For those seeking pastoral shelter from the storm of world events this spring, there is a special incentive to look north. Sixty years old this month, the Pennine Way is being celebrated in style, with guided walks and an exhibition at the Dales Countryside Museum in Wensleydale. In North Yorkshire, speeches and a singsong are planned to mark the April day, in 1965, when the village of Malham hosted the opening of Britain’s first national trail.
The recognition is richly deserved. Stretching 268 miles from Derbyshire to the Scottish Borders, the establishment of the Pennine Way represented an epic political achievement as well as a new leisure option. Though the inhabitants of northern mill towns and mining communities had a voracious appetite for open spaces and beauty, local landowners were for decades reluctant to give it to them. The postwar campaigning work of the Lancashire journalist Tom Stephenson and the Ramblers’ Association opened up swaths of private moorland previously fenced off behind “No Trespassing” signs.
