Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
ors, bent on sucking the happiness, even the will to live out of you. And on cue, the light
dimmed, the winds whipped up and the gooseflesh prickled.
Nine Standards
Now we had to head on across a moor of ankle sucking repute. Wainwright, the renowned
hiker and trail blazer whose acrid commentaries we had come to relish, compared terrain
such as this, to ”walking through oxtail soup.” I think he was being unduly generous -
in its worst condition, struggling through a sodden peat bog is more like wading in farm-
yard slurry. The rich, black, organic matter laps over boots and socks and insinuates itself
between the toes, drying to a tidemark crust. But the conditions today were not at their
worst; the British summer had held up, and we had walked as I had taken delight in remind-
ing the suddenly deaf stricken Chris, in temperatures approximating 70 degrees, with puffy
white clouds, a little breeze ... Taking a bearing from the sticks that protruded from the bog,
Chris picked a route striding from tufty reed to tufty reed that eventually carried most of
us in reasonable safety across the bog. We struck out on the summer route, following the
sticks that lead the gullible hikers away from the guns. For in a day or two, the glorious
twelfth (of August) would open up these bleak moors to the flocks of grouse shooters intent
upon proving the ascendancy of humankind versus the defenseless innocence of a few dull
brown birds.
Safe in wind and limb, I should have enjoyed the hop scotch across the tops, but a cloud of
“morose” had settled around me like the microclimate of dust and dirt Pig Pen inhabits in
the Snoopy cartoons. I was tired of ignoring the flames licking my feet and I wasn't see-
ing well. Then with no warning, to my embarrassment, my eyes misted with tears. When
I walked The Pennine Way, I had squelched my way quite cheerily through the bogs, ed-
ematous as they were with a month of rain, but now under the dark sky, the black bog to my
Search WWH ::
Custom Search