Entwistle to Winter Hill Via Turton Moor, Hanging Stones, Turton Heights
Unresolved feelings niggled and persisted. The couple of miles that I’d chopped out of the route on that sodden last day; the feeling of missing out on experiencing the visible drawing-closer of Winter Hill to the point where I was finally on it; the feeling of being denied the satisfaction of gazing over the whole length of the walk from its concluding point. I wanted to have a stab at resolution.
On a stunning July morning I got off the train at Entwistle and made my way past Wayoh, and up onto Turton Heights. Somehow, the shoulder-high rushes that had drenched me from the side as the rain had drenched me from above, had become knee-high and tame.
I was stunned by the way Winter Hill rose up over the crest of Turton Heights as I approached it— it was quite a moment—and what a moment that would have been had it been visible to me the first time around.
I descended warmly from Turton Heights, and headed dryly through the grotty woods in which I’d picked up stash 6 (that I’d been too wet and knackered to open last time I was here, and which still remains unopened in my flat) and made it to the point where I’d made the wet decision to cut two miles out of the route and head directly to Belmont.
It felt really good to be here unsodden and looking forward to a few more miles of moor and a couple of hundred more meters or so of ascent.
I trudged – my lightest, most carefree trudge – up to Turton Moor, for the first time.
Great views of Pendle Hill and the Bowland fells opened up and I greeted the Hanging Stones, which were losing the day’s moorland beauty contest to a shimmering field of cotton grass.
I take a detour from the-route-that-would-have-been to go look at the view from Great Hill, where there’s a fabulous lookout over Lancashire, past Pendle Hill towards the Bowland fells. Yorkshire Dales and Cumbrian fells are also peepingly visible in the great span of land I can see between Darwen Tower to the north and Winter Hill to the south. Now the final stretch of today’s walk begins and I set off along Redmond’s Edge and then Spitler’s Edge and watch Winter Hill’s top loom perfectly visibly towards me.
At the top I’m finally rewarded with a view of the full 100 miles of what I pretty much walked just under a year ago. And there’s views of the coast and of Welsh mountains, and more Lakeland and Yorkshire Dale peaks poking forth beyond Bowland – other horizons rippling out from the one I traced a line along with my feet.
It’s wonderful to be here, but it’s inevitably incomplete. I’ve not traced this line all the way around unbrokenly, to where I’m looking back at it from and I’m at a distance from it again. The sense of having made my relationship with the horizon physical is there but at something of a remove. It’s becoming hazy. I think I’m okay with that. I make a film of myself finally visibly here and then peg it down the hill to Belmont to make the last bus.
