The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker Page B

reward was magnificent. Views were endless, as was the sea of black peat rippled and cut into chunks and slabs by streams the colour of an old-fashioned porter beer. In the keen sunlight, the great slabs of millstone grit glittered like black diamonds, presenting themselves as terrific impromptu picnic tables, chairs and even sunbathing platforms. I stopped to munch my sandwiches by Kinder Downfall, watching the spray of the water tumble over the edge, vaporise and float free into the sharp sky.
    Melting snow had swollen the river and, to cross it, I joined with a group of others in trekking upstream to find a spot where it could be forded. We nearly lost one braveheart, who strode out, shouting ‘Follow me!,’ on to a packed shelf of hard snow over the river. Just as he reached a point where he could almost jump to the other side, the shelf groaned and cracked, dropping with a splash into the rushing water. Looking like a surprised polar bear in a nature documentary, our man flailed downstream towards the fall, but managed to jump free back on to the rocks before cartoon calamity struck. We were all a bit hysterical by then, wheezing laughter and shouts of ribald piss-taking at each other in clouds of wintry breath. There was, I realised, a different atmosphere on these northern peaks: far more comradely, much less pompous than you’d sometimes find elsewhere. And more than anywhere I’d walked in years, Kinder looked and felt like a completely different world to the one below, a world that would never fail to lift sagging spirits or inspire new ways of seeing things. It had been a peak well worth fighting for, even if the fight had been a little overcooked by the Chinese whispers of constant retelling.
    The descent back down into the Vale of Edale was equally delicious, down the boulder-strewn track that serves as the first (or, less commonly, the last) stretch of the Pennine Way. Well-worn tracks, smooth gates, numerous discreet signs and little wooden fingerposts make it impossible to lose your way. Not for the first time, I marvelled at the ruthless, yet generally cheerful, efficiency with which the Peak District National Park deals with its many visitors. It has to: situated as it is between the great metropolises of the north and Midlands, with well over a quarter of the British population within an hour’s drive, it receives easily the greatest number of visitors of all 15 British national parks, something over ten million annually (the next most popular are all in northern England too: the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District and the North York Moors, in that order). Yet despite this overwhelming influx, the annual spend of those visitors in the Peak District is the second lowest of all 15 parks: at £97 million per annum it’s higher only than lowly Exmoor, which receives around an eighth of the Peak’s number of visitors. The annual spend in the Lake District, by comparison, is nearly £700 million, and from two million fewer people.
    On all the leaflets and notice boards locally, I’d clocked the phrase about the Peak being ‘one of the family of National Parks’, and as I climbed down towards Edale and a pint in the Old Nag’s Head, the traditional starting point of the Pennine Way, I pictured this strange, diverse family. The well-loved grandparents of the clan, whom I imagined as a sort of Phil and Jill Archer, were undoubtedly the Lake District and Snowdonia, offering their venerable wisdom to the eager whippersnappers around them. Equally aged, if a little more bellicose, was Great Uncle Cairngorms, glowering by the fire in a big leather armchair and cradling a fine malt. Pembrokeshire and the Norfolk Broads were two flash cousins glued to their iPhones, one a surf dude, the other a braying yachtie. Pony-mad little sister, the New Forest, was something straight out of a Thelwell cartoon. The Yorkshire Moors and Dales were two of your favourite aunties, who always baked the best cakes, but who also