ACROSS THE PENNINE The deep, authentic mountain-thrill. WILLIAM WATSON. F I ROM gardens in Manchester suburbs your view to the east is closed by a long line of hill. It is less than twenty miles from you. No peaks stand out; the ridge runs almost level, due north and due south. This is the Pennine. It is an outlying bone of rock thrust down from the rocky mass of northern Britain into the soft flesh of England, somewhat as the Apennines are thrust down into Italy from the Alps. But the Apennines go all the way to the south; the Pennine goes only half-way; it ends north of Derby. It stands out from the English plain as the raised spine stands out from the back of a spade, declining in height till it disappears into the general level, near the spade's middle. This English range is not built upon the grand scale, as mountain scales go. South of Whernside, Ingleborough and Pen-y-gent it does not rise above 2200 feet. The Peak, its last attempt to be high, before disappearing, runs to little more than 2000. That famous goose, Montgomery, Macaulay's butt, did his best to make a fool of the Pennine with indiscreet praise: Here in wild pomp, magnificently bleak, Here rocks on rocks, on forests forests rise, For any modest set of hills to be hymned to such tunes is no happiness; rather, a thing to live down. Still, the Pennine is mountain. It has a flora that runs to the Arctic Circle. When the sites of York Minster and Lancaster Castle were lying under the ice the Pennine rose above the general misfortune. Its veteran millstone grit stood out dark and unreddened by any geologic innovation throughout the time when a shallow sea was washing over all the lowland shires of the Midlands, narrowing to a strait at the gap where the London Midland and Scottish trains now pick their way between the Peak and the mountains of Wales, and laying down the red sands of which Chester Cathedral was in due time to be composed. You do find fossil shells of some But these had lived sea creatures high up on the Peak. in an older world untinged by such modernisms as begat the ruddy glow that now flushes the walls and roofs of Trent-side villages and the tilth of Nottinghamshire farms. Above other invasions, as well as those of scouring glaciers and staining seas, the Pennine emerged inviolate. It let the Roman legions thunder by, beneath its flanks, and it waved Christianity aside. Against the Peak, its southern buttress, stream after stream of northward racial movement, peaceful or violent, broke and parted as currents do at the pier of a bridge. Celts and Romans and English, pushing out in turn from their south-eastern landing-places, would all seem to have paused, considered and then turned first to the left, the West, when they struck on the swelling tract of forest and rock that culminates in Kinder Scout. Romano-Celtic Christianity and Anglo-Saxon Paganism and then the Christianity of Augustine—all must have bumped up against the Peak and then coasted cannily northward, below its western slope, feeling their way towards the sea-board and Ireland. II A range of mountain may not be the Alps, and yet have a career. And the Pennine has done its big things. The way that its strata are bent and worn has shaped the industrial history of England. A kind of life that is not precisely lived anywhere else made the Brontës just what they were. On Pennine heights there stick out the raw ends of forces that help to set us all our work and to map out our lives. As you walk over Dead Head Moss, at the top of the ridge, on a wet day of southwesterly wind, you leave behind a steep, drenched western slant on which the wind has dropped most of its takings of water from the Atlantic. The cause of the different work and life of Yorkshire and Lancashire pours itself in at the doors of your senses; you see it in breaking clouds, hear it in the lowered voices of moorland streams and feel it in the slackening drip of rain-drops from a soaked cap to your nose. Or go to Wharncliffe Crags upon the Yorkshire slope, east of Penistone. Here the infinite goodness and mercy of nature have made a rock-climber's gymnasium, three happy miles long, amidst fern and forest. If Paley had ever seen Wharncliffe, and been a rock-climber, his case might have been notably strengthened. The scrambler at Wharncliffe, resting midway up a smooth and square-cut "chimney," built for his use like a dream of desire, sees the moorland slopes below him sinewy and knotty with the twisted and notched roots that are still left of the chase where Gurth and Wamba talked together when Yorkshire was still roamed by droves of swine, like the Balkan forests to-day. From some two hundred yards below, across an intervening gritstone quarry, there comes all day the whistling of engines busy in a siding; every few minutes some North Eastern train comes grunting up or sliding down the main highway of traffic between the two halves of the manufacturing North. From beyond the railway the climber hears in silent intervals the broken waters of the Don, whose pace was the fortune of Sheffield's first grindstones—perhaps cut from that quarry below. A few distant factory chimneys rise predominant over the smoke-filled hollows between sombre moors. In such a place you get an index or an epitome of North-West England. To Southerners it is a region of sharp surprises and piquant juxtapositions. Here English soil is more ancient than anywhere else, and the ways of man's labour more modern. For here alone the edges of towns where work is all a manipulation of steam and electric power are frayed against ridges of rock that were old before the site of London was made; here the factory hooter wakes sitting grouse and "you hear the clogs, before dawn, tapping a dotted line of sound through peat and bracken." III There was no bad wine in one's youth, and even to-day there is not such a thing as a bad mountain pass. The mere descent from one were joy enough to fill holidays— the easing of your breath, the flagging stride set suddenly free, the road that has begun to bear you of itself, as moving staircases do, down its unwinding coils, miles and miles of them on ahead, lying like tumbled white tape thrown on a floor, rising and falling, it seems to the eye, capriciously. Passes cannot be spoilt, not even if you waste half your attention on wheedling a car round the fifty sharp bends of the St. Gotthard zigzags, or free-wheel on a "push-bike" down the twenty-five lovely miles of the Grimsel's northern descent. But the sharpest delight of all attends the last stage of the rise. The surprise that your effort has earned is about to be paid you. The savour of contrast that all passes possess has matured: it awaits your absorption, not half a mile off. As you near the top, you feel that things are astir as if with some delicate sense of approaching event; cool air begins to lip over; it goes to your head; you exult to be reaching one of the spots where the make of the earth, its adventures and workings, come to a point and show themselves in their cunning variety and coherence. Perhaps, from the crest of the ridge that you are attaining, half of every pound of falling snow will be set apart to go to the German Ocean, and half to the Black Sea. Or you may look down, to right and left, on landscapes that speak of the Mediterranean of Titian and Vergil; and, again, of the Gothic |