Great Mountain Days in the Pennines. Terry Marsh

8 Bowes Moor

       NORTH WEST DALES – EDEN VALLEY AND THE HOWGILLS

       9 Hartley Fell and Nine Standards Rigg

       10 Lunds Fell, Hugh Seat and High Seat

       11 Wild Boar Fell and Swarth Fell

       12 Green Bell

       13 The Fairmile Circuit

       14 Cautley Spout and The Calf

       15 The Calf from Sedbergh

       YORKSHIRE DALES

       16 Great Shunner Fell and Lovely Seat

       17 Upper Swaledale and Rogan’s Seat

       18 Dodd Fell Hill and Drumaldrace

       19 Gragareth and Great Coum

       20 Whernside

       21 Ingleborough

       22 Giggleswick Scar

       23 Nappa Cross, Rye Loaf Hill and Victoria Cave

       24 Pen-y-Ghent and Plover Hill

       25 Fountains Fell

       26 Janet’s Foss, Gordale Scar and Malham Cove

       27 Buckden Pike

       28 Great Whernside

       29 Cracoe Fell and Thorpe Fell

       30 Elslack Moor and Pinhaw Beacon

       31 Rombalds Moor and Ilkley Moor

       SOUTH PENNINES

       32 Pendle Hill

       33 Boulsworth Hill

       34 Delf Hill and Stanbury Moor

       35 Wadsworth Moor

       36 Worsthorne Moor and Black Hameldon

       37 Thieveley Pike and Cliviger Gorge

       38 Bride Stones Moor

       39 Luddenden Dean and Midgeley Moor

       40 Stoodley Pike

       41 Langfield Common

       42 Blackstone Edge

       43 Rooley Moor and Cowpe Lowe

       44 White Hill and Piethorne Clough

       DARK PEAK

       45 Saddleworth Edges

       46 Lord’s Seat and Mam Tor

       47 Kinder Downfall

       48 Rowlee Pasture and Alport Castles

       49 Back Tor and Derwent Edge

       50 Stanage Edge

       Appendix 1 Concise walk reference

       Appendix 2 Bibliography

      Cautley Spout (Walk 14)

      PREFACE

      Arriving at the summit of Great Whernside (Walk 28)

      During the late 1980s, still cutting my writer’s teeth, I braved the world of the Pennines to work on The Pennine Mountains. It was an eye-opening experience – one that led me into gelatinous peaty folds and across high, airy summits. Raised in industrial Lancashire, what little I knew of the Pennines was to my mind tarred with the same brush of bleak grimness as the towns and villages gathered among the Pennine landscapes.

      I soon came to realise that the stereotypical portrait was a chimera, an unfounded legend that betrayed the beauty that I came to discover here. Some years later I visited again, preparing another guide for walkers, but in the meantime had learned how to appreciate these softer, more moulded landscapes, and had realised that absence of the crags that frequent the Lake District and parts of Snowdonia didn’t have to mean an absence of a perfect walkers’ domain.

      The walks in this book are very much personal favourites. There are, of course, the summit routes that one might expect to find, but I’ve introduced a few that are much less well known. Together they give a taste of the Pennines that should appeal to everyone, and encourage all to try a few new flavours.

      Terry Marsh, 2013

      Pen-y-ghent from the descent to Stainforth (Walk 22)

      INTRODUCTION

      Ingleborough from Giggleswick Scar (Walk 21)

      The Pennines are a low-rising mountain range, separating the north-west of England from the north-east. Often described as the ‘backbone of England’, they form a somewhat disjointed range stretching from Derbyshire to the Scottish border. To speak of them as a ‘chain’ merely serves to draw attention to the weak links, the places where the central spinal mass has been eroded to leave behind distinct groups of hills and moors separated by wide valleys. Geographers would tell you that the Pennines are neither a chain nor a range of mountains, but simply a broad uplift. Moreover, what many would regard as ‘Pennine’ country means different things in different places. First and foremost, the Pennines are a major water catchment area, with numerous reservoirs in the head-streams of the river valleys. Couple this man-made endeavour with that of Nature, and the result is a region widely considered to be one of the most scenic in Britain.

      Although the Pennine Way ends among the Cheviot Hills, they are not part of the Pennines, being separated from them by the Tyne Gap and the Whin Sill, along which runs Hadrian’s Wall. Conversely, although the southern end of the Pennines is commonly accepted as somewhere in the High Peak of Derbyshire, often Edale (the start of the Pennine Way), they actually extend further south to the true southern end of the Pennines in the Stoke-on-Trent area, many miles south of Edale.

      So, the exact area of the Pennines is difficult to define. In terms of this book they extend no further south than Mam Tor above Edale, and not much further north than Cross Fell, the highest summit of the Pennines, lying on the eastern edge of Cumbria. Within this area is an amazing, and often frustrating, succession of landscapes fashioned from river valleys, moorlands and upland peat bogs, and penned in by a host of cities, towns and villages to form an area that weaves a rich and interesting story of industrial development together with a strong cultural and industrial heritage.

      The Pennine Way is often regarded as a strenuous high-level route through predominantly wild country, intended for walkers of some experience, and involving a fair element of physical exertion and a willingness to endure rough going. Those characteristics sum up the Pennines perfectly. But the region is far from the wholly boggy, unremitting,