In the course of writing my books, there are places I end up going back to repeatedly, normally because I have missed something first, second and third time. Chatsworth Moors, the furthest straggle of the gritstone peat moors of the Pennines down towards Matlock, hold their secrets close. While the moor directly above Chatsworth is reasonably accessible, those parcels to the south of Beeley Triangle are very difficult to access in the first place. You end up jumping over locked gates or searching the long enclosure-era walls for any way through. The OS map shows little of interest here; a few old quarries, the intriguing name Raven Tor and a line of diamond-shaped enclosures on Harewood Moor.
Over the early part of this year, I have been involved in a side-project created by Michael Stewart, writer and senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield. He devised four great walks around a series of stones carved with new poems about the Brontës and asked me to provide the maps and route descriptions. The Emily Brontë Walk is a suitably adventurous yomp across the wild moortops above Oxenhope and Haworth, but avoids many of the usual over-trodden paths. The Charlotte Brontë Walk is a lovely short loop through the countryside around Thornton, an area entirely new to me but very rewarding.
Houndkirk Road is a fantastically named ancient highway across Burbage Moor between Ringinglow and Longshaw, but seems something of a barren trudge across a lonely shoulder of moor. My school used to use it for its cross country races, bussing the whole year to the far end of the track and then letting us race back to Whirlow via Limb Valley in the wind and rain. It always seemed like a godforsaken place and doubtless remains a place of torment for those who didn't relish cross country as I did.
Well, thanks to the good folk at Woodlands.co.uk I have recently been the proud recipient of a 2017 Woodlands Award for one of the Best Woodlands Books of the Year for The West Yorkshire Woods: Part 1. It is particularly satisfying as this is a respected woodland management organisation and my layman's guide to woodland history and exploration in the Calder Valley has obviously met with their approval.
The Kentish Coast (or should that by the Old Coast of Kent) is a surprisingly varied affair, combining dizzying chalk cliffs with golden sands and endless shingle beaches. I began at Broadstairs in the middle of Folk Week, but before nine in the morning there was little sign of it on the streets. The tidy arc of Viking Bay is a colourful pageant to the classic English seaside, with an old Punch and Judy stand as its centrepiece. I set off below the low dirty white cliffs – this part of the coast path is not yet open, but it is easy to trace a route round to Ramsgate along the cliffs. The town is reached by a set of stone stairs built into a fake section of cliff, exposed by the fact it is the colour of gritstone and not chalk. The chalk cliffs of the North Foreland continue until Pegwell Bay, where a Viking ship celebrates the first Saxon invasion here in 449. The crazy Danes who built the replica sailed it across the North Sea in 1949.
Kinder Scout held a particular thrall over me when I was younger, the highest point in the nearby Peak District but respected to the point of reverence. Its featureless plateau was something to be wary of. I only remember crossing it once, when I was considered old enough for this undertaking and I emerged on the far edge some distance from where I was intending. Maybe because instead of using a compass, I tried to navigate the maze of deep groughs leading into the hinterland from Kinder Gates. When finally this ran out and I neared the watershed, on which the theoretical (but invisible) high point was located, I climbed out of the grough into a remarkable landscape. I stood above a warren of black channels that stretched as far as I could see in every direction, bare peat onto which clung a thin covering of grass on the higher islands. The vision stayed with me, as of a desert, a peculiarly soggy but equally bewildering one.
