Pennine Way: National Trail Guide

by Damian Hall

To replace its previous two-volume guide to the Pennine Way, Aurum now publishes an entirely new one-volume guide for the 21st-century walker. The Pennine Way is Britain’ s toughest long-distance path, running 268 miles from Derbyshire’ s Peak District up through the Yorkshire Dales, Cumbria and Northumberland into the Scottish Borders. Until now, Aurum’ s Trail Guide has covered it in two volumes, where our competitors publish one, and those volumes have been bulked out with circular day walks which no-one essaying the arduous task of walking even a stretch of the Path will realistically want to divert to do. Now, Damian Hall, one of Country Walking’ s senior contributors, has written a completely new guide, giving all the information the modern walker GPS references, gradients of each section, public transport links, extensive details of the wildlife and flora to be seen along the way, and a guide for occasional walkers to the real highlight stretches of the path.

192 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

A record-breaking ultramarathon runner who represented Great Britain aged 40 and continues to record competitive results in the world’s toughest races (mostly powered by tea). He’s featured in several films, books and the national media.

Reviews

[AJW]

This was the book I chose to carry when I walked the entire Pennine Way (PW) in Aug 2018.

It contains the entire route on 1:25k OS maps along with written directions giving a comprehensive guide to finding your way along the PW. The text directions on each double page spread matches the OS maps so there is no need to flit back & forth between pages.

The text also gives a small amount of additional information to key landscape features, buildings, monuments & places you walk pass/through. It is a fantastic resource & I saw several other PW walkers use this book as well.

Its weaknesses compared to other PW guidebooks is that it doesn’t contain detailed information on places to stay/camp. (But this information easily gets out of date.) Sometimes I felt the text directions were edited down too much to fit the available space around the OS map extracts, making them vague & leaving me unsure about which direction to take. (I carried a GPS as a back up.) Also the map extracts are limited to the actual pathway so you can’t take your bearings from nearby landmarks.

I chose to do the PW above all the other long distance walks as I love the bleak moorland landscape that much of this walk passes through. And reading the text comments by the author Damien Hall, I could see a kindred spirit and he felt like an invisible companion to me on my walk, oohing & ahhing, at the spectacular bleak boggy landscape. For me, it is like being at sea, looking ahead to the far horizon and seeing solid waves of brown-green rolling into the distance, and feeling a liberating sense of freedom at all the space around me.

[Tim Palfreman]

A practical guide to walking the Pennine Way, with interesting anecdotes about places along the route. Great revision for my Spine Race next week😃