A Homecoming of Sorts:
Five Days Healing in the Cheviots
By Trevor H. Smith
August 2023
Part Five: We understand each other’s pain.
I bagged up and began my ascent. Ahead of me I could see three figures in silhouettes that signified the end of break time. One stood with a bag on, a second was hunched, gathering, while a third stood apart, looking north to the path ahead. As I neared the summit, a fourth and fifth rose, stretching, readying themselves for the off. And as I navigated multiple good mornings, a sixth person appeared from behind some nearby rushes, those arrow-straight, dark green spears that pepper these poorly drained plateaus.
The group comprised two middle-aged men, two young adults in their early 20s, and two teenagers. We engaged in the customary sharing of routes, where we had come from (today, and at the beginning of our journeys), and where we were going (today and at the end of our journeys). As a matter of hiking etiquette we each spoke with vagueness around our plans for where we might set up camp at the end of the day. I stated ‘around Windy Gyle’ as my target for the day, dependent on the weather and (thinking to myself) whether I managed to salvage some morale from the day after its blue beginnings. They had been told about a water source off the south side of Windy Gyle where they would top up before ‘probably moving on a bit’ to camp somewhere further north along the route. Nothing from any of us about covening for the evening, whatever that meant in the bleak, rainy, windswept uplands of the Cheviots.
This brief but pleasant eschange with the group had banished from my mind all thoughts of the creeping damp in my toes, my pathetic breakfast, and even the tiredness in my legs. I looked to the north and caught my first sight of the flagstones that trace the Pennine Way through the marsh and blanket bog of the Cheviots. My homecoming was no longer pending. I was in it; it was happening all around me. As I set off across the stones, so too did my group of strangers, one right alongside me, chatting as he tramped through the cotton grass, the other five not far behind. I was soon informed that over four summers and in varying configurations, the group had hiked the entire Pennine Way together. Today was the penultimate day of their years-long Pennine Way adventure. The older guys turned out to be brothers, each having brought along two of their children, and of course there had been days when one or more of their number had not wanted to go on, ‘but we always do,’ said Meri, the eldest of the two teenagers, ‘because we’re all here together understanding each others’ pain’.