Wayoh Reservoir, Turton Heights, Longworth Moor, Belmont, Winter Hill. 8 Miles.

I have a problem with the word ‘challenge’ – specifically its seemingly increasing use as a noun. This whole horizon walk thing has certainly had aspects to it that are challenging and there have been plenty of times where I’ve felt challenged – but this isn’t ‘a challenge’.  Challenge fits too neatly into the neoliberal – ‘give it 110%’ shakedown we’re living grit-toothed through. Challenge is an aspect of what this is but only an aspect – there’s adventure, risk, uncertainty, fun, problem solving, physical effort, mental struggle and beauty – lots and lots of beauty. To privilege or emphasise challenge above these other facets of an outdoorsy undertaking seems unhealthily masochistic, and it’s bringing an instrumental, economic mentality into what should be a time/place for play. I’m quite happy to think of this walk as ‘playing out’.

As for a purpose – there doesn’t have to be one beyond the playing with the landscape that drawing a line around it and then walking that line is. I have realised though that this walk does do something that seems kind of purpose-like: it makes my relationship with the horizon physical. I’ve grown up, worked and done pretty much everything I’ve done under the gaze of this crescent of hills – in a way they define me. I’m sort of paying tribute to that by walking it – I’m adding a physical element to the looking at and looking back.

I wearily pack up the tent and head down from the woods to the reservoir. It’s a really beautiful place, but I’m eager to get away. I squeeze past a skip that’s been plonked at the start of a public footpath and then misnavigate into some farm buildings where, unnervingly, there’s what appears to be a fiercely torn open lorry trailer.

I find the right path eventually, and move through some grotty woods to a lane running between fields. It takes me past another old agricultural building re-purposed for the wealth-creators. As I pass I hear the security intercom sounding and think I must be being addressed – warned off perhaps – but then I realise that, bizarrely, the intercom is loudly playing a phone-in radio show.

I pass through a lovely little hamlet – stone houses jumbled around a curling cobbled lane – that feels occupied, as in taken over. The cars parked, the signs of renovation… I’m not imagining that these buildings were the scene of something idyllic, that was then crushed by a shockwave of cash from the cities, but there is a feeling of spoils being taken.

The Ordnance Survey map (digital) I’m using shows a public footpath running up through the drive of a farm, but as I get to it there’s a very unfriendly sign insisting that there’s no access this way and a CCTV camera on a tall metal stalk reinforces the point. I see there’s another way to the path further up the road and head up there seething a little. I think of paths as kind of sacred and there’s nothing that gives me more of a hit of civic pride than a well maintained and signposted public footpath. Maybe there was agreement about this one and the OS just hasn’t quite caught up; maybe there was some ceremony of deconsecration – maybe it isn’t just contempt.

I find my way around to where I would’ve got to a bunch quicker and begin the trudge up to Turton Heights. It’s been threatening to rain all morning and now it starts – and it’s really going for it. I’m making my way up a signposted route through a field, but if the signs ever followed anything like a discernible path then it’s long overgrown. There are shoulder high rushes in enormous clumps and they quickly saturate my clothes as I squeeze through and stumble over them. I get to the top of the moor and it’s just chucking it down. I’m soaked and my shoes are audibly squelching as I walk. I realise how lucky I’ve been with the weather – I don’t know what I’d have done if there’d been two consecutive days like this earlier in the week. I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it.

I’m starting to shiver and I decide for the first time to cut out something on my route – I’ll skip Turton Moor and the Hanging Stones. I’ll come and look at them another time. Right now, for the first time in the whole adventure, I’m really not enjoying myself. It cuts two miles off my total, but I’m still happy I’ll have done my 100 miles – the detours from the main route to the campsites and such will have more than made up for the loss. It’s still a hard decision though and I hesitate on it for a good few minutes – but cold and weariness eventually win out, and I cut off the route and head towards Belmont.

I’m at the foot of Winter Hill now, but I’m not ready to head up just yet – I need to get out of the rain if just for a few minutes. I head into the first pub I see  – the Belmont Bull -which, marvellously, has a sign saying ‘Muddy boots and wet bums welcome’ – I had been worried about exactly those things. I’m welcomed in by the barman, Tom. There’s no better icebreaker than looking like a defeated, sodden and overladen mess and we’re quickly talking about the walk I’ve been doing and how it’s all going to climax with Winter Hill. I complain to Tom about the rain and the rushes and he says something like – ‘Ah, the rushes, yeah. I do like a walk in the rain though’. Instantly I start to feel that I might have been being a bit soft about the rushy terrain of the West Pennine Moors. Tom says he knows a better way up Winter Hill than the one I’d been planning and I’m really happy to hear about it. It doesn’t appear on the OS maps and I never spotted it on Google Earth – but it sounds like it’s going to get me up there in a satisfyingly direct way. I try pouring the water out of my shoes, wringing out my socks and then giving them repeated blowings under the hand-dryer in the gents, but it’s really not making much of a difference. I have a couple of coffees and realise I’m starving so I order lunch. As I’m eating I have a wonderful realisation: I can leave the rucksack here. I’m going to be coming back here anyway – I’ve spoken to Rachel and she’s going to pick me up from here; I’m certainly not getting any Manchester horizon pics from the zoom-camera today; there’s nothing in there I’ll need up on the hill. I ask Tom if that would be cool and he says yes. This is amazing. I recheck the route with Tom and then set off – 33 pounds lighter. I’m practically skipping as I make my way to the outskirts of the village, past a little reservoir known locally as ‘The Blue Lagoon’, across some low wooden bridges over swollen streams and begin the ascent. The path is muddy, crumbly, full of slippy unstable rocks and great patches of bog and largely very steep – but it’s visible. It takes just under an hour for me to get up the first ascent, across the boggy ‘flats’ and then up onto the hill itself. Lord knows how long it would’ve been if I’d still had the weight of the rucksack on me. It’s really wild with wind and rain and the visibility is next to nothing. I can make out the smaller transmitters but not the main spire I’ve taken to be the end of my route. I find the trig point, which is great to see, but I want to find the fucking massive transmitter tower that’s on this hill but which is completely invisible to me now.

I get out my tablet with my OS map on it, hoping it will hold out in the rain for long enough to show me where to go, and I see that I need to follow a path southeast which then branches southwest and I’ll be there. Splashing directly through massive puddles – why bother going around when you’re already soaked? – I finally make it to the gates of the transmitter’s compound and… I still can’t really see it – there’s a sort of detectable darkening vertical line through the fog. That’s it. I try and do a quick video of myself being there and hurry off downhill.

 

Seeing Manchester from this iconic bit of my horizon, and seeing the whole route that I’d walked to get here – the triumphant last gaze at it all – wasn’t going to happen. Sod it. It’s cold, let’s go. I scurry back down the path, which is by now pretty much a stream, cackling loudly and frequently.

 

 

 

Top o’ Leach, Hailstorm Hill, Tottington Higher End Moor, Whittle Hill, Peel Monument, Bull Hill, Wayoh Reservoir. 13 miles.

Pretty much constantly as I walk there’s a tune playing in my head. Often it’s a well-known song that’s just beamed in there – I’ve had Ramones, Al Green, Marvin Gaye, Shirley Bassey, ‘and many more‘ all cycling about this week. Sometimes it’ll be a more beloved thing from my past listening like a Hüsker Dü song or a bit of Mission of Burma or Amon Düül II. Then there’s the bastardised versions of popular songs: one such inexplicably constant companion is the first line of the Chris Rea song ‘Driving Home for Christmas’, but with the lyrics changed to: ‘Hydrochloric Acid… Is my favourite fuckin’ acid‘. Then there’s a whole bunch of things that I’ve just unwillingly made up – there’s about a whole musical’s worth of chorus-line, good-time, upbeat showtunes going on that are just INANE. Lastly, there’s the ones that relate to my current situation. So the other day when I was taking my first steps up Mount Famine having just added the contents of Stash 1 to my rucksack, feeling the extra weight, I had ‘Na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, na, Baby give it up, Give it up BABY GIVE IT UP‘ looping loudly. This morning, awfully, but pertinently, I had Phil Collins’ ‘One more night… One more night‘ chiming on and on.

But despite that it was a great feeling having just one… further night before completing this adventure.

I could hear that work had begun at the quarry as I was setting off up the moor. The high-tufted grass was full of little dewy spider webs.

After a bit of a disheartening early navigational struggle I found the path to Top O’ Leach and made it to its gorgeous summit. Wonderful views towards Rossendale, down into Calderdale and over Rochdale’s other tops, plus some ruins and TWO trig points. One of them seemed older, an earlier format.

I strode on to the nearby top of Hail Storm Hill and then went up the gently rising moor to Tottington Higher End Moor. I was in one of the biggest windfarms in the UK and I was having a ball being amongst these machines. I dislike the reindustrialisation of the hills – the roads for the maintenance vehicles, the large rubblefields and the slicing-through of old paths; and I’m full of disdain and suspicion of their makers – the Peel Group: the massive organisation that will probably build the next planet after it’s crushed all of Earth’s local councils with unrefusable leverage. But I really adore these things. They’re modern in an almost nostalgic sense… something about them reminds me of early ’80s kids’ sci-fi imagery. And the size of them, the sound of them and the giant swoop of the blades – despite all the reservations about why they’re here what they do and who benefits, I still find something marvellous and hopeful about them.

 

I descend into a deep clough and then drag myself up to the top of Whittle Hill. There’s a large cross sprouting from a cairn at the top. I joke in my head about it being a ‘response’ to the windmills – but then read the plaque at the top and discover it was a tribute to yet another victim of a plane crash – another one who came down on the hills. Apparently before a certain point people weren’t aware that wind speeds varied with altitude, and so pilots navigating in poor conditions would often calculate that they’d cleared higher ground and descend fatally early.

A long stroll down from the hills takes me into Ramsbottom, where I’ve scheduled a stop for an hour or two to recharge my phone so I can make sure I can let Rachel know when and where to pick me up from tomorrow. In the sunny high-street I’m conscious again of looking a bit untoward. I’m also noticing that people smell really nice. It’s reminding me of Mr Hanky from South Park – ‘You smell an awful lot like flowers‘ – which makes me worry about what scents I’m exuding. I hesitate on the threshold of Lola’s Vegan Restaurant, but I’m welcomed in and shown to a seat with a plug socket and given a glass of water unprompted because I ‘look thirsty’. I spend a great couple of hours in there getting percents back on my phone, eating a vegan Philly ‘Steak n Cheese’ baguette and a sipping a couple of ‘Big Ginge’ mocktails.

I have to drag myself away and uphill, past the last of Ramsbottom’s houses, steeply up a path in a patch of woodland and then out over a fast-moving b-road to the base of Holcombe moor, upon which Peel Monument stands. I get to the monument, get my pictures of Manchester and look across the hazy outline of the horizon to where I started out from. It looks a daftly long way off – I can’t really take in that I’ve walked from there.

 

And the pinned slope of Winter Hill, that I’ve watched growing and sliding leftwards this whole time still seems a heckuva distance away.

I slog up a long, muddy path adjacent to a military live firing zone and make my way over Bull Hill’s seemingly endless sloping top to its summit. I’m feeling seriously fatigued now but I’m pleased that this will have been the last significant climb of the day and everything will be downhill now to the reservoir where I’ll camp. Until a check of my compass lets me know that it isn’t, and to get to Wayoh I need to haul myself over this nothingy slab of moor to the southwest – ordinarily not so much of a task, but right now it’s a painful realisation. I whimper and set off down Bull Hill and up the nowhere slope. It’s boggy, lumpy and the path is tricky to pick up. What’s more, today seems to be the day that the ants get their wings – it must be a joyous occasion for them, but it’s making me curse their maker because every time I stop for a breather or to check my map I get covered in them. They particularly like to get in my ears.

I eventually get over the crest of the hell-slope and begin the real descent – into the fringes of Bolton – past a building which, from the smell, I can only take to be some kind of cat-sick processing plant. I move through farms and down into an area of a type I mentally christen ‘farmers and footballers’. It’s a picturesque country village, but most of the buildings are pretty new and many are still under construction. Many of the older buildings are converted into modern minimansions. A terrace or two of what must’ve been the ‘original’ community remains, but seems dominated now by the millionaire, (or thereabouts) bracket property that’s sprung up. It sets me on edge. I’m hoping to find somewhere to camp around here and I’m sensing something about the place that I find  hostile. Joggers, dog walkers pass me and to my default ‘Hiya’ I get strained responses. It’s different than the friendly but oddly office-y greetings you get in the Peak District and miles away from the ‘How do’ that’s popped up a couple of times since Warland.

I make it down to the reservoir as the light starts to give up and start worriedly looking for somewhere to camp. I’m tired and paranoid – there are ‘No Camping’ signs up on all the paths around the reservoir and my mind’s not able to keep in proportion what the consequences of me being caught doing it would be.

I get a little higher up a road away from the reservoir, past more farmer/footballer type homes, and cut down a path into the surrounding woods. I go pretty deep in and find a big enough gap between the pine trees to set my tent up on the needle-y mulch. The paranoia grows – there’s dogs barking seemingly everywhere and I hear shouting voices. I decide I’m not going to cook tonight, or even turn on my lamp. I’m just going to make a quick Spam wrap, shove it down with some water, and then try and sleep.

That takes a long time to do because my anxiety about being where I am gets to play freely now I’ve nothing else to think about. I keep imagining being discovered by a parade of torch-bearing farmers and footballers, protecting their countryside from villains who’d try to steal comfort in it – like I was in a countryside version of Scorsese’s After Hours.

Eventually this died away and I just lay there listening to the trees creak and the owls scream.