A Pennine Journey
The Pennine Journey long-distance footpath traverses some of the most delightful terrain that northern England has to offer.
In September 1938 Alfred Wainwright made a solitary walk through the Pennines. The following year he wrote up an account of this walk which was eventually published as ‘A Pennine Journey’ in 1986.
In 1998 David and Heather Pitt, members of The Wainwright Society, re-created this walk, adapted for today’s roads and public rights-of-way, taking a route that Wainwright might have taken if he was planning it today.
Various members of the Wainwright Society walked the 18 stages and wrote appropriate route descriptions, which together with maps by Ron Scholes and illustrations by Colin Bywater, both in the Wainwright style, were published in the new Pennine Journey book edited by David Pitt.
The route is 247 miles long and divided into 18 stages. 55 miles of which are in Cumbria:
- Day 11 – Greenhead to Alston
- Day 12 – Alston to Milburn (via Garrigill)
- Day 13 – Milburn to Appleby (via Dufton)
- Day 14 – Appleby to Kirkby Stephen (via Brough)
- Day 15 – Kirkby Stephen to Garsdale Head (via Mallerstang)
- Day 16 – Garsdale Head to Sedbergh
- Day 17 – Sedbergh to Ingleton (via Dent)
The entire route is now waymarked and the Ordnance Survey expect to have all the route on Explorer maps and Landranger maps soon.
Even if you don’t do the walk, the book is a good guide to the Eden Valley, North Pennines and Yorkshire Dales areas of Cumbria.
A sample drawing from the book (Settle Station) is shown below:
Related Links:
- A Pennine Journey – official website
- A Pennine Journey – pdf leaflet
- The Wainwright society
- Amazon – A Pennine Journey – by A Wainwright
- Amazon – A Pennine Journey – by David Pitt
- Ordance Survey blog entry
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