A Walk On The Wildside 7th June 2008

The Mountain Rescue team were out collecting in the centre of Holmfirth on Saturday and Lesley and I both thought a contribution would be money well spent. After hastily buying a map at Holmfirth Tourist Information office we were dropped off in the easterly Digley reservoir car park by my husband. Our backpacks stuffed with bananas and the latest bogof oaty granola bar bargain from the marvellous Wooldale Coop, we began the walk over to Marsden, taking in a little bit of the Pennine Way.

Digley reservoir is dominated by the hulk of Holme Moss and it always has a lonely air about it, even though it’s a popular walk for families, bilberry pickers and dog walkers. I can just imagine it as a suitable lair for Grendel’s mother. Very soon that grim image was dispelled by a friendly bloke who started chatting as I stopped to take some photos of the stone walls that line the path. He explained that there had been a big house up there which accounted for the grand stone gateposts and the rhododendrons, but that it had been demolished when the reservoir had been constructed. He was walking round to Holme Village and told us how his whole family were there too, having all returned from various parts of the UK. A strong advertisement for the attraction of that tenacious village, clinging on to the foot of Holme Moss. After he had explained the route we should take, he left us and we carried on up the stony track with the fields, dotted with sheep and cattle, on either side of it.

The land around there shows evidence of back-breaking toil for whoever worked it in the past and you can see fields across at Holme, as well as the fields on this side of the valley that have been carefully surrounded by stone walls, even though they can’t be very productive. The walls often have pop-holes built into them like stone age cat flaps, I’m not sure why (if anyone could tell me it would solve a mystery). The gates are also ancient skewhiff affairs that appear to have been tadged up from something else, old bedsteads may be? It’s great territory for ferns, foxgloves, bilberries, lapwings, curlews, kestrels and grouse. We also heard a cuckoo, the first for me this year. However, the curlews beat the cuckoo for sheer volume and we began to wonder if we were disturbing their nest sites even though we were on the path, as we were circled by a curlew calling loudly, its curved beak clearly visible.

As we climbed the incline, we watched walkers toiling up from Blackpool Bridge on the path that returns over to Holme. The moor is covered with cotton grass which gives a greyish caste to the vegetation. I hoped it looked like frost but Lesley, more accurately, said its fluffy texture made the moorland look slightly mouldy. We passed a couple of empty, lonely farms. One of them, Goodbent Lodge, is extravagantly shored up. Cows with their calves and one big red bull were clustered in the fields around it, the calves watching us through the fence as we passed.

Very soon we were climbing the stile onto the Isle of Skye Road at Issue Edge, where a tea van is parked. A group of walkers were grouped around it, supping cups of tea and chowing down on scrumptious looking egg and sausage teacakes with silent relish. They told us they had come from Slaithwaite and were stoking up in anticipation of the return leg. For the first time that day, but not the last, I was tempted by some yummy looking nosh, but neither of us felt we could walk well on a big greasy sarnie, so we had a chat with a few of the walkers who Lesley knew and then set off, over the road and onto the Pennine Way.

Fabulous views of the hills, which looked huge and lonely, encouraged us on and we were delighted to be walking down hill whilst plenty of walkers and bikers were slogging uphill in the opposite direction. We passed a group of teenage lads festooned with kit, several of whom were looking fairly tired. They were nearly at the top, but would then be able to see Black Hill in front of them, their next big scary challenge. As we passed lots of scruffy sheep we were overtaken by a cheerful garrulous man who introduced himself as ‘Overend Watts, the man who hates walking’. He explained that he was a month out of Lands End, making for John O’Groats, and that he wasn’t thinking too much about the journey, just doing it. He also said that he had got lost 100 metres from Lands End and this seemed to be born out when we saw him again, a mile or so down the track, in animated disagreement with another long distance hiker about the route the Pennine Way should follow. I gave him a banana to boost his energy levels, but I don’t think he needed it. Good luck, Overend!

A couple of months after posting this I decided to google Overend to see if I could find anything about the outcome of his marathon walk. it seems incongruous but it seems that Overend Watts was the bass player with the 1970s band Mott the Hoople. If it is the same man I'm glad he replaced his sparkly platform heeled boots for something more suitable for rough terrain. I don't know if he's made it to John O'Groats.

The route down into Marsden follows a chain of reservoirs and is on the side of a steep valley. We passed a farm with some fallow deer grazing peacefully in a paddock and were passed ourselves by a tractor towing a trailer that smelt inexplicably of kippers and making a deafening rattling racket as it bumped over the potholes. We also met a mother and daughter with the cutest cocker spaniel puppy, that was scared by the noise our walking poles made as we walked up to it.

Marsden crouches right at the bottom of an amphitheatre of hills and its mill chimneys still poke up from the sloping terraces of houses that back right up to the mills. Marsden must have been a noisy place when they were all working. We made for the centre of the village and were tempted by the ice cream parlour and a cake shop, but made instead for the Riverhead pub, which was cool and shady, although lots of its clientele were outside in the sun. The Riverhead is a micro-brewery and has some tempting beers on sale. If we had more money and time I think we would have liked to try the liquorice stout and the cherry beer as well as the weiss bier we had a half of. Perfect stuff for powering us off along the canal-side to Linthwaite.

The canal towpath between Marsden and Linthwaite is really beautiful. A series of locks guard the canal like drawbridges. I would have liked to see one in action, but we only saw narrow boats moored up. The river runs on one side of the canal, at first in a deep little valley and then it flattens out. The railway is on the other side, serving as a third route between Huddersfield and Manchester. There are plenty of attractive houses bordering the canal, some with lawns running down to it, some obviously very old, forming part of the history of the waterway. Lots of people use the canal as a leisure route for cycling or dog walking and we were victims of a random dog coat-shaking attack as a jolly spaniel splashed out of the water and immediately spun himself dry. Despite the attractive scenery and the happy people, I couldn’t forget the recent story in our local paper about a murder that had happened recently on the canal side. The dark brown canal water looks gloomy even on a sunny day.

It took us a bit longer than we had anticipated to reach Linthwaite and the Titanic Mills where we had arranged to be picked up by my husband. Despite being tempted by the floating tearooms in Slaithwaite we soldiered on and eventually saw the ruin of Westwood Mill, quickly realising that we were close to the Titanic. This mighty building is now reincarnated as a spa, hotel and apartments, proving that not everything with that fateful name sinks without a trace. We had come further than we originally planned and went home promising to return to the tea van, the Riverhead, the ice cream shop and the floating tea room, but may be not all on the same day.