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Bolton & Blackburn with DarwenWalk Details:
The Walk: |
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It was a measure of how easy the Merseyside tops had been that we’d managed to bag seven today without even putting our walking boots on. We knew Winter Hill would be a different proposition (not least because with overcast skies and an icy wind it appeared to be living up to its name) and piled on not just walking boots, but also waterproofs, gloves and hat. Unfortunately we had to start our ascent by going downhill – we’d been forced to park about halfway up the village, but the path up the hill started at the bottom of the village. It wasn’t long before we were able to leave the A675 and start our ascent. We were immediately glad to have boots on. The first section of the path was a churned up mudbath. We soon found the cause of this – a stream was flowing down the path, and gave us some difficulty as we had to scramble up rocks made slippery by the flowing water. We quickly emerged into a field, the entrance marked by a sheep skull lying in the path. It was not alone; we would see three or four more sheep carcasses in varying stages of repulsive decay as we made our way across the field, and we wondered what was killing sheep off in some numbers It could well be that they were simply exhausted from fighting their way through the bog that covered most of the field. It certainly tired us out, slipping and sliding and jumping our way from tussock to ankle-turning tussock of reeds. This was safer though than trying to pick your way across the surface of the bog; Jim at one point stepped on a bit that looked like safe grass and disappeared over his knee. He didn’t even touch bottom, and had to spend the rest of the day covered in stinking black peat. How I laughed! We were glad to clamber up a steep slope at the back of the field and join another path that came up from further down the A675. There were some people coming up this way – we nodded a greeting to them before accelerating away from them up the hill. The going was now much gentler in gradient and easier underfoot – the path we’d joined was of far superior quality than our initial route and was obviously the usual route up this side of the hill. Nevertheless it was still too tricky for a descending cyclist, who seemed unable to get more than a dozen metres at a time without having to put his feet down.
From the bench, reaching the highest point of Bolton Unitary Authority involved a stumble alongside a fence to our left alongside the compound of an enormous radio mast, the largest of the eight that litter the top of this hill. It’s another of those county tops that isn’t the highest point of a hill, but merely where the county boundary crosses the should er of the hill. As such, it was a fairly undistinguished place, and we were glad to turn our backs on it and head up to the true top of Winter Hill and the highest point in Blackburn. Returning to the path, it immediately took us to the service road (or rather, track) for all the radio masts. This came up from the other side of the hill, and we suspected it was the most popular route of ascent – at any rate, there were several groups of walkers on it. One of the walkers was a woman who was even more muddied than Jim – she’d clearly sunk in bog up to her waist. It was probably just as well that she was walking with others, and was a salutary lesson of the dangers of walking in the hills. The track wound slowly up between the diverse radio masts, all safely locked away in individual cages as if they were some form of particularly dangerous beast. We wondered why on earth they needed so many. At least one was clearly disused, with its compound gate swinging unlocked and its keeper’s hut falling into disrepair. There was a great variety of construction, in addition to the huge one we’d first seen – our favourite was a short squat one to our right, looking like the skeleton of a cartoon rocket. We soon reached our destination, aided by the wind now to our backs. The trig point here was dwarfed by the metal giants towering above it, but still bought a smile to our faces. I don’t know why these concrete pillars hold such resonance with us, but I’ve been all the more appreciative of them since seeing their history on the BBC programme “Map Man”. The view from on top of the trig point was not all we could have hoped for, being partially obscured by indecent amounts of precipitation. We could, however, still see as far as a reservoir the other side of Belmont. In the other direction we could see Billinge Hill with its ghastly summit building. Bizarrely Billinge Hill looked closer from here than the far larger Winter Hill had looked when we were on top of Billinge Hill – I couldn’t understand how that could be?! It was an easy and high speed descent of the hill, enlivened briefly
by meeting the same cyclist again – this time struggling even harder
to re-ascend the hill. Jim failed to put his foot in the bog, and we returned
safely and gladly to the car as the drizzle got even heavier.
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We’d been looking for a supermarket to
buy our lunch at throughout today; given how many towns we’d driven
round the outskirts of, it was astonishing that it wasn’t until
we’d almost given up searching and were leaving the outskirts of
Bolton to go to Winter Hill that we finally found an Asda. Perhaps people
in Merseyside and Manchester just don’t eat? Unfortunately it was
so bitterly cold that we felt unable to take our lunch up the hill to
eat, and instead ate it in the car parked at the roadside in Belmont.
Close
to the summit we stopped at a handy bench. The weather, having so far
been merely threatening, now opened hostilities with a barrage of high-speed
drizzle born upon an evil wind. In the circumstances we wouldn’t
stay seated for long, but it was long enough to see the walkers we’d
left behind earlier nearly reach the top and then turn back in the face
of the adverse weather – quitters!