Oop hill ‘n’ down dale on t’ moors

Saturday 24 Oct

I’d been hoping for great weather this weekend, but I woke this morning, looked out the window and was greeted with typical Yorkshire sunshine: it was raining very heavily. Clearly we would not be rushing off on a trek across the moors, and so I headed downstairs for a leisurely start to the day.

Here Nick and I managed some quite heady conversation. She’s doing her DPhil on how students reason, and we managed to get into some deep discussion about the different theoretical and philosophical approaches to her work (she’s much better read on educational theories than I am). There probably aren’t too many people in England (and certainly not in Todmorden) who have discussed Wittgenstein before breakfast on a Saturday morning.

After giving a hand with baking some fresh bread, and attiring myself for the inclement weather, we decided to head for the hills anyway. Nick and Mike were happy to let the existence of a particular geocache dictate the route (I have some very tolerant friends!). In fact, there are quite a few caches up on the moors, but this one involved some mathematical puzzles (of a sort) and had only been found once since it was hidden in February, and so I thought that I would try to pay it the tribute of a visit if it could possibly be managed.

Thus it was that in a steady drizzle we set off from Walsden, walking up alongside the Rochdale canal, before finding our way to a path that would take us up onto the moors themselves.

For better or worse, we set off cross-country at one point, making a direct bee-line for the cache. All of a sudden we came to a steep sided tiny gully which required a bit of a detour in order to cross to the other side. In the process, we were knee deep in grass on unstable tussocks finding it impossible to see where to step next in order to avoid getting our feet wet. Needless to say we got our feet wet. Very wet.

This very physical experience of the moors continued once we got to the top. The rain had mostly stopped but it was very windy (the photo to the right doesn’t really tell the truth: I should be being blown to the right of the sign, not the left … which means the winds weren’t quite galeforce!), and its howling power took your breath away at times, and forced it down your nostrils and lungs at others. There were rain fronts crossing every so often, blocking our view of the sprawling city of Manchester off to the west, and then the sun would come out to light up the fields on the slopes of the hills and to add an extra glow to the orange coloured grassland.

The track that we reached, running along the top of the moors near some reservoirs, is actually part of the famous Pennine Way. The photo proves that I have walked on it (just not very much of it in the grand scheme of the whole 429km route).

Not far from the cache we found a lovely little — and I mean little — bridge, which we think may have been part of one of the wool-pack trails used to cart wool by horse during the industrial revolution. That’s Nick’s dog Sparrow crossing it in the photo above (he inherited the name from a previous owner). And not far from this there was a tiny and curious little memorial to we know not whom: a small piece of slate with a brief inscription, just placed in no particular spot at all, except for the fact that it was simply “up on the moors” with all that that seems to mean.

The cache itself proved a little elusive at first (I could imagine Nick thinking “You dragged us here for nothing?!”), but eventually it revealed itself (Nick is now hooked on the idea, but is putting it on hold in order to finish dealing with Wittgenstein … and she assures me that she was really glad to have explored this part of the moors that she hadn’t even visited herself (and here was me assuming that they were going to be able to rescue me if we got misted in!!!)).

On our way back down the weather was much better for taking photographs, and we could get a better sense of the landscape. There are such narrow margins here between prosperity and subsistence, between city and country, between valley and hilltop, between travel on water and travel on foot, between harsh bleakness and peaceful idyll, between the 21st century and the 17th. And the weather itself was not a disappointment; indeed it made the whole experience more real. I just wish I could have taken better photos to capture it all (I’d left the good camera in the car because of the wetness, although I wonder if I could have done justice to capturing what I was seeing anyway).

The day ended in very enjoyable fashion (once we were dry and cleaned up). Nick and Mike had invited some of their friends around, and prepared a wonderful dinner. A very sociable and pleasant evening ensued, which was just a nice end to a really fantastic day.

There are some extra photos to be found by clicking here.