Travel Reference
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Restored by another hearty meal (steak and kidney pie), a good night's rest and an enter-
taining breakfast when our landlady addressed one of our companions as “little girl,” (re-
member, our average age was about fifty-five), we set off once more, stopping briefly for
supplies and a group photo, taken by a passing motorist. Now our way was punctuated not
by hills and streams, but by a cement factory, and a motorway bridge! Yet all things have
their charms and I urged Chris to photograph me on the dour footbridge crossing the M6. It
is hardly a scenic photo, but it is significant to me. As a child, I had watched the construc-
tion of a similar footbridge over the M62 when we drove that way across the Pennines for
weekend visits to my grandmother. She lived on the other side of that divide in Yorkshire,
God's own county, as the locals would have it, whilst we had defected to the wastelands of
Lancashire. The wars of the roses had not quite played themselves out yet in those parts, but
still persisted in the gentle rivalry between the two counties. The M62 footbridge had been
seen as an expensive and perhaps frivolous concession to Pennine Way hikers - Who would
credit it, they live in an age of cars and trains and buses and yet they walk! With blistered
feet and angled diagonally against slicing winds, I had walked across the M62 footbridge
more than two decades ago. There was a faded photograph to prove it. And now I was here
for my reckoning. I smile broadly out of the new picture under the shade of my egg yolk
yellow Macular Disease Society cap (for there is blue sky, and puffy white clouds). Before
I climbed the steps to the bridge, Chris had muttered in my ear, “I will lift up mine eyes to
the hills” - a vast Bible had been opened at this passage from the 121
st
Psalm and left on the
sideboard at the Bed and Breakfast in Shap. As I looked into the camera, I saw the blurred
outline of the great hill of Kidsty Pike in the far distance. I felt a satisfying sense of awe and
achievement as slowly I breathed out. More evidence of the distance I had travelled.
No matter, there was much ground still to be covered, twenty miles or more, the furthest
walk to date and Pete encouraged us to persist long after we were ready to break for lunch.
When we did rest, it was an inconvenient spot, with no rocks, bushes or tree cover suffi-
cient to screen us when we answered the calls of nature. I can be seen stumbling around
in the background of a photograph, trying to find a suitable spot. The picture was taken to
record the horses that came to investigate our lunch! Chris was beginning to hum Beeth-
oven's Pastoral Symphony in celebration of our harmony with the animal kingdom when
Sarah pointed out that one of those horses was a stallion, jealously guarding his mares. As
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