-painted. There must be something comical about the three of us trying to push forward into it, cheeks flattened with the G-force, coats ballooned with air, trousers vacuum-packed around our legs, hair streaming behind along with scarves and straps and anything else that isn’t tied down or tucked in, but it’s hard to see the funny side. It’s even harder to say anything, the wind tearing off and shredding every utterance as it leaves the lips, and it’s during long, gruelling, uphill passages like this, disadvantaged by every element, that I concede the Pennine Way really should be tackled from south to north, not north to south. It feels interminable, relentless, and there’s no option but to keep pushing on. The weather, never less than interesting in these parts, is now excelling itself, and has gone into a sort of hyperactive, attention-seeking overdrive; mist, then a downpour, then a sudden blast of blinding sunlight from between two clouds with a rainbow thrown in for effect, then a thrashing squall accompanied by thunder, then dark cloud, and all of it hurried and harried and driven along by the blasting wind. We pass a series of sinister-looking shooting huts to the right, like gun emplacements, a reminder again that these moors are not the playgrounds of the commoner but owned, private land, managed and manipulated by interested parties for the purpose of profit. A stream runs to the left, and a series of white-painted posts marks the route for about a mile before petering out.

  Possibly as a mental retreat from the misery of the situation I find myself making lists. First, a list of things I’ve lost on this walk, including my two poles, one compass, one zip-up fleece and one copy of my Selected Poems. To that list I also add half a stone in weight (a conservative estimate if the notches on my belt are anything to go by), some abstract concepts like my sense of humour, especially on occasions like this, and ‘my way’, twice, once in the Cheviots, once on Cross Fell. I then list my injuries: five horsefly bites, a bloody thumb, some soreness in the big toe of my right foot when bent backwards, windburn on my face, chapped lips, and the odd moment of wounded pride. But no blisters, which is both mystery and miracle combined. On we go, into it, at it, the Tan Hill Inn being our immediate objective. It appears at one moment, like a boat adrift on the horizon in a terrible storm, then slips below a hill, and half an hour later when we have climbed that hill we see it again, but further away somehow, even more remote, receding with every step. Unlike the wind, which has not receded at all but grown stronger with altitude, and walking into it is an enormous effort, reminiscent of hauling a great weight, something like a big sledge with rusty runners and an anchor trailing behind, and on that sledge my spirit, sulking and unwilling, not happy, heavy and unhelpful, facing backwards with its arms crossed and its bottom lip stuck out, heels dragging in the dirt.

  I also have to question the extent to which the final ascent of Sleightholme Moor can legitimately be termed a ‘path’, when in all honesty it is a quagmire, half a mile of sticky toffee pudding and black treacle with just the odd tussock to leap for. The mud, when I stand in it, which is unavoidable, is reluctant to let go, and wants to rive off my boots and my trousers as well given half a chance, and I make several detours left and right looking for a land-bridge or something with grass on it, only to be blocked by either a swamp, a flooded ditch, a stream in full flow or one of those ghostly, rheumy ponds of standing water which in the film version of this escapade would be full of severed heads. Finally, having splashed off the moor on all fours, sodden and dripping and cold, I turn around and look back over the wet, shifting horizons and the heaving summits, and at the rain-filled valleys and swelling moors. More than anything else, it looks like the ocean.

  *

  Two cockerels are perched on the windowsill of the Tan Hill Inn, and a few more are strutting around in the car park. Just outside the door, blown over by the wind, an old woman on her back with her orange dress up around her head is being helped to her feet, and there is a sheep in the lobby. The Tan Hill, at 1,732 feet above sea level, claims to be Britain’s highest pub, a claim disputed by the Cat and Fiddle Inn in the Peak District. Its fame and possibly its fortune as well were secured in the seventies through a series of adverts for Everest double glazing, in which celebrity farmer Ted Moult let a feather fall undisturbed through the air in front of one of the windows while a storm raged against the glass on the outside. The windows are still doing their job but I’m sad to learn that the feather, housed in a display case next to a picture of Ted, was stolen last year, with a stag party from Leeds the main suspects. We sit down by a carved, vertical route map of the Pennine Way next to an open fire, numb and not particularly talkative, more interested in a hot drink than anything alcoholic. A magnet for bikers, hikers and cyclists, the pub has a fancy-dress atmosphere, with most customers togged out in black leather, luminous lycra or multicoloured Gore-tex, all of it damp or partly dried, carrying with it the vague whiff of wet dogs, augmented by the actual presence of a number of wet dogs. After half an hour it’s time to move on, but I can’t quite pull myself away from the action in the next room, where performance poet Ranting Ritchie has set up his mic stand and is trying to get the attention of customers who are talking and drinking or skewering Cumberland sausages with forks or s
awing through the grilled rinds of gammon steaks. He recites a couple of John Cooper Clarke pieces with the swearing edited out, presumably because there are kids and families present, and he has a good line in banter, but it’s hard going. I feel a strong surge of schadenfreude, watching him trying to work the crowd and rise above the clinking of glasses and the chatter of pub-goers, seeing it from the other side. It’s a reaction not unlike vertigo, a horrible sense that at any moment I might reach for the microphone and jump with him into the poetic abyss, in a poetic suicide pact, and I’m swaying and sweating by the door when Peter’s hand lands on my shoulder and steers me out onto the moor.

  *

  From Tan Hill to Keld is all downhill, or at least it seems that way compared with what came before, and the miles go past quickly and without incident, the wind dropping, the weather cheering up, the temperature rising. But fourteen miles is still a fair step in one day. I’m feeling it in my calves, and Peter has pulled something in his leg, and is now less concerned with how far to the nearest tenth of a mile we have walked and more preoccupied with how far we have to go. Paul seems to be going well but is quieter, as we all are. Then rounding the shoulder of Low Brown Hill my mood brightens. The valley ahead runs directly south, and as we enter it, the clouds dissolve and sunlight fills it from top to bottom, a big bath of buttery yellow light spread right to our feet. Not only that, it’s a ‘dale’, not the first dale I’ve walked into or across but the first one that actually looks like a dale, Stonesdale actually, a typical, picture-book, pop-up dale, with lime-green grass partitioned into fields by white dry-stone walls, fringed by moor, a small brook running through it, tidy windowless barns at the end of cart-tracks, a single farmhouse with a single tree giving it shelter, a yard to the side and a kitchen garden to the rear, and doves on the roof. And then it hits me that I’m cheerful not only in response to the postcard prettiness opening up ahead but out of a realisation that I have walked into Yorkshire. Down by the waterfall, before Keld village, a male redstart waits on the branch of a rowan tree just long enough for me to see the fire in its belly and the afterburn of its tail.

  *

  I’m reading at the Georgian Theatre Royal in Richmond, a place that has to be seen to be believed, or perhaps believed to be seen. Built in 1788 by actor–manager Samuel Butler, closed down sixty years later and remaining closed until the year I was born, the theatre is a kind of optical illusion, somehow seating up to two hundred people in an auditorium reminiscent of an old operating theatre, like the one Keats attended in London, or an early provincial courtroom, just as likely to host a murder trial as a play or poetry reading. Walking onto the stage I feel about a hundred foot tall, looming over the audience, their heads dotted around its galleries and side-boxes like fruit in a market. My feet seem particularly enormous, great clodhopping shoes stretching out in front of me down the raked stage, as if I might squash half the people sitting in the pit by taking a step forward. Attendance is a contested fifty-nine (I’ve been taking photographs of the audience every night and I can count at least sixty-eight faces in the image) who part with a very generous £270, which I split with the theatre. The audience also parts with one pair of woollen walking socks, one packet of walking plasters and one packet of Garibaldi biscuits, which I keep for myself. It’s the first formal reading I’ve given since Abbotsford, and during the interval I draw the raffle. First prize, a book of poems by Simon Armitage; second prize, two books of poems, etc., etc.

  I’m staying with Ben and Delphine who live just up the hill. The routine is familiar by now but the situation still strange: showering in someone else’s bathroom, drying off with their towels, shaving amongst their personal toiletries and preferred products, eating at their table, doing my best to be poetic in their company, cashing up on the bedspread, making notes until the small hours, hunting for the light switch. Stranger still for my hosts, I imagine, having a complete outsider disappear behind the door of the spare bedroom, rooms which are nearly always reliquaries or shrines, museums of past lives or mausoleums devoted to a particular absence, a place of mothballed clothes, stockpiled books, musical instruments locked in cases, photographs under cellophane, framed certificates, dusty trophies, threadbare soft toys, objects which have no function or place in the everyday world of the living room or the kitchen or the master bedroom but whose significance to family lore borders on the sacred. I am sleeping in a memory vault, and none of the memories are mine. From the crammed bookshelf I prise out a Penguin paperback copy of the Odyssey, well thumbed and riddled with marginalia written in an alien hand, and drift off to sleep with Odysseus still several years from home.

  Keld to Hawes

  12.5 MILES

  OS Explorer OL30 North Sheet/South

  Monday 19 July

  I wake early and take stock. Was that inked vertical stripe in the subway under the A66 really the halfway line? If so, I’m on the back nine, the home stretch; I have ‘broken its back’ without it breaking me. Conversely, it means I have the same distance to walk as I have already walked (and I feel like I have walked about five thousand miles) but with only eight days left to do it, and that is a depressing thought. Another week of walking and talking, the plod, plod, plod of my own footsteps and the blah, blah, blah of my own voice. It’s raining outside, and if it’s raining in Richmond it’s almost certainly raining even harder at the top of Swaledale, which means it’s probably lashing down in the hills beyond. From the window of the back bedroom I look towards those hills but they have been absorbed by fog. I think about trying to get the weather forecast on my mobile phone but weather forecasts are designed for people wondering whether they should take an umbrella with them to Tesco’s, not for people spending their days above the tree-line and inside the clouds. It’s a horizontal-based service, and my requirements these days are always vertical.

  Although at least I’m not alone, having been assigned Colin Chick, Pennine Way Ranger for the Yorkshire Dales National Park for today’s stretch of the journey. Colin looks a tad apprehensive when I stroll towards his regulation green Land Rover and tap on the window, but mellows after just a few minutes of chat, and later on admits to being somewhat uneasy about the prospect of spending eight hours on the hills with a poet.

  ‘What did you think I’d be like?’

  ‘I don’t know, to be honest.’

  ‘Some kind of bespectacled, fragile intellectual in a velvet jacket and unsuitable shoes, right?’

  ‘No,’ he says, unconvincingly, then a moment later, ‘OK, yes.’

  I tell him my frilly blouse and pantaloons got dirty on Sleightholme Moor and are at the cleaners, then we set off back towards the waterfall where I spotted the redstart. We’re heading for the pretty market town of Hawes in Wensleydale, all cake shops and antiques by reputation, sitting directly south of here with the massive, arching rump of Great Shunner Fell accounting for everything in between. But first the route insists on a 270-degree clockwise circumnavigation of Kisdon, a sort of five-hundred-metre conical roundabout at the junction of the River Swale and Straw Beck, generating enough centrifugal energy to propel the hiker towards Great Shunner Fell’s summit then over the top into the next dale. The path is stony and slippery to begin with, and the hillside rabbit-infested. There’s even a small, sable-black bunny, offspring of some escaped pet, presumably, that hasn’t quite evolved to meet the requirements of the wild, and crouches about five yards away with its head in a wall, on the basis that if he can’t see us then we can’t see him. A couple of buzzards glide over the ravine to our left. This was an old corpse road, though it’s tricky enough to negotiate with just the weight of a medium-size rucksack strapped across the back, and I really wouldn’t fancy trying to bear a dead body along these broken and slimy rocks. The path to heaven does not run smooth, and this particular path is less smooth than most. In keeping with his Land Rover, Colin is wearing a green fleece top, a green shirt, green socks and a pair of green shorts, and the view, as I follow him up and around the clo
ck-face of Kisdon, is mainly his sturdy calves and the odd flash of thigh. The buzzards are still circling, and a kestrel hangs in the valley, its wings wavering and balancing in the breeze but its head so still it could be nailed in position. Colin says there are white crows to look out for in Malhamdale but none here. Splashing through a patch of heather, he stoops to pick a handful of bilberries, shining like tiny purple baubles, luminous globes overhanging the path, so bright because dazzling sunlight is suddenly reflecting from the rain-coated skin of the fruit, and I notice an unusual presence walking along beside me for a few minutes, someone I haven’t seen for a while: my shadow.

  The door to Kisdon Cottage is locked so we peer through the window. We’ve stopped here because Colin says it is the house of his dreams. It’s empty but not abandoned: the flagged floor looks swept, there’s a red-and-white gingham cloth on the kitchen table, candlesticks are streaked with molten wax, and crockery and ornaments are arranged tidily on the dresser shelves and across the mantelpiece. Outside there’s a plastic washing line strung between the gable end and the porch, and even the semblance of a kitchen garden bordered by a low stone wall. I can’t tell if Colin is disappointed by these signs of life or pleased that the property is habitable.

  ‘Can you get a car up here?’

  ‘Near enough,’ he says, but he isn’t looking at me or the house, and I realise as I follow his gaze that for Colin, Kisdon Cottage is less about cosy firesides and wooden staircases taken back to the grain, and more about the view. Because the whole of Swaledale is rolled out in front of us, eastward-facing and filled with early sun, home to a long, lazy river, a textbook dale straight out of a Sunday-night ITV drama or an advert for something wholesome and organic. On the OS map, which I lift and hold along our line of sight, Swaledale lies stretched, pale and thin, like the sloughed, diaphanous skin of an anaconda, or the pelt of a long-by-narrow creature staked out on the ground. The white background accorded to it, against the pale yellow of the moors, even makes it appear like a parched salt pan or an estuary at low tide. Whereas in reality the reverse is true, the fields and meadows being lush with colours and rich in textures, and the moors above it becoming faint and ill-defined to the point where they merge and blur with the sky. From this vantage point, Kisdon Cottage feels like and may literally be the highest house in Swaledale, standing above it all at the valley head, having the finest outlook, the final say.