In less than two weeks’ time I’m due to go up to Scotland for a week of mountain walking with two old friends. It has been in the back of my mind for a while now that I have not actually climbed anything that could be called a “mountain” for some time. So today I grasped the opportunity of the continuing fine weather, threw aside all temptations to feel guilt about all the other things I might have been doing, and set off for a walk. As I loaded my pack this morning my wife said, “You’ll have a lot of time to think.” Then we joked about the fact that the Girl Guides have an annual event called “Thinking Day”. If only I could get away with doing it for one day in the year!
Those of my readers who are reasonably familiar with the geography of this region will have spotted already that we don’t actually have any mountains hereabouts. When training for this kind of adventure in the past, however, I have identified a couple of decently steep hills, and then I have chosen one to climb more than once during the day. Today’s walk was reasonably strenuous, although falling short of what I expect to face in Scotland. I walked about 13 km. and ascended something over 600 m.
I chose to climb a hill just over the border into Lancashire, called Pendle Hill. This has a special significance for me because the nearby town of Nelson, in which I spent four years of my childhood, is dominated by Pendle Hill. Living there I became keenly aware of the legacy of historical tradition which surrounds it. Pendle is famed for the “Pendle Witches”, whose story bears some similarities to that of the American Salem Witches. In 1612 a group of twelve people from the Pendle area were brought to trial, accused of committing several murders by means of witchcraft. Although only one in the long series of witch-hunts that afflicted Britain (and other parts of Europe) during the 16th. and 17th. centuries, this particular episode has come to be celebrated in literature (particularly in Harrison Ainsworth’s The Lancashire Witches) and now contributes a significant amount to the tourist offering of the area. I grew up on the stories of “Old Demdyke” and “Chattox” and their fellow accused (ten of whom were eventually executed at Lancaster Castle). The area to the south of Pendle Hill, associated with the witches, still features the old hamlets (such as Sabden Fold, Barley and Roughlee) and the farms and manor houses of that period. The past there seems to be very present.
The summit ridge of the hill itself is a strange place, because it consists of a long, flattened dome, so that standing at certain points along it one cannot see the world outside the hill, and there is a feeling of complete isolation. Elsewhere, however, there are superb views over East Lancashire and North and West Yorkshire. It is a magical place to be in more senses than one.
Oh, yes! I did manage to do quite a lot of thinking, and not only in the form of reminiscence about my childhood. A part of my reflection concerned the terrible bigotry of the time of the Pendle witches. People were content to see their fellow human beings treated in the most appalling manner, with torture a routine part of the judicial process. The hanging that ended the lives of the Pendle witches was undoubtedly a preferential end to the burning alive that was visited on many others. We tend to regard as totally alien the atrocities perpetrated nowadays in the name of islamic jihadism. In historical terms, however, we are not all that far from the 1612 executions in Lancaster Castle. More to the point, I’m writing this on the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre, in the former Yugoslavia, inflicted on Muslims in the name of Christianity. It does make you think, doesn’t it?