I woke regularly during the night with the familiar camping feeling of bones in conflict with hard ground, and somewhere in the small hours I became aware that the rain had begun. By the time I woke properly at 0643 there was persistent rain outside the tent, and pain all over on the inside. Every single bit of my body was sore.
I turned carefully onto my back, and lay there for a while wondering how I was going to pack up the tent and the rucksack in the rain, without soaking everything I was carrying. It then occurred to me that it would make more sense to try to strap the tent to the outside of the pack, and that I would just have to learn the economy of movement necessary to be able to pack up the rest of my kit inside the tent. Having made those decisions I felt a little better, and decided to crawl out to the loo. There were several minutes of profound misery when I realised I'd lost my waterproof trousers, but I felt much better again when I found them trapped beneath the Thermarest at the other end of the tent.
By 8am I was packed and sheltering from the rain by the Reception desk waiting for the others, whilst boiling a kettley thing full of water for my flask. The man behind reception had been kind enough to give me a black plastic bin liner for my tent, and I'd found some straps at the bottom of my rucksack for this sort of eventuality. It wasn't ideal, but it was a lot better than soaking the rest of my kit. They didn't sell pasties or similar things at the little shop, but I'd had a couple more oatcakes with cheese for a minimalist brekkie.
At about 8.15am we set off in a bunch with the Kind Man and his dog, and headed back up towards Black Tor and Laddow Rocks. We were climbing through rain, mist and a fairly sharp wind, but I found the fresh conditions invigorating, and didn't really notice the pull up too much. By the time I got to the top I was having a great time :-)
The mist cleared as another slabbed section came into view on the approach to Black Hill, but it came down again as Black Hill came into sight.
The top was a gloomy and depressing quagmire, and I can barely imagine what the journey there must have been like in the days before a path was laid!
At the main Wessenden Reservoir I encountered the runner again. He stopped to chat, and it turned out that he and I had several races in common. It was fairly obvious that he'd be up at the front while I'd be bringing up the rear, but it always seems to me that it's getting out and having a go that counts :-) He was a very interesting bloke who'd worked as a miner and was now a landscape gardener. We discussed changes to that area of the country politically over the course of the last 20 years or so, but finally I needed to move on as there was still a long way to go.
I pressed on again, although it took me 20 minutes or so to work out how to cross the deep and fast flowing stream at the weir below a little waterfall. I decided I needed a stick.
I managed to remain dry during the crossing, but as I started the trek over Black Moss the sky turned an eerie shade of greyish green, and a thunder storm began. It was rather unnerving to be out there in the moor on my own, but eventually the rain passed and the sky brightened up again.
Both the kind bloke at Crowden and the man running in the reservoir had said that there was a pub just along the A62 where the route crossed it at Standedge, and having had no real dinner, breakfast or lunch I was very much looking forward to getting there for food. I eventually emerged onto the A62 exhausted, and turned right, but the pub a quarter of a mile along on the left was closed: permanently, as far as I could see. I noticed another one about half a mile further on on the right, and so I put my head down and pushed on towards it. When I got there and found that it was not only closed but actually on the market for sale I began to feel like crying! It wasn't clear now whether I should continue along the A62, or take the small road on the right that I'd passed just before the second defunct pub. NB: this is one of the disadvantages of the strip maps contained in the National Trail Guides: if you walk off the strip, or need to see what's round the corner, you're stymied :-(
There'd been a sign at the little road saying "B and B 3/4 mile", and so I decided I'd be better off going that way. The road was mainly uphill, and although I'd not gone further than 14 miles I was rapidly growing exhausted and demoralised. 3/4 of a mile came and went, and I began to wonder whether some Pennine Way Walker Hating Person had put up the sign for a joke. I began to despair of finding anywhere to stay, and started to consider the possiblity of calling for a cab to take me all the way home as soon as I found a telephone, when all of a sudden I got over the brow of a hill and saw some sort of building a couple of hundred metres away on the left. I dragged myself towards it, and heard an apparently disembodied voice calling my name. It turned out to be Darren by his tent, parked in the garden on the slope above the house! This was Forest Farm Guest House, and kind Mrs Fussey let me put up my tent in her garden. She also offered to provide breakfast, and allowed Darren and me to use her phone to get a cab to take us into Marsden for dinner. Wonderful :-)
Darren and I shared the taxi with two Dutch walkers, and had dinner at the Railway. I was starving and had garlic bread with mushrooms in cream, followed by an enormous plate of fish, chips and home made mushy peas. I'd been planning rhubarb crumble with custard, but I had no room left after the fish and chips. The 4 of us then went to the Co-op for supplies - my opportunity to stock up with cheese and onion pasties - and after that we got a taxi back.
I didn't feel terribly well back in the tent, presumably because I'd eaten too much. I was fine by the morning, though, and enjoyed scrambled eggs on toast for breakfast with a nice pot of tea. For a £1 each we got a lift back to the point on the A62 that we'd reached the previous day, and continued the walk from there.
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