Times Walks: Stuart Maconie on the British countryside

BBC personality, Stuart Maconie, was a northern townie who spent his days and nights with rock bands - until one day walking in the Lake District

Stuart Maconie

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I can’t guarantee that this will work for everyone but if I were asked for the best incentive, the keenest encouragement, the strongest motivation to lace up the boots, pack the pack and take to the great outdoors, I can heartily recommend spending four or five days in a transit van with grubby Brummie thrash metal band Napalm Death.

Or hanging out in seedy New York clubs with Primal Scream. Or going on tour in Yorkshire with a rock group in the throes of a messy, acrimonious — possibly violent — break-up. The Happy Mondays maybe. Or even better, The Fall.

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Well, it worked for me anyway. I had grown up believing myself as urban as underpasses and urine-damp phone boxes, a townie whose closest brush with muddy and inconvenient nature was watching Jack Hargreaves’s Out Of Town on dull Sunday afternoons — an experience as thrilling to my teenage self as taking Mogadon in a care home — or fishing shopping trolleys out of a twilit Leeds-Liverpool canal.

I grew up a punk rocker on a nasty brutish Wigan council estate. If truth be known I wore it like a badge of pride. I was streetwise. I was sharp. I was no more likely to ramble than I was to brass rub or Morris dance and I was no anorak in any sense.

Who would want to be drinking tea from a Thermos in a cagoule on some bleak sodden moor when you could be sipping a cool one in a sexy dim smoky bar with even cooler denizens of the night?

Cut to the mid-1990s and there I am, on said moor, with said Thermos and cagoule, cold, damp and elated, with chapped cheeks and bearing a smile from ear to ear. To fully appreciate the joys of the wide open spaces, the high fells, the sparkling ghyll and the crystalline air, it can help to have spent a lot of late nights in dubious company as a music journalist as I did as deputy editor of the NME. But it’s not vital.

In Little Gidding, the last of his Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot writes “If you came this way/ taking any route, starting from anywhere/ At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off/ sense and notion. You are not here to verify/ . . . you are here to kneel . . .”

Old T. S. was writing, rather sternly of course, about religion, but read in a kindlier way, I think his words could apply to that sudden, life-changing immersion in the natural world, a sense of transcendent pleasure in landscape and raw geography.

When you stride out across the moors among an exultant choir of larks or see the Sun come up pink over a valley filled with the cotton wool of early morning mist or feel the spray on a coastal path, you are, if not exactly kneeling as old T. S. would have you, then certainly surrendering yourself to sensations, rhythms, moods that run deeper and wider than the quotidian dimensions of the office, the car and the computer screen.

My moment of epiphany came in the Lake District, just as it has for many a northern townie from Wordsworth to Wainwright. Wainwright’s moment came on Orrest Head, a modest but delightful fell over elegant Lake Windermere when a boy from Blackburn lifted his eyes to a view far removed from the smoky factory chimneys.

Mine came on the equally modest, even more delightful Loughrigg Fell, a shaggy upstart of a hill by Rydal and Grasmere lakes. Seeing the hazy ridges of the central Lakeland fells arrayed before me from a vantage point that the crowds toiling through the gift shops of Keswick and Bowness were denied, I felt literally and metaphorically elevated.

It was my wife who’d wanted to visit the area. Bullishly I had offered to introduce her to it. Teenage stamping ground and all that, I boasted. As it turned out my knowledge of the Lakes was pretty much confined to pub, chippy and the odd good fishing spot. “What’s that?” she asked in awe, gazing up at some mist-shrouded peak.

“Ermm, some kind of mountain I think.” So, curiosity whetted we bought the maps and the flasks and the Gore-tex jackets and, of course, the Wainwright Pictorial Guides and a love affair began.

Two hundred and something of the 214 Wainwright Fells later (I’m hoping to put the last tick next to Kirk Fell this summer), I’m still in love. Not just with the Lakes but with the Brecon Beacons and the Malverns, with the Pennine foothills around Manchester; Rivington Pike and lonely Winter Hill where the TV mast that once beamed Jack Hargreaves’s Out Of Town into my Wigan council house stands.

Even with Sandwell Valley in Smethwick and Hollingworth Lake in Oldham and Fletcher Moss in Chorlton; each of which you can be in from the centre of urban conurbations within minutes and feeling that you have left behind the world of parking tickets, skips, reversing beeper signals, radio phone-ins, “cashier No 9, please” and all the other drab furniture of modern life.

Exercise, yes. Weight loss, yes. All these good things come to the walker. But it’s more than that. It’s expanded horizons, clear thinking, poetry over prose. It’s a balm for the mind. Wainwright said of his favourite mountain that “a man could forget a raging toothache on Haystacks”.

William Blake put it like this: “Great things are done when men and mountains meet. This is not done by jostling in the street.” But it doesn’t need to be mountains. It can be moors or copses or estuaries or seashores or even towpaths. Just get those boots on. If you’ll allow me three poets in one short piece, it’s like Thom Gunn said — “One is always nearer by not staying still”.