Blackstone Edge, Warland Reservoir, Crook Hill, Rough Hill, Freeholds Top, Whitworth Higher End Moor, Britannia Quarries. 12 Miles.

It was like I was on Kinder in the morning fog again, surrounded by gritstone outcrops and enveloping blankness as I got my stuff together for today’s miles. Having less of them ahead today than I’ve had so far I’d allowed myself a lie-in. I set off at 10am expecting a gentler day rambling around Rochdale, where I was born and where – walking with my dad as a kid – I first got a taste for this kind of thing.

I pass a string of reservoirs on my right. There’s something really bracing about them in their relative remoteness – their setting in the wide moorland.

I drag myself west away from them and descend into Warland. Here, by the canal, I watch a family operate the lock and swingbridge to allow their boat to pass over the border from Lancashire to Yorkshire, as I’m straddling the two counties sat on a bench eating lunch. Unfairly, I enjoy the cracks of impatience showing in the face of a driver waiting for their road to be returned to them.

I start ascending again, over a path that for a while leads over the roof of the Summit Tunnel. This path is another seldom-trod and very overgrown sort, with bees buzzing around my shins between the heather and other shrubs either side of it. Frequently a bee will be lying in the path. I really don’t want to stand on one in case it releases some sort of KILL pheromone and its mates come for me. Some shoulder-high, moth-spawning ferns to pass through and then a sharpish ascent up a grotty clough and I’m on the high ground again.

At the bottom of the high ground at least. There’s a lot of ascent on paths of varying quality. There’s a lot of the sapping, livestock-churned field trudging and trying to find ghostly faint trails where the grass seems to have just bowed slightly along a narrow line. I eventually hit a gravel track which leads me through Crook Hill wind farm, one of several that have blossomed over the last decade or so on this stretch of hills. A digger driver nods to me and says ‘fine for walking around here isn’t it’. I agree – I’m glad it was a pleasantry because I hadn’t been sure if this was still a public place. Clearly it is – good. ‘You look buggered’, he says – I agree. We chat about his work – they’re loving it up here: left to themselves to get on with things amid the great views. ‘It’s really spooky when it’s foggy’ – I bet. If you’ve heard the sound of the windmills you’d appreciate the otherliness of the prospect.

I’m heading for Freeholds top and it’s still a long trudge up to it after I’ve left the windmills behind. I cross over Rough hill and then I’m crossing a great scooped curve of field draped over Ramsden Clough – there’s superb views of Calderdale to the East. There’s Stoodley Pike. Stoodle-ay-hee-ho.

Freeholds Top is the kind of summit I really like – a smooth wide grassy top that’s easy to trudge over, with a gently curving ascent and a trig point that peeps up over the curve as you approach. Perfect. There’s also a little fenced-off tarn as here a bonus feature.

It’s too hazy to see the Forest of Bowland or the Yorkshire Dales, but the views of Calderdale, Rochdale and towards Pendle Hill are really wonderful. And of Manchester of course. I’m using the autofocus on the zoom-lensed camera I’ve borrowed because I’m too inexperienced to do otherwise. But the summer haze is starting to make getting shots of the city quite tricky now. The beautiful days have seen the city’s definition fade into a shreddies-under-the-milk sort of bluey-vagueness. That’s cool  – I’m here to look at the city from the perspective of the hills and their view isn’t always going to be as startlingly crisp as it’s been the past few days.

From there it’s a long descent through fields, past some fine-looking rams (seriously curly horns), into Shawforth. It’s just a little odd to be here as I grew up just a couple of miles further down the road I’m now on.  I look for a turning which will take me back up the last batch of ascent for the day. It’s well into the evening and I’m walking through a pleasant ’70s estate that hugs the agricultural slopes – plenty of kids playing, mums chatting and such. I feel uncomfortably conspicuous as I weave through its streets looking sweaty and ‘buggered’ under the weight of my massive rucksack with a trowel and a mallet hanging off the back. I make it to a footpath running steeply up, directly beside someone’s garden. A horse starts to follow me – with friendly curiosity, I think – as I begin haltingly lurching up this steep field. I think I can hear someone whistling the horse back, but I don’t turn around – I just carry on uphill. This is a truly hard ascent. My legs just don’t want to do it and I can only muster a few steps at a time before I need a breather. I can feel the estate still watching me as I haul this ridiculously huge sack up the slope – taking ages to do it. I’m almost ready to quit – my family lives in Rochdale and I’m weighing up how bad it would be to retreat, make a call and get picked up and put up for the night. Maybe I’d get dropped at the estate in the morning and have another crack at it. But I don’t want to walk past that fucking horse again.

Finally I feel the ground level off a bit. I slog across another couple of lumpy, pathless fields and then find a track which eventually leads me past a huge quarry. Around me are remnants of excavation and industrial activity now done or dormant. A flock of dirt bikers suddenly appears and starts taking advantage of a landscape perfectly sculpted for their pastime. I charge weakly on looking for somewhere to pitch up that’s away from tire tracks and out of sight of the active quarry I’m now skirting the edge of.

A boggy trudge over some darkening tussocky moor leads me to an abandoned mineshaft, the leftover quarried rock from which has left a nice barrier from the wind and from visibility to the nearby paths. The shaft itself looks like a bucolic version of the Pit of Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi. I find a spot, clear the ground of a few rocks – and quite a bit of sheep shit – and pitch up.

It’s closer to human activity here than I’ve been before when wild camping; I can hear dogs barking and – I think – the occasional raised voice, I assume from the evenings final walkers or from relatively distant farm buildings. But I feel well protected by the circle of rocks I’m set up in and, after ramen by moonlight, I have the best night’s sleep I’ve had on the trip so far.

Alderman’s Hill, Broadstone Hill, Hollin Brown Knoll, Standedge, White Hill, Blackstone Edge. 16 Miles.

I had my first bit of horizon cynicism at the campsite. After explaining what I was doing, Jack said flatly ‘You can’t see Winter Hill from Manchester’. It might be true that he’s never seen Winter Hill from Manchester, but in the right place and on the right floor it’s there alright – it really looms over the city. I said ‘well, if you lean out from my balcony and the building they’ve just put up on Oxford Road wasn’t there, then you’d see the transmitter’. At this, Jack’s mate said ‘you can’t just base it on any… flag that’s on something’ and walked off, seeming amused and satisfied that the nonsense of something had been unearthed.

I think there’s good reason to be cynical about this venture. Despite having used a method for working out what the horizon is from one perspective, there’s still a lot of arbitrary-ish decisions been made about what’s included in the route and what’s not. Wild Bank clearly occupies a prominent portion of the skyline to the east of my flat, but including it would’ve meant a 6 mile detour, and the ground behind it is higher and more substantially horizon-like to me. Excluded for similar reasons are notable lumps like Sponds Hill, Whaley Moor, Crompton Moor and Knowl Moor. There’s also aesthetic tweaks and additions – having the walk being between two transmitters, for example, and making it 100 miles long. It can be annoying to people when people make up the rules and blur the edges of things. It kinda confirms to people that nothing’s pure and proper. Nobody’s doing anything PROPERLY ANYMORE.

It felt good to be moving again and getting out onto higher ground. Today was beautiful – scorching hot in the valleys and on the slopes but breezily warm on the high moors.

I got up to Alderman’s hill – a key feature of the view from my kitchen window, and then made my way across Saddleworth moor.

This was some truly beautiful walking. The moor and the valley below looked amazing; a cloud bank was rising off the moors further out that I’d be walking in later in the day. You don’t get many mornings as stunning as this one.

Following this route that I’d plotted out on Google Earth a month ago can sometimes feel a bit like being the pawn of a god I once was. The route followed a pathless heavy-going trudge up to Hollin Brown Knoll – an area associated with the Moors Murders. I assumed there would be some horizon-based reward waiting for me as I arrived as I’m not really into murder tourism… or rather, I just don’t know what disposition to have at the scene of something so brutal and famous. As it was, there was little to see there but moor. Maybe there was some horizon or other interest a few hundred yards further on, but it had been tiring getting here and I wanted to get away. The emptiness of it on the way up though had been really gorgeous. There was also a long trench or ditch-like structure that crossed large sections of the moor and I want to try to find out what that is.

I finally got off Saddleworth moor, starkly beautiful as it had been it was good to be getting back on a path. I picked up the Pennine Way and followed it between Saddleworth and West Yorkshire, passing Black Moss reservoir from which – I was surprised to see – Manchester was clearly visible. This meant that the overlooking hill – West Nab above Marsden – was probably unfairly overlooked as a contender for inclusion in my horizon. Sos mate.

I passed Standedge, which overlooks Delph and Diggle, and from there I was getting into proper South Pennine Moorland. There’s something about these particular moors – those immediately either side of the M62 at the border of Lancashire and West Yorkshire that really feel like home to me. There’s none of the plunging and soaring dramatics of the Dark Peak or the gentler gorgeousness of the White Peak, but there’s something splendid about the high emptiness and the distances visible from here. It’s also something just about their colour and texture – their smooth grandness.

The Windy Hill transmitter was great to see, because it’s very good-looking and it also meant I was close to Blackstone Edge. Crossing the Pennine Way footbridge over the M62 was a fantastic moment. I’ve been under this beauty so many times but never across it on foot yet.

I was surprised at how full of grit and pebbles it is -they could easily get kicked onto the carriageway below by a jogger’s trainer. Next time I pass under it I’m gonna hold my breath a bit.

A last uphill slog and I’d got to Blackstone Edge and looked for somewhere to pitch. Still inexperienced at wild camping I went for somewhere that was big enough for the tent to fit in, but not quite big enough to peg it out in. This resulted in a very ‘flappy’ pitch – not very sturdy-feeling or rainproof tonight. Hope it doesn’t rain.