Walk the Pennine Way with a Cicerone guidebook

• Location
• Description
• Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Route
• Maps
• Updates
• Reviews

Wanted: A long green trail

You could say it all started on 22 June 1935. An article appeared in the Daily Herald newspaper entitled ’Wanted: A Long Green Trail’, written by the ramblers’ champion Tom Stephenson. ’Why should we not press for something akin to the Appalachian Trail?’ he asked. ’A Pennine Way from the Peak to the Cheviots.’ He imagined that the route would be ’a faint line on the Ordnance Maps which the feet of grateful pilgrims would, with the passing years, engrave on the face of the land.’ Well, the engraving went rather deep in places, even to the extent that you could claim the route was carved in stone, but that is a testimony to the popularity of the route.

It took 30 years of lobbying and hard work to steer the Pennine Way to its official opening in April 1965. As a long-distance walk it is impressive, stretching from Edale in the Peak District National Park onto the gritstone moors of the South Pennines. The way passes through the verdant Yorkshire Dales National Park, then crosses the bleak and remote North Pennines. Not content to finish there, the Pennine Way traverses Hadrian’s Wall and runs through the Northumberland National Park. High in the Cheviot Hills, it finally steps over the border into Scotland to finish at Kirk Yetholm. It measures over 435km (270 miles), involving a cumulative ascent of 11,225m (36,825ft). Most walkers take between two and three weeks to cover the distance, and there are many ways to create a schedule to suit people’s different expectations.

Pennine geology

As a teenager I was not content simply to admire the Pennines. I wielded a hammer and chisel so that I could take great chunks of them home with me!

Pennine geology is relatively easy to understand, though in a few places it becomes very complex. The oldest bedrock is seldom seen on the Pennine Way, revealing itself only around Malham and Dufton. Ancient Silurian slate at Malham Tarn, along with Ordovician mudstone and volcanic rock above Dufton, date back 450 million years. These rocks are revealed only where fault lines bring them to the surface. The Weardale Granite, which underlies the North Pennines, outcrops nowhere and was only ’proved’ by a borehole sunk at Rookhope in 1961.

In the Devonian period, around 395 million years ago, violent volcanic activity laid the foundations of the Cheviot Hills, at the northern end of the Pennine Way. All the lower hills are made of andesite lavas, while the central parts are formed of a massive dome of granite, pushed into the Earth’s crust some 360 million years ago and only recently exposed to the elements.

During the Carboniferous period, around 350 to 300 million years ago, the whole region was covered by a warm, shallow, tropical sea. Countless billions of shelled, soft-bodied creatures lived and died in this sea. Coral reefs grew, and even microscopic organisms often had hard external or internal structures. Over the aeons, these creatures left their hard shells in heaps on the seabed, and these deposits became the massive grey limestones seen to best effect in the Yorkshire Dales today.

Even while thick beds of limestone were being laid down, distant mountain ranges were being worn away by storms. Vast rivers brought mud, sand and gravel down into the sea. These murky deposits reduced the amount of light entering the water, causing delicate coral reefs and other creatures to perish. As more mud and sand was washed into the sea, a vast delta spread across the region.

At times, shoals of sand and gravel stood above the waterline, and these became colonised by strange, fern-like trees. The level of water in the rivers and sea was in a state of fluctuation. Sometimes the delta was completely flooded, so the plants would be buried under more sand and gravel. The compressed plant material within the beds of sand and mud became thin bands of coal, known as the Coal Measures. This alternating series of sandstones and mudstones, with occasional seams of coal, can be seen best in the Dark Peak and the South Pennines. Remnants of the series can be studied on the higher summits of the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines.

The Carboniferous rocks were laid down in layers, helping to explain what happened next, around 295 million years ago. An extensive mass of molten dolerite was squeezed, under enormous pressure, between the layers of rock – rather like jam between two slices of bread. This rock is always prominent wherever it outcrops, and is referred to as the Whin Sill.

Almost 300 million years are ’missing’ from the Pennine geological record, in which time the range has been broken into enormous blocks by faulting. The Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines display plenty of limestone, as their ’blocks’ stand higher than the Peak District and South Pennines. The entire range was scoured by glaciers during the Ice Age, and many parts are covered with glacial detritus in the form of boulder clay, sand and gravel. More recent climatic changes resulted in the upland soil becoming so waterlogged that thick deposits of peat have formed on most of the higher moorlands.