Trek or treat... a poet tackles hard metres

VIEWED from the balcony of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s cafe on one of the rare, warm sunny days we’ve had so far this summer, the lush Pennine countryside looks magnificent.

But as any keen walker or fan of outdoor pursuits will tell you, head deep into this beguiling landscape and you are likely to encounter an altogether wilder, unforgiving place. At its heart is the Pennine Way, which snakes 256 miles along the jagged backbone of England over some of the roughest terrain in the country, from the Cheviots down to the Peak District.

The Pennine Way is Britain’s first and arguably finest long distance footpath and each year walkers are drawn back to it, or attempt to complete the route for the first time. Which is exactly what Simon Armitage decided to do in the summer of 2010 and this week he returned to the sculpture park, where he held a residency in 2007, to talk about the book inspired by his journey.

Walking Home – Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, is an account of his three-week trek along this bleak and beautiful terrain and the characters he encountered along the way. Travelling without a penny in his pocket, he gave poetry readings in village halls, churches, pubs and living rooms, passing his hat (or in his case his walking sock) round at the end of each performance. His audiences varied from the passionate to the indifferent, and his readings were accompanied by the clacking of pool balls, the drumming of rain and the bleating of sheep.

But why embark on such a gruelling journey? “The Pennine Way comes through Marsden, where I grew up, and when I was a kid it was part of the village psychology that come early spring these muddy walkers would start trooping through the place,” says Simon.

“I noticed how well the village treated them when they were looking for somewhere to eat, or sleep and it struck me that the Pennine Way offered a great kind of gantry down the middle of the Pennine Watershed to look out either side of the north and its communities and the landscape.”

Most people attempt the route from Edale in the Peak District and head north towards Kirk Yetholm, on the other side of the Scottish border, but Armitage did it the other way round. “All the guide books are written in the other direction and the idea is you keep all the weather at your back and the sun out of your face, as unlikely as it is that the sun shines. But because I was giving readings every night and working towards a homecoming reading in Marsden, I thought that would be a useful incentive to keep me going.”

Before setting off he posted a message on his website asking people to lay on events along the route. “I said if people were interested in me coming to read I would do it for nothing if they wouldn’t mind putting me up for the night and giving me some sandwiches. I also wanted to test my reputation as a poet and find out whether I could live on my wits as a modern-day troubadour and test poetry’s reputation as well, because us poets are always questioning its validity and its place in the world.”

He set off at the end of June with a few belongings and clutching the names and addresses of some people who had agreed to put him up. Along the way he encountered nothing but warmth and kindness. “I felt fairly confident knowing that people had been in touch and given that they wanted me to go and read, that there would be some kind of welcome. But what I hadn’t anticipated was the company and every day it felt as though I was being handed over from one community to another.”

Sometimes he was joined on his trek by friends, forest rangers and locals who knew the area. “You couldn’t have bought that kind of insight into the landscape and that, along with the huge amount of goodwill, really helped me. Every day a new little community would form and then disperse. There was a day in Garrigill and I’d been reading in the village hall, we had a few drinks afterwards and quite a few people were stood around the bar saying ‘we’ll come with you’ and I thought ‘of course you will.’ But when I woke up the next morning I could hear this chatting and shuffling around outside the bedroom window, and when I pulled the curtains back there were about eight people stood there – it was like a scene from Life of Brian.”

He was grateful to those who gave him shelter for the night, but admits it was a slightly strange experience. “You go to a stranger’s house and into a back bedroom and you’re not quite sure of the protocol of which towel to use and how the plumbing works. Plus, I was always knackered at the end of the day and those were the moments you wanted to curl up in a ball but you had to put your face on and go back downstairs and talk to people.”

Then there was the small matter of doing readings. “In a strange way I think it kept me going because if I didn’t have the readings planned I could have easily packed it in. It was contradictory in some ways because arriving in a strange town could sometimes be one of those bleak moments and yet within two hours I was giving a reading and enjoying it, so the readings fed into the walking,” he says.

“I did a reading in Gargrave village hall and I met the organiser during the day because I’d passed his house and he came out and said, ‘I’m a bit worried about numbers’ and I thought ‘here we go,’ but then he mentioned fire regulations and there must have been 170 people there that night. Then in Calder High in Mytholmroyd, in the Ted Hughes Theatre, we were getting on for 200 that night. But then I read in Alwinton in a pub called the Rose and Thistle and there might have been 15 people, not all of whom had come for the reading.” He even read in someone’s house one night. “I felt like a hermit who had come into their house to dispense wisdom. There was just six people and it was more like a dinner party, they were lovely people but it’s a peculiar business sitting in someone’s front room.”

As well as the readings, the journey also gave him the chance to walk through remote areas he’d never seen before. “I hadn’t realised how much of that landscape there is and how empty it is, because there were days when I saw nobody not even people doing the Pennine Way. We’re quite rightly concerned about how much of the land we’re concreting over but if you do want to go and get lost somewhere you still can. I remember heading towards Keld and getting up on to a moor and looking south and just seeing horizon after horizon of moor, hill and heath.”

You might have thought this would have been a perfect opportunity for Armitage to spend time writing poems, like a latter day Wordsworth, but he says there was little time for poetry. “One of the ideas was I would indulge in the quietness – and quite often when I go out walking I come back with a poem. But I realised fairly early on that it must be the same part of my brain that I need to write poems I also needed to navigate and read the map and the compass. You need your wits about you to write poetry and I needed them to make sure I didn’t get lost.”

He also had to contend with the not so great British weather. “I set off from the Cheviots and that stretch is notoriously boggy, but we’d had a very dry spring and it was actually dusty. It was about a week in when the wind started blowing and after that it was at best grey and at worst every day I would walk into the clouds. I had a really horrible day up on Cross Fell between Garrigill and Dufton on the other side. I got lost up on the top and I write at length about it in the book,” he says.

“You lose your nerve very quickly. I had a GPS system which I thought I’d only use as a last resort but it actually had to come out quite a few times. When you get lost in the mist it’s upsetting, you start to believe you can’t find your way out of it. It’s also quite spooky, especially after people have been telling you ghost stories about headless airmen wandering around on the dark peaks.”

He walked up to 18 miles on a good day but admits he had mixed reactions as he drew closer to Marsden. “For a couple of days before I got there I started seeing recognisable masts and church steeples and I knew I was getting nearer. I thought there would be a sense of euphoria, or at least satisfaction, but I felt strangely numb and I think it was something to do with momentum, because I’d got into the habit of walking and meeting people and I wasn’t sure I wanted that to stop. But that night after sleeping in my own bed I did want to stop.” However, he still had another 36 miles to walk in order to complete the journey. “I kidded myself that I’d finished the walk and that was painful putting the boots back on and setting off again.”

Finally, though, he reached the end and says it was worth the effort. “I didn’t know whether I could walk the Pennine Way, physically or mentally, and I hadn’t anticipated meeting and writing about so many people. I imagined it would be quite a solitary plod across the hills, so that was more than a bonus because it became the subject of the book in lots of ways.”

The journey also reinforced his belief in the relevance of poetry to ordinary people. “It made me feel absolutely proud to be a poet. There aren’t that many of us and there never have been. It’s always been a minority art form and a dissenting art form. But I think there’s always been a place in people’s hearts for it and when I think back to 1995, I was still a probation officer in Oldham and it made me feel good that I had the courage to jack that in and to see myself as a poet and make a living out of it. That’s what I was testing in this book, whether I could a earn living from it and in the end it paid my way.”

Walking Home – Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way, published by Faber and Faber, is available from July 5 priced £16.99 hardback, or £12.99 on ebook.