Above him, Cooper could see the Downfall ravine, the rocks around it like bastions and towers, broken and shattered. Water was spraying off the edge today. After heavy rain, it foamed and steamed as it cascaded off the plateau.
It was because Kinder held so much water that it was impossible to find a dry route across it. He’d heard that those streams of water removed ten thousand tons of the mountain’s bulk every year. Eventually, the plateau would be flattened to the level of the surrounding river valleys. But not in his lifetime.
The whole fourteen square miles of Kinder Scout were criss-crossed with deep groughs, carved by water between the hags. Their sides were steep, spongy slopes, their bottoms filled with water that fed the Downfall. It was only by continually crossing them that it was possible to maintain a steady direction.
Some people thought this place was pretty grim, especially in the winter. The unrelenting blackness of the peat could be a bit overwhelming. It wasn’t a place to wander alone if you were already depressed, or feeling despair about the futility of life. Nature could reflect your mood and exaggerate it. Half an hour of floundering through grough and bog would drain your energy and sap your will to live. And in fog? Damp, close air and reduced visibility could soon evoke sensations of isolation and fear.
So what made Kinder Scout so attractive to walkers? Well, the views were certainly extensive — Yorkshire to the north and Cheshire in the west, with the mountains of Wales visible in the distance on a clear day. This vista might not have been so clear at the time of the Mass Trespass, thanks to the smoke from mill chimneys and the coal fires of inner-city workers’ homes.
For centuries the sphagnum moss binding the surface had been steadily killed off by industrial pollution, all that acid rain falling from factories in Manchester. The sphagnum was being reintroduced now, thanks to the Moors for the Future project.
After seeing its fourteen square miles of bare peat steaming with moisture, someone had once called the Kinder plateau ‘land at the end of its tether, entirely covered in the droppings of dinosaurs’. It had certainly been an uncompromising landscape for generations. But now Kinder was in the throes of change. Out here on the edge of the world, two thousand feet above sea level, life was returning to this once bleak moonscape.
A grouse jumped up from the heather with a harsh cry — Go back! Go back, back, back, back! But Cooper continued to move onwards.
On a flattened edge of the slope below, he glimpsed the Mermaid’s Pool. On the plateau itself, the rock formations were the best-known landmarks. Pym Chair, the Druid Stone, the Boxing Gloves, Madwoman’s Stones, Punch’s Nose, Ringing Roger.
The Woolpacks and the Mushroom Garden were names describing the appearance of many of the gritstone rocks. The Pagoda was a collection of huge flat stones laid on top of each other. The Moat Stone was named because of the shallow pool surrounding it. Some rocks resembled a frog, a fossilised giant snail or an upturned tooth.
For a moment, Cooper wondered what it was like to live in a part of the country where individual rocks weren’t named on the Ordnance Survey map. Were people still as conscious of their own history, the presence of those ancestors with their dark, superstitious imaginations?
All these legends brought his thoughts back to the New Trespassers Walking Club. Their entire existence was based on a legend. Yet as a group, they seemed to have been stitched together like a kind of Frankenstein’s monster.
The more Cooper thought about it, the more the Kinder Mass Trespass seemed a tenuous connection between these people. And some of them cared nothing for the significance of the 1932 trespass. One believed it was a Communist plot. So what had brought them together in the first place? Could these people be linked by something completely different?
The Mass Trespass had taken place in April. The 24th to be exact. Why was that a ‘bad time’ for members of the group, as Darius Roth had described it a few days ago? Cooper had assumed it was something to do with work, or school holidays: 24 April could sometimes fall during the Easter break, but not always. So was there some other significance to the choice of October? Who had chosen the date for the walk? Darius, of course.
Cooper stopped walking suddenly. He felt as though his feet had hit hidden obstacles in the wet peat; those familiar tentacles had reached out and grabbed his ankles. He was recalling his conversation with Elsa Roth about the fate of Darius’s brother, Magnus, the rock climber. Didn’t she say that he died six years ago? Surely that was just about the time the date of the New Trespassers’ annual walk was changed. Did Darius move the date to October to mark his brother’s death? Could there be some significance to that? Were they all connected through that fatal incident?
Ahead, the Swine’s Back led along the southern edge of the plateau towards Grindsbrook, and Kinder itself stretched before him.
Ironically, the original trespassers had got lost on Kinder. In fact, they’d never reached the top of the hill at all but had turned left and descended to Ashop Head instead of right towards the Downfall and onto the plateau. A Sheffield group who ascended Jacob’s Ladder on the other side of the moor to meet them must have been baffled to see the main party turning away and heading in the opposite direction. Like so many ramblers since, the Kinder mass trespassers had no idea where they were.
Where the restoration work was taking place, some areas of the plateau had been transformed from dark menace to a bright benevolence as the black, eroded morass was seeded over and turned green.
But here was the Kinder that he’d always known. Desolate and dangerous. A place where unwary walkers wandered lost for hours and could sink up to their waists in the bog. A path of stone slabs had been laid across a stretch of badly eroded moorland, like a causeway across a black, peaty ocean.
Cooper reached Crowden Head and for a while he sat out of the wind behind a rock, watching the clouds roll in from the south-west and taking in the silence at the summit.
To the north across the Snake Pass lay the high moors of Bleaklow and Black Hill. Along the eastern edge of the plateau, a soggy line across high ground from the Madwoman’s Stones to the cairn of Ringing Roger. The plateau today looked bleak, and dangerous.
If you were lost on Kinder, there was no safe way down unless you managed to hit one of the two main paths. Without a compass and the ability to use it, you might walk round in circles for hours. The best advice was to stay where you were until help arrived.
But the New Trespassers Walking Club hadn’t done that. Why not? What had caused that division within the group and made them head off in separate directions?
Well, perhaps because they had no clear leadership. Without firm direction from Darius, there was no one able to make a decision that would be accepted by the others. That was why the group had split up. No unity, no solidarity, no commitment to each other. They’d put their trust in Darius Roth, and he’d failed them when it came to a crisis.
That morning, Diane Fry drove under Clifton Bridge and pulled into the BP service station as usual. Another text message had arrived on her phone from InPost to alert her to a delivery, with a code to access her locker. That was odd. She wasn’t expecting anything. She wracked her memory to remember what she might have ordered that hadn’t already arrived, but couldn’t think what it might be.
Well, she could only go and find out. All she had to do was scan the QR code or enter the number on the touch screen to open a locker. But she remembered what Angie had said in that call yesterday: Don’t use your locker.