The author continues his trek down the Northumberland Coast Path to the town of Amble. He is joined by the painter Katherine Renton, who often works in natural materials. The chapter ruminates on questions of power, hierarchy and ownership. Beginning in the market town of Alnwick, the chapter takes the pulse of contemporary Northumberland, thinking about issues of land use and community, as well as family and the natural world. In Amble, the author visits the site of a former salt panning factory and contemplates the ‘wildness’ of the coast and its appeal to the owners of second homes and tourists.
Entering south-east Northumberland, a part of the county less often visited by the tourists who flock to its more glittery north, the author visits Woodhorn Museum in Ashington to enjoy the Pitmen Painters Gallery. From there, he is chaperoned around the town once described as the biggest pit village in the world by the artist Narbi Price. A detour to Cambois near Blyth allows for a tour of a former Miners’ Institute, where Esther Huss and Alex Oates explain how and why they have taken stewardship of the site to usher art and culture into a disenfranchised ‘left behind’ community.
This short bridging chapter set on the River Tyne explores family memory, nostalgia, aqua gods, Roman history and the spiritual underpinning of pilgrimage.
This is another short bridging chapter, based on further exploring the symbolic importance of ‘crossing over’ – this time on the River Wear, which is connected back to the coast which it empties into. This reinforces the importance of the metaphor of the water cycle and the notion of the eternal return.
From Tunstall Hills in Sunderland to Durham Cathedral, this chapter follows a pilgrimage route instigated by the poet William Martin in the 1980s and reinstated by the author in 2016. Beginning in the garden of the late Bill Martin, the chapter melds pasts, recounting of this journey with the present account of its traversal. Following gravity railway lines and old wagon ways out of built-up Sunderland, the terrain gives way to the rural lands of north-east Durham. The author riffs on the Cuthbert legend and on the coal-mining communities of the area. The chapter considers Martin’s poetry in relation to the wider folk culture of the area and muses on his notion of ‘Marradharma’, a portmanteau which fused socialism with eastern spiritual traditions.
In 1926, Dorothy worked for Glacier National Park, north America, and married I. A. Richards on Honolulu in December 1926. In 1928, she, her husband and two guides successfully climbed the Dent Blanche in the Alps by its dangerous north ridge, the first ascent. For a while she became famous and was commissioned to write a book, Climbing Days, published in 1935. Her family was troubled by both her mother’s and her sister’s mental illness. The Richards went to live in China in 1929.
Dorothy Pilley grew up in a strict middle-class home where women were expected to prepare for marriage and little else. Frustrated and depressed by these restrictions, it was by chance she discovered the mountains during a holiday to Snowdonia in Wales, during the First World War. It was a life-changing experience and from then on she devoted her life to climbing and the mountains. Frustrated by the sexist attitudes of the all-male Alpine Club, she and other women formed the first feminist rock-climbing club, the Pinnacle Club, in 1921. Torn between love and the interwar restrictions marriage placed on women, she fled England for Canada and embarked on a record-breaking series of ascents.
When Ethel Gallimore was widowed just over a year after getting married, she became ill with grief. Only walking in the Peak District near her home in Sheffield saved her. In 1924 she formed a local conservation committee, to protect the Peak District from development, which would later become the Sheffield and Peak branch of the Council for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE). She and other ramblers also campaigned for wider public access to the forbidden moorlands of Kinder Scout, Bleaklow and other privately owned grouse-shooting estates. In 1927 her committee raised enough money to buy part of the Longshaw Estate, and handed the deeds over to the National Trust. In the early 1930s she began her campaign to have the Peak District included in the areas of land considered for designation as National Parks. When the Addiston Committee’s report into National Parks was published in 1931 she was disappointed to see the Peak District was not among the primary list of favoured areas, such as the Lake District and Snowdonia.
During the Second World War, Ethel, now Mrs Gerald Haythornthwaite, was seconded to work in the CPRE’s head office, where she worked on the plans for the creation of National Parks. She sat on the Hobhouse Committee, which recommended the Peak District should be a National Park. It was the first National Park, officially designated in April 1951 in the dying days of Clement Attlee’s government. She still had to fight motorways, racing circuits, developments and littering ramblers.
Ethel Haythornthwaite continued working for the Peak District, in an informal capacity, until her final days. The Peak District was successful in terms of negotiating access for walkers and ramblers across previously private moorland. Wangari Maathai became an MP in 2002, and in 2004 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Green Belt Movement planted more than 30 million trees. Wildlife has returned to the Karura Forest and Kenya’s tree cover has increased from less than 2 per cent, to more than 12 per cent of the land mass.