The Rossendale Rambler

At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, walking through Rawtenstall, I passed a pale-as-pastry man sitting groaning on his front doorstep with his head in his hands. Saturday night's reet good cheer was obviously still punching its way out of his cerebral cortex.

No such whey-facedness in the crowds legging it west up Haslingden Old Road. I must have seen 200 walkers by the time I got to the Marl Pits recreation ground and every cheek seemed ruddy, every eye bright.

I had not expected the Rossendale annual round-the-hills walk to start so promptly, nor with quite such a bang. By the time I signed in (at 9.32am) and collected my tag (No 320), the misty high country north of Rawtenstall was already seething with walkers. There is no prize for completing this 18 mile circuit of the Lancashire hills - just a certificate signed by the mayor of Rossendale and a good glow of satisfaction. Hundreds turn out in all weathers on the first Sunday of each September to pit themselves against steepish hillsides, stony tracks, peat bogs and several score stone stiles.

It is a family day out on the hills and that makes for tremendous camaraderie. A couple of packs of knot- thighed greyhounds had sprinted off at 9am sharp, intent on completing the course in under three hours. But the majority of walkers - almost all local people from the other former textile towns of Rossendale - were happy to take it at their own pace, a comfortable, gossiping one.

Between the wars, these industrial towns of east Lancashire and west Yorkshire were the cradle of the Ramblers' Association. Men and women engaged all week in the noisy, monotonous work of the textile mills looked to the hills for their salvation at the weekends - the .high grassy ridges and heathery moors of the Pennines. The tradition continues, flourishing even though the mills are silent and the towns cleaned up these days.

"First time I climbed Whernside," said Hazel, "it snowed and I cried. But I love this walking now."

She strode away up the boggy path towards Cribden Hill, the first proper ascent of the walk. Cribden sorted out sheep from goats. Some, such as Hazel, reached the top in a lather of breathlessness, but were soon forging on over the skid pans of the moors. Others, self-confessed sheep, crept around the lower contours to meet the goats on a less rugged ground.

Views were tremendous from here, perhaps 15 or 20 miles across the rolling hills of the Forest of Rossendale. Factories with ranks of windows, tall industrial chimneys and greystone terraces jammed the valley bottoms. Up here the farmsteads crouched low, tucked hard in against their guardian slopes, houses and barns all of a piece in a style the conquering Norsemen introduced more than a thousand years ago.

I followed a young man with legs like tree trunks. "Where are you off to?" called an old man from a perch on a tumbled stone wall. Tree Trunks wordlessly circled his finger - "round-the-hills". No more explanation needed.

If we hopped lightly over one stile during the course of the day, we queued at 40 V-shaped stiles, square stiles, stiles with steps and stiles that turned out to be padlocked gates. "What do you mean, can I climb over a gate?" an indignant young woman broadsided her swain in Far Pasture. "Of course I can climb over a gate! What do you take me for?" She steamed off downhill, leaving him sinking in her wake.

In the doorway of the checkpoint van parked by Clowbridge Reservoir, one of the helpers was wolfing a garlicchicken sandwich thick and solid enough to patch a stone wall. "You seem to be enjoying that, love," observed her colleague with heavy sarcasm. "Aye, and when I'm done I'll breathe it all over you." The men were definitely getting the worst of it here.

After the 10-mile mark we became more spread out. Now there was time and space to notice things: a kestrel hovering over a grass bank, lichen of intense greenness on a stone wall, a grove of ancient thorns with limbs gnarled and twisted into a vigorous silvery musculature.

The walk crossed the puddly track of Limersgate, an old packhorse route hollowed out by the countless hoofbeats of horses bringing sacks of lime to the acid peatlands of the moor farmers. I dropped down a wet slope, into the (accurately named) hamlet of Water and found the Commercial Inn ready and willing to serve a cool pint of Hancock's bitter to a travel-stained walker. Then, feeling leg-weary and a bit jaded, I bought a packet of Chorley cakes from Lock's shop up the road.

Now, I do not know what it is about Chorley cakes - they are a bit like Eccles cakes, but rather more so but from Water onwards my feet took wing. I marched through Dean, where the Baptist choir used to sing so tunefully they were known as the Nightingales of Dean. I doubled across Grime Bridge, whose name was earned by constant contact with the coal and the colliers of the mine just up the bank.

These were snippets of local history I had learned from Tim Nuttall of Rawtenstall, for whose teapot and kitchen table I was now headed. It was Tim who first tried out the round-the-hills route back in the mid-Sixties as a 10-year-old guinea-pig. His approving comments persuaded the originators of the walk that it could be promoted as a family ramble. After a cuppa in his Fern Street house, I set my boots at the final obstacle, Cowpe Lowe. "This walk's last bite, Cowpe Lowe," an engineer from Haslingden had told me, "1,400ft, a real rattlesnake of a hill."

Yes, Cowpe Lowe bit back hard. At the summit, I felt flaked out. But I scurried on down and into Marl Pits at the end of the walk, (at 5.30pm) to collect my hard earned certificate, feeling as fresh as any iron-thighed hero of the hill. A strange effect. Me, I Put it down to those Chorley cakes.

(This article has been reproduced by kind permission of the Daily Telegraph . Editor)

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