Hiking the Pennine Way 60 years after its creation | Northumberland holidays

High on the ridges of the Pennines, somewhere between the waters of Malham Tarn in the Yorkshire Dales and Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish Borders, a 31-year-old woman stands amid a group of mainly male walkers. She’s wearing bell-bottom jeans, a fitted long-sleeve top and an Alice band to keep her hair out of her face in the prevailing westerly wind. Her name is Joyce Neville and the year is 1952. She’s in the middle of a walk along a proposed national trail – the Pennine Way

Joyce had seen an advert for this self-described “Pioneer Walk” in the Sunday newspapers a few months earlier. It was placed by the writer and campaigner Tom Stephenson who was requesting “accomplished walkers, fit and over 18” to take part in a 15-day hike on the “long green trail” he was suggesting be created in Britain (inspired by the US’s 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail). Few women wore jeans back then, according to Joyce’s notes (which were passed on to me by Paddy Dillon, author of Cicerone’s Walking the Pennine Way guidebook), and the whole trip cost just £25.

More than 70 years later, my friend Cerys and I are standing in the Pennines, at the lip of a feature known as High Cup Nick. This glacially scoured U-shaped valley, known as England’s Grand Canyon, sits above the village of Dufton in Cumbria. We are on the first day of a three-day walk on the Pennine Way (which officially opened in 1965) to celebrate its diamond anniversary. We’d begun on a cold but sunny day in February at the waterfall-rich town of Middleton-in-Teesdale, and already scrambled alongside the torrent of Cauldron Snout, listened to the call of corncrakes in the farmland of the Eden Valley, bog-hopped along the path beside MOD Warcop training ground (out of bounds to hikers without prior permission), and arrived at this – one of the geological highlights of the entire 268-mile trail.

The landscape would have been the same when Joyce trod it in the 1950s, though some things have definitely changed.

“Back then it was a damn tough walk because all the blanket bog would be trodden into a filthy morass that got to waist-deep at times,” said Paddy when I called him pre-trip to ask advice about the section we had decided to walk, between Middleton-in-Teesdale and Greenhead, inspired by the same three-day trip Stephenson made in 1948 to publicise his cause. He was accompanied by five MPs, among them Barbara Castle (one of the longest serving female MPs in British history) and Arthur Blenkinsop (a Labour MP for South Shields who went on to become vice-president of the Ramblers). “You could have worn waders and it might have kept you clean. Now, thanks to the flagstones, you can do it in carpet slippers.”

We weren’t quite so bold as to ditch our hiking boots, but our gear was definitely changed from Joyce’s day. At the time, she notes, when women were expected to wear long tweed skirts for walking, her outfit was regarded as quite scandalous. In a way, we have Joyce and other women like her to thank for the fact that we can now wear warm, dry fleece-lined trousers without offending anyone. We also had our lightweight waterproof jackets, and didn’t have to carry heavy canvas bell tents like they did. When Joyce was walking this route, hikers had to negotiate with farmers to camp in their fields; later, after the path’s official opening, there were about 20 YHA hostels along the route. There are only a handful left, so guesthouses, pubs with rooms, the occasional campsite and Airbnbs are the way most people do things.

As we stand gawping at the crumbling buttresses and pinnacles that line the edges of High Cup, we meet a hiker called Mike, 73, with his dog Ringo, who says he lived along the trail at Earby when the Pennine Way opened.

“I remember we’d hear the banging of frying pans before we ever saw the walkers,” he laughs. “They were hanging off the backpacks of the factory workers from Manchester who would clock off on Saturday and start walking and see how far they could get before they had to head back to work on Monday.”

Similar to those early walkers, we were squashing our walk in between work. In contrast, we would be staying in warm “hobbit huts” at Dufton Caravan Park, having walked from Brunswick House B&B, run by Andrew Milnes, who told us that trail walkers account for a third of his annual business.

Despite good accommodation, the distance is no shorter, and when we arrive into Dufton at dusk we head immediately for a hearty meal at The Stag Inn – thankful we don’t need to cook our own dinner. We chat to Amanda behind the bar who raves about the section of the trail we were walking. “Do you think it will last another 60 years?” I ask her. “60?” she says. “It will last another 6,000 – it’s not going anywhere.”

We were, however, and after a cosy night, we begin our walk on the hardest and highest section of the trail – over Cross Fell, home to the notoriously bitter Helm Wind (the only named wind in the UK). There is frost on the ground, the temperature is -4C (25F).

By the time we reach the slopes of the 893-metre (2,930ft) peak, we hit the snowline. It is cold, but the ground is made solid by the frost, and we hike easily to the summit plateau, marked by a great stone cross (reportedly – we later find out from the woman who runs the Post Office at Garrigill – constructed on the trail’s opening by a reverend from Scotland who had received a message “from above” to build it to protect walkers). And as we reach it and see the Lakeland peaks spread out in front of us without even a breath of wind, I muse how perhaps it is working.

We stop to eat lunch at Greg’s Hut, a former miners’ lodgings now looked after by the volunteer-run Mountain Bothies Association and, judging by the entries in the visitor’s book, frequented by many a Pennine Way walker.

From there the trail heads to Garrigill and on to Alston, cleaving its way between a mass of land used for grouse shooting, a place where hikers would have once had run-ins with gamekeepers eager to protect their money-making birds – a practice that still causes heated debates between landowners, conservationists and access campaigners.

Walking a trail may seem like an act of pure recreation, but the origins of the Pennine Way are firmly rooted in politics. The trail’s creator, Tom Stephenson, never actually walked the entirety of his creation, the idea for which came in 1935, three years after the mass trespass of Kinder Scout, a protest in the Peak District for walkers’ rights. “He wasn’t interested in walking it, but he made damn sure other people did,” says Paddy. “His idea was if he could get people en masse into the countryside to areas previously forbidden to walk on, like Kinder Scout and Bleaklow [also in the Peak District], he could use that as a lever to get more rights in general for people to access previously private land.”

After a night at the Cumberland Inn in Alston, we set our compass for Greenhead and Hadrian’s Wall, where we will grab a taxi, then the train at Haltwhistle to head home. We plough through the 17 miles easily, listening to the song of curlews, spying wild deer at the former Lambley station (now a private house), and admiring the snowdrops that have burst through the ground.

Since Stephenson’s pioneered the concept of a walk that allowed everyone to traverse the backbone of England, more routes have been established, such as the South Tyne Trail. For 23 miles, it follows the route of the defunct Haltwhistle railway line (closed in 1976; opened as a footpath in 2004) parallel to the Pennine Way and is so much easier and more commonly walked that Paddy has included it in his updated guidebook.

The Pennine Way was the UK’s first national trail – there are now 17 in England and Wales, and four equivalent long-distance “great trails” in Scotland. The newest and longest yet, the 2,700-mile King Charles III England Coast Path is due to be fully walkable by the end of 2025; many parts of it are open now. Yet there is still much to fight for. According to the campaigning group Right to Roam, only 8% of England is accessible to hikers – nearly 49,000 miles of historic paths have been removed from official maps and 32,000 rights of way are blocked. Access is even more limited to those wishing to swim, cycle or camp (with one exception – wild camping is legal on Dartmoor, but this is being contested in the supreme court by a wealthy landowner).

Sixty years feels like a long time, but walking can still be a political act. And, perhaps, much like Joyce Neville in 1952, we should all hit the trails to exercise our right to roam. Jeans are optional.