On the first morning I left Edale at an hour my landlady considered unreasonable, with a pack heavier than it had any reason to be, and I was not yet sure whether I was walking away from something or toward it. A distinction, I had been told by a friend who walks, that tends to dissolve by the third day. She was right about this, as she is right about most things, though it took me rather longer than three days to admit it.
The Pennine Way is not a beautiful path, not the way the coast-to-coast is beautiful. It is a rough one. Peat bog and limestone pavement, drizzle and the kind of wind that removes opinions from one's head before breakfast. You walk it, mostly, because other people have walked it, and because the act of doing so for long enough changes the weight of the pack without changing the pack itself.
On the matter of boots, and other companions.
I had bought the boots in February, in a small shop off Tottenham Court Road run by a man whose opinion of trail runners can be summarised by the single raised eyebrow he offered when I mentioned them. "Two hundred miles in a pair of these," he said, holding up a pair of Scarpas the colour of a retriever, "and you'll know whether you want to keep walking or go home."
The man was not being unkind. He was, I came to understand somewhere around Hawes, giving me the only honest answer to a question I had not yet learned how to ask. The walk does not teach you whether you want to keep walking. It teaches you what you want to keep walking toward, which is a different question entirely, and a more difficult one.
There are books you read in a chair and books you read on a train, and then there are books — Macfarlane's, most of Sebald's, some of Dillard's — that you only really read when you are walking with them in mind, so that the landscape does the underlining on your behalf.
By the eighth day I had stopped taking photographs. Niko, walking the final five days with me, took them for both of us. He has a better eye than I do, and the patience for rain. I was, by then, interested only in the act of walking itself, and in the small thefts of attention that a long day afoot permits you — the angle of a gatepost, the sound a drystone wall makes in thick fog, the precise moment at which a thermos of tea stops being a luxury and becomes a necessity.
What I did not know, what I could not have known before setting off, is that the walk would be almost entirely about arithmetic. How many hours until the next tea. How many miles to the next village. How many days before my knees began to complain. And then, on the eleventh day, a different arithmetic: how many years I had lived in the city, how many of those years I had felt at home in it, how much of my life I had spent measuring the distance between the place I was and the place I intended to be.
Arriving, without having quite arrived.
The last day was, of all days, ordinary. I crossed into Kirk Yetholm in the soft light of a Saturday afternoon, exchanged a handshake with a man at the pub who had walked the thing fourteen times and had given up counting the reasons. I ate a pie. I drank a pint of something local, and a second one, and then a third, and I sat for an hour on a bench in the small square with my boots off and the wind coming down the valley, and I understood, quite suddenly and without ceremony, that I was not walking away from anything at all.
I was, instead, walking the long way round to the idea of staying. Which is, as my walking friend would later put it, the same thing people have been doing on foot for three thousand years, and the reason footpaths exist. They are not, she said, for leaving. They are for the gradual and deliberate business of coming home.
There is a photograph Niko took on the last evening, which I have not yet printed, though I keep meaning to. It is a very small picture. A field, a wall, a line of sheep, and — if you look for it — the shadow of a figure on the right-hand edge of the frame, smaller than the sheep, walking out of shot. When I first saw it I assumed the figure was me. Looking at it now, I am less certain. It looks a little more like the idea of a person, walking the way a person walks when they have stopped minding the rain.
If you plan to walk it, you should know two things. The first is that the weather will be worse than the forecast, and this will at some point feel like an outrage and at some later point feel like a gift. The second is that you will not finish the person who started. This is, I think, the reason to go, though I could not have told you so in February. It is the sort of thing a long walk has to tell you itself.
— Clara Abernathy, Kirkby Stephen