It seems incredible, the last time I was in Chipping was December 2008. I arrived at first light and drove home in the dark, after following pretty much the route I’ll be following today. Chipping hasn’t changed much. It’s still as elusive a place as ever, to non-locals, though quite a substantial and indeed a very pretty village when you do manage to find it. The roads that morning were icy, and the tops were snowy. Today is forecast for eighteen degrees, but warming already to considerably more than that. I was sad to note in passing the demise of the little Cobbled Corner café, so beloved of cyclists and walkers. We arrive to find the car-park is empty, but then this is a mid-week morning.
I have a chair that was made in Chipping. The H J Berry factory, famous for furniture making since 1840, closed in 2010, finally crushed by the financial collapse. The site is still being cleared this morning. I guess it’ll go for houses. My dining table was made by William Lawrence of Nottingham. That place closed in 2000. I can just about grasp the scale of the loss in terms of skills and livelihoods, but I need a very flexible view of economics to understand why it makes better sense now, if I want something so basic as a chair or a table, to have it made in China, and shipped halfway round the world, regardless of the carbon footprint that implies. The likes of H J Berry and William Lawrence are not coming back. Maybe other, more modern manufactories will replace them in the post BREXIT world. I don’t know. All I know is the shape of the future Global Britain remains, as ever, a mystery.
Anyway, it’s a hot morning, with something of a haze about it, which bodes ill for photography, but we’ll see what comes out. We wend our way out of the village, and pick up the track that takes us to Saddle End Farm, then we strike up Saddle Fell. This is the first leg of a fine horseshoe walk that’ll take in Fair Snape (1706 ft) and end with Parlick (1417 ft). That morning in 2008, I remember an inversion which obscured the tops, but which we came out of on the climb up Saddle Fell, to reveal a cloudless blue, and snow clad hills afloat on a sea of mist. It’s a scene I put in my last novel Winter on the Hill.
I must have been much fitter then, as I don’t remember as many of the ups and downs along the way that strike me today, in this heat. I remember tackling the fell without much difficulty, but then memory can be selective. Today I’m flagging, sweating, swigging water every five minutes. The horse-flies are taking lumps out of me, and I’m salving their bites with the now ubiquitous hand sanitizing gel. It seems to work too, and keeps the buggers off.
Although hazy, we still have a sufficiently awesome view across the vale to Longridge Fell. Our later objectives – Fair Snape and Parlick, rising above Wolf Fell, are starting to preen themselves in the light, as the morning matures, and are looking a lot bigger than I remember. These are substantial hills, Fair Snape only a little lower than the grand old lady Pendle herself.
It’s cooler as we crest the ridge and come onto the moor-top, but only because the air is moving a little. I remember skittering about on ice up here last time – the bogs all frozen deep. Today the moor is dry and dusty, the meandering trail leading us across to Paddy’s Pole on Fair Snape. There’s litter here, and the remains of past lunches. Paddy’s pole is – well – a pole sticking out of a substantial cairn. Nearby is a well constructed wind-shelter of dry-stone walling, comprising several stalls. Way south is Parlick, with its ever present coterie of paragliders. They were aloft that winter too. It was minus five on the summit then. Heaven knows what it was up around the paraglider man’s toes.
We have quite a drop in altitude, before the final pull to the stately dome of Parlick (1417ft). By now the hips are aching. I’m hoping this is just a bit of stiffness and not a sign of wear and tear. My mother’s hips began their decline around my age, rendering the last decade of her life one of severe immobility and frustration, even with an eventual replacement in her early eighties which she never really got the use of. We keep our fingers crossed, make hay while the sun shines and soldier on – to seriously mix our metaphors.
The descent from Parlick is a steep one. We meet the paraglider men coming up with their huge packs, and pity them, though they look happy enough, and why not? Not all humans are destined to fly as they are. There is a hang-glider coming up too, rolled into a long and impossibly ungainly package, which the guy carries over his shoulder. He makes painfully slow progress, his brow dripping in the heat, and humidity. There is something messianic in his plodding torment. One hopes he manages to stay aloft long enough to make this purgatorial journey worth his while.
The thermals that will power his flight are in evidence around Fell Foot. They are like earth-scented blasts from an open furnace, and seeming strong enough even to lift my arms, though I obviously imagine it. Gaining the lower ground now, and slightly giddy in the heat, one is tempted to think the walk is over, but we’ve still a way to go and the navigation not so straight forward. Not all the paths are well-marked, and we’re outside the access area, so we must be careful. I’m trying to stay off the roads, but I lose the path around a place called Fish House, which is undergoing extensive rebuilding work, where neither signage nor evidence of gates or stiles exist any more so, in spite of our best efforts searching for a way through, we end up finishing the last mile into Chipping by tarmac.
There’s water in the car, which replenishes the shrivelled extremities, then a large Mocha from the farm shop does the rest. Here, I learn the Cobbled Corner Café is not gone forever, that it may reopen soon, which I’m sure is good news to many.
A fair day on Fair Snape, then, about eight and a half miles, sixteen hundred feet of ascent, four hours round. At this rate, we may even be fit enough to heave our bones up a mountain, before the year is out.
The Rivendale Review 