Walking with Plato (16 page)

After a while, I stopped constellation-hopping, switched off my brain, and simply gazed upwards. It was beautiful. Not just everyday beautiful, but Plato-beautiful. Beautiful with a capital ‘B’ – almost.

I often lie out and look at the stars. And, whenever I do, I experience the same longing I felt as a child, listening to the opening notes of
Peer Gynt
.

Of all the sights the world affords, no other brings me half as close to the divine, to the perfect and the unchanging, to Beauty Itself.

But there’s something else too: a curious inner trembling, an unsettling but oddly comforting sense of being lost in something vast, a strangely uplifting sense of loneliness and insignificance.

In the past, I have wondered if this experience is peculiar to me. But, of course, it isn’t. It is, in fact, an experience common enough to have acquired a label. The same label that Longinus used when discussing great works of poetry and rhetoric:
the sublime
.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wealthy young gentlemen would often round off their education by embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe, and steeping themselves in the art and culture of the Renaissance and classical antiquity.

These tours inevitably required them to cross the Alps. And, although, at first, these mountain crossings were considered to be arduous, albeit necessary inconveniences, over time they came to be viewed as highlights of the Tour.

The immensity and grandeur of the peaks, their inaccessibility and remoteness, their formless, chaotic beauty, the sense of danger they evoked, their utter imperviousness to human plans and desires – all of these gave rise to feelings of awe.

In 1688, in a letter describing a walking tour of the Alps, the English critic and dramatist John Dennis wrote that ‘the sense of all this produc’d different motions in me, viz. a delightful Horrour, a terrible Joy, and at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled’.

In the same letter, he took the term
the
sublime
, which had previously been used only in discussions of rhetoric and literature, and used it to label this intense aesthetic experience.

A number of British writers, such as Shaftesbury, Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, and Hildebrand Jacob, later ­developed this idea of the sublime as a quality in nature.

In a 1735 essay entitled ‘How the mind is raised to the sublime’, Hildebrand Jacob listed some of the objects in nature that can evoke a sense of the sublime:

All the vast, and wonderful scenes, either of delight, or horror, which the universe affords . . . such as unbounded prospects, particularly that of the ocean, in its different situations of agitation, or repose; the rising or setting sun; the solemnity of moon light; all the phaenomena in the heavens, and objects of astronomy. We are moved in the same manner by the view of dreadful precipices; great ruins; subterraneous caverns, and the operations of nature in those dark recesses[.]

The experience of the sublime is one of the most profound that life affords. Lying there, that night, awed by the immensity of space and acutely conscious of my own insignificance, I felt it strongly. And, ‘at the same time that I was infinitely pleased, I trembled’.

The twenty-mile section of the Pennine Way from Greenhead to the market town of
Alston
is difficult to navigate, difficult to negotiate, and consists of unremarkable farmland and moorland.

It’s difficult to navigate because the waymarks are few and far between, because they don’t always point in precisely the right direction, and because they sometimes point in entirely the wrong direction.

Navigational difficulties are made all the more acute if, like Wendy and me, you are travelling from north to south.

There’s much talk, in England, of the so-called ‘North– South divide’ whereby Southerners are said to enjoy all kinds of economic, educational, and cultural advantages over Northerners.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on the Pennine Way. Those walking it from the south have access to any number of guidebooks detailing every step of the way, and benefit from largely adequate signing en route.

Those walking it from the north have access to precisely no guidebooks (it’s impossible to gain any useful information by reading a South–North guide backwards), and very often have to make do with signs showing them where they’ve
been
rather than where they’re
going
.

The most remarkable example of North–South bias I saw on the Pennine Way was a notice warning Southerners entering a field to ‘Beware of the bull’. This self-same notice served as the only indication to Northerners that they had just
left
a field with a bull in it.

On the day that Wendy and I walked from Greenhead to Alston, our navigational difficulties were further compounded by mist and rain.

The trickiest sections of marsh and moorland on this part of the Pennine Way have no paths. So walkers must rely on a trail of infrequent marker posts to guide their steps. These get swallowed up in the mist and the rain, leaving those without advanced map-and-compass skills blundering around like the biblical madman among the tombs.

The difficulties of negotiation are every bit as great as the difficulties of navigation.

This is first and foremost because large sections of both moorland and farmland here are marshy. So a false step can leave you ankle-deep or knee-deep in water. This necessitates hopping, skipping, and jumping your way from dryish-looking patch to dryish-looking patch, and hoping that those patches really are as dryish as they appear.

There are also places where you have to fight your way through knee-high vegetation that catches at your boots and conceals potentially ankle-breaking rabbit holes.

The cattle also pose problems.

Along the Pennine Way, there are lots of notices warning hikers that cows with calves can become aggressive, and that it’s dangerous to walk between a cow and her young. This is no joke. According to the UK’s National Office for Statistics, an average of five people per year are trampled to death, and dozens more injured, by cows.

Unfortunately, it’s sometimes difficult to avoid getting between a cow and her calves. This is especially true on misty days when you can’t see the cows and the cows can’t see you.

On this particular day, Wendy and I often found ourselves having to retrace our steps after stumbling across surprised, nervous, or seriously pissed-off-looking cows.

The net result of the rain, the fog, the marshy ground, the knee-high vegetation, the misleading waymarks, and the scary cows was that we made achingly slow progress. At one point, it took us an hour and twenty minutes to cover a single mile.

So, like many End to Enders before us, we abandoned the Pennine Way during the latter part of the day, and walked the last six miles to Alston along the blessedly easy South Tyndale Trail, which follows the route of the old South Tyndale Railway.

Thanks to this sneaky ruse, we arrived at the Alston YHA with plenty of time to relax before bedtime.

Better still, we had set apart the following day as a rest day, and therefore got to spend an additional twenty-four hours in Alston, visiting the shops and cafés on its cobble-stoned main street, and enjoying the fine views of the surrounding fells.

This was a jolly good thing, because the next section of our journey, twenty miles from Alston to
Dufton
, has the reputation of being the Pennine Way’s toughest.

We set off at an insanely early hour, anxious to give ourselves plenty of hours of daylight.

The walk began easily and pleasantly enough with a five-mile stretch through farmland and along the banks of the River South Tyne to the tiny village of Garrigill. From there, the Pennine Way winds its way upwards for several miles, across fells and hills, towards the summit of the notorious Cross Fell.

A substantial portion of this three-hour stretch is taken up by the Corpse Path: a steep trail comprised of loose stones, which requires zero navigational skills but is generally detested by hikers because of the heavy toll it takes on the ankles and the knees.

Wendy and I didn’t find it too bad. In fact, we quite enjoyed it. Partly because, coming at it from the north, we were walking uphill, which is easier on the joints than walking downhill. Partly because the weather was good. But mostly because, having psyched ourselves up for a long and gruelling day, we were making surprisingly swift and straightforward progress.

Things took a dramatic turn for the worse, however, when we reached Cross Fell and began to make our way across high ground to Great Dun Fell and beyond.

At 2,930 feet, Cross Fell is the highest point on the Pennine Way and the highest point in England outside the Lake District. At 2,782 feet, Great Dun Fell is not much lower.

The region between these two peaks suffers some of the worst weather in Britain, with mist on two hundred days a year, gale-force winds on a hundred days a year, and a mean annual temperature of just four degrees Celsius.

The weather on the ascent had been warm and sunny. But at the summit everything changed. We fought our way from Cross Fell to Great Dun Fell through a gale so strong that it blew us over more than once, through mist so thick that we could barely see one another, and through blinding, stinging rain.

Although it was the middle of summer, we had to raid our rucksacks for fleece jumpers, waterproofs, hats, and gloves to protect ourselves from the cold.

The route here is ill-defined and tricky to navigate. In some of the boggiest places, there are paths made from stone slabs, but apart from that it’s a matter of walking between man-made piles of stones known as cairns.

In such poor weather, these cairns are invisible, and not even the best map-and-compass skills can save you from constant blundering and backtracking.

In the end, I had to place my entire faith in my smartphone’s GPS. ‘The GPS says we’re west of the trail,’ I would say to Wendy, shouting to make myself heard above the gale. ‘So we have to go
this
way . . .’

In this manner, we battled our way to Great Dun Fell and beyond, stopping inside a low-walled stone shelter, part way across, for a few minutes’ blessed relief from the wind.

After Great Dun Fell, there’s a brief descent, followed by a final climb to the summit of Knock Old Man. After this, the trail leads steadily downwards for five miles to Alston.

This descent, though tough on the knees, was a pleasure and a delight. With each step, the wind dropped, the mist thinned, and the temperature rose.

Being an inexperienced walker, it came as a glorious surprise to me to discover that beneath the summits, below the cloud line, lay a world still bathed in warmth and sunshine: a wholesome, joyful, welcoming world.

We arrived at the YHA in Dufton – a quintessentially English village centred upon a splendid old-fashioned village green – in great good humour, having conquered the longest and toughest section of the Pennine Way.