In my discombobulated state on the top of Moel Famau, I’d managed to lose sight of what I’d undertaken the walk for. On the summit, I’d tried to film a couple of ‘well, here I am’ monologues for the video that I might make documenting the walk, and I had come up with the line ‘it’s good to turn a nice idea into a reality’, as the sort of take-home message of the endeavour.
But that’s not quite right. On reflection it feels calculatedly underwhelming, to the point of being disingenous. And it hazes over the real motivations for the walk.
When I got back to Manchester, and back up to the flat, it was dark. But there was already something added to the experience of gazing out over the lights of Ardwick, past the lights of the cranes, and over shining Tameside to where the line of the Eastern edge of the Peak District would be.
In the morning, it became clear that the walk’s timing had been spot on. The next floor had been added to the building that I knew was set to obscure Alderman’s Hill, and the line of sight linking it to my flat had finally been broken.
Alderman’s Farewell
At some point in the walk, the last piece of the rising framework would have been dropped into place in front of Alderman’s Hill. Maybe Friday, as I was heading out of England.
As soon as I saw the building was going up back early in 2026, a sort of desperation began in me. I’d already considered linking my long planned Moel Famau walk to something involving the Saddleworth skyline. I had versions of this which tried to trace every lick of hillside I could see from the kitchen window, combining parts of the ‘outer horizon’ I’d walked in 2016, with the ‘inner horizon’ – big features of the view but which were more towards the foreground – Wild Bank, Harridge Pike and the high ground up around Scouthead. So I’d do all that, then walk to the flat along the Medlock, and then head off to Wales.
I’d abandoned this after a few draft routes, because I was getting tangled up in my own rules and motivations – shifting the rules to include other notable features of the view from here added hours to the journey which didn’t seem likely to be that enjoyable to walk, that kind of thing.
But it had been fine to backburner this plan, because it was just something that would be cool to do at some point. Then with the building rising up and threatening sight of Alderman – I knew I didn’t have that luxury anymore.
And internally I was panicking. I didn’t want to let this ‘nice idea’ be scuppered by a the surprise encroachment of this building into its terrain, but my plans were still flimsy and other commitments were crowding the time I needed get serious about them.
I’d also had this idea I might mark the imminent loss by making a flag, perhaps saying ‘goodbye’ on it, big enough to be visible twelve miles away, that I’d take up and unfurl on Alderman’s Hill, and get someone to take a zoomed-in picture of me waving it from the flat. I looked into it but the logistics of it were a bit cumbersome and the time to organise it didn’t seem available. Would have been quite something to pull off but, quite typically, I was overcomplicating things.
It was really late in the day when I realised I could simplify things massively by just starting the walk at Alderman’s Hill and making my way to Moel Famau from there, without having to bring any other parts of the kitchen window view into it or performing any sort of visual stunt up it. Soon-to-be-obscured Alderman was clearly the eastern side’s main character for this walk, and other stars of the kitchen view, Wild Bank and such, would still be part of the view for the foreseable future and needn’t be included. Starting the walk at Alderman would be tribute enough to its coming loss, and starting it whilst the notional visual line between it, my flat and Moel Famau is still present, would create a kind of enduring embodiment to that line, even as its non-notional aspect disappeared to the naked eye. Know what I mean?
So finally having decided the walk’s motivation and start and end points I could get on with plotting a definitive route. I’d sketched out versions of the route several times over the years, but without much rigour – mostly just tweaking the output of a Google Maps walking direction route to the hilltop from the flat. I now needed to take a bit more seriously ideas about how long the ‘legs’ of the journey were going to be, whether I wanted to wild camp or use camp sites, and whether I wanted to fit in the ‘stars’ of the western view like Carrington Moss’ flare stack and Helsby Hill – that kind of thing.
I’ll always wonder if I made the right decision by choosing camp sites (mostly caravan parks) over wild camping. The cost of it stung a bit, and often it cost me extra mileage and deviations from the ‘sightline’ to get to them. I’m well used to wild camping now. After 2016’s walk, I had a 9 year gap before I wild camped again. Since then I’ve really thrown myself into it, bothering the the Bowland Fells, the Lake District, the Shropshire Hills, the Carneddau and the Peak District numerous times since summer 2025. I love it. But the difference between pitching up at above 500 meters in the Peak District and camping in a patch of woodland near Partington, for example, wasn’t one I was quite ready to tackle. I’m a fairly paranoid sort, and the thought of being detected by a dog walker, a farmer or by someone on some nefarious forestbusiness, would easily have kept be too anxious to sleep – it would have all got a bit disproportionate in my head. Maybe this is something I would get used to if I tried it out a few times, but I just wasn’t ready for it. So the camp sites it was. And of course it solved a bunch of logistical problems like charging things and having abundant water – getting showered. Stuff like that.
And the old Zephyros was a HERO. Bought for the 2016 walk, with help from my dad, it held up brilliantly under the heavy rain in Frodsham and looked fantastically tiny on all of these sites. I missed the luxurious roominess of my newer Pioneer 2. But it was perfect for this trip, being a fair bit lighter, and also because it made a further point of connection between the 2016 walk and this one.
Take a bow Zephyros 1 (orignal version)
I’m getting sidetracked again. This is meant to be about rediscovering the purpose of the walk, after a little disorientation upon achieving the walk’s goal.
And this became clear again the first time I looked over at the building-under-construction in daylight, when I came back from Wales. The inner-panic I’d been feeling since noticing the building going up was now gone. The urge to ‘do something’ about the loss I was facing was satisfied. The tear that the new building has made in the view, is still jarring and painful, but I’ve come to terms with it. And looking west from the living room window is really special now. Looking over the Hulme Arch, past the Carrington Moss flare stack, whether mute, smoking or blazing like a star; past the dark lump formed by Frodsham Hill and Helsby Hill, and – if the sky’s clear enough – to the hazy outline of Moel Famau, there’s a feeling present now that wasn’t there before. It’s real, tangible – and pretty marvellous.
The stars of my western view at sunset – October 2026
PS. The blisters all seemed to have healed up okay. I still get a bit of soreness in my right heel and I still have a few purple/black toenails 07/10/2026
Thanks and Shoutouts and Reading List
Massive love and thanks to Rachel for completely understanding and supporting these adventures I set for myself, for coming and collecting me at the bottom of Moel Famau, and for being very kind about how much my rucksack STANK in the car, after several long, warm days on my perspiring back.
Further inspiration for this walk came from Lydia Unsworth’s apparently sudden walk from Manchester to London, and any long distance walker should be humbled by the fairly astonishing achievements of Matt Dalby, whose capacities for getting to fairly far-flung places and back in the space of a day – York! – are mind boggling to me. The keen-eyed suburban ambulations of my good friend Joincey are also a constant source of gratification. Improv Guitar Wizard Dave Birchall is also one for bringing focus to further subtle and strange dimensions of walking.
As regards the transformation of Manchester in recent years – this walk is an idiosyncratic response to a very personal, subjective sense of loss. The cause of the loss is something which is creating a much greater set of losses for a far greater number of people. Some will be of a similar nature – where the loss is about injuries to the meaning of where you live, changes to the feel of the place, having to live with torn horizons; much of the loss will be more deeply material and even existential. As it progresses, it concretises the kinds of future it’s possible for the city to have and it helps to set in stone the sorts of future direction of the country has too.
On that, it’s very helpful to read up about what’s driving these changes, what effects they’re having and what could and should be different about the trajectory the city has taken.
So please, take a look at this great clutch of work:
Isaac Rose and Johnathan Silver (2021) The Airbnb Assault on Manchester
Froud et. al. (2018) From Developer Led Regeneration to Civic Futures