In the West Yorkshire village of Marsden where I was born and grew up, a peculiar phenomenon took place every year. Starting round about May, usually in the late evenings, foreign creatures in big leather boots and mud-splattered over-trousers began descending from the moor to the south. They carried on their backs the carapaces of huge rucksacks and, from a distance, silhouetted on the horizon, they looked like astronauts. Up close, they smelt of dubbin, Kendal Mint Cake and sweat. And having just completed the first and arguably most daunting section of the Pennine Way, they wore on their faces a variety of expressions.

When I was a child this regular arrival of hikers was a source of curiosity and entertainment. Sometimes they were looking for the now defunct Youth Hostel, a former Co-op with about a dozen beds and a pool table, which also operated as a hang-out for bored local teenagers. But more often they were looking for somewhere to pitch their tent. In the absence of any campsite, this was usually the football field, or somebody’s garden, or, on one occasion, the roundabout at the top of Fall Lane. A couple of lads from East Kilbride liked Marsden so much they dropped their plan to hike north and camped at the back of the allotments for the whole summer, occasionally opening the flaps to emit great wafts of pungent smoke, to put their empty cider bottles out and to allow some of the village girls in. One old boy who knocked at my parents’ house in desperate need of water still sends a Christmas card thirty years later.

The village welcomed these walkers; they were a good source of passing trade and to a certain extent put Marsden on the map. And without doubt, the walkers welcomed Marsden. Having set off from the starting post opposite the Old Nag’s Head Inn in Edale, they would have covered a distance of about twenty-seven miles. That’s a hard day’s walk even through pleasant meadows or along a gentle towpath, but the first leg of the Pennine Way is a grim yomp across the aptly named Dark Peak, incorporating, just to emphasise the point, the equally aptly named Bleaklow and Black Hill. As kids, we roamed around the moors looking for adventures. But we always knew that beyond the immediate horizon, even beyond Saddleworth Moor which Myra Hindley and Ian Brady had turned into a macabre children’s cemetery, there was a more foreboding and forbidden place. Looking up towards those moors from Manchester in the west or Sheffield in the south, it’s difficult to understand: they seem little more than swollen uplands, humped rather than jagged, broad rather than high. But people go there and don’t come back. Even on a clear day they form a bewildering and disorienting landscape, without feature or vista, like walking on a moon made largely of black mud. In the thick, clammy mist, which can descend in minutes, it is a nightmare. The Moorland Rescue team, friends of my dad, would sometimes come into the pub at night celebrating pulling a hiker out of a bog or finding some shivering wretch before nightfall. On other occasions a more sombre mood hung about them, and they sat quietly with their drinks and their thoughts. For those hikers arriving in Marsden after crossing the Dark Peak, the looks on their faces said it all. They had encountered something up there they hadn’t anticipated, and the evidence wasn’t just in their peat-clogged boots and their sodden coats. It was in their eyes. For many, the village of Marsden was not only the first stop along the Pennine Way, it was also the last.

The Pennine Way is about 256 miles long – no one seems to be able to put a precise figure on it – beginning in Edale in Derbyshire and ending in Kirk Yetholm, just the other side of the Scottish border. Britain’s first official long-distance trail, it was formally opened in 1965, though hiker and journalist Tom Stephenson initially proposed the walk in a Daily Herald article published in 1935. Born out of the ‘right to roam’ movement, public disquiet after the great depression and the subsequent mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932, it was, in its conception, as much a political statement as a leisure activity, and no doubt there are members of the landed gentry with double-barrelled surnames and similarly barrelled shotguns who would still like to ban the common people from wandering across certain tracts of open moorland, especially during the month of August. According to the literature, many thousands of people hike some stretch of the Way each year, but of those who attempt the whole thing, only a fraction succeed. While taking in some of the most beautiful scenery in the country, it also passes through some of the bleakest. High above the tree-line, beyond even the hardiest sheep, some of the longer, lonelier sections represent a substantial challenge not just to the body but to the spirit. Indeed, if much of the literature is to be believed, the Pennine Way is more of an endurance test or an assault course than a walk, and not something for a feeble-minded, faint-hearted tenderfoot.

In the summer of 2010 I decided to walk the Pennine Way. I wanted to write a book about the North, one that could observe and describe the land and its people, and one that could encompass elements of memoir as well as saying something about my life as a poet. I identified the Pennine Way as the perfect platform: a kind of gantry running down the backbone of the country offering countless possibilities for perspectives and encounters, with every leg of the journey a new territory and a new chapter. But I decided to approach it in two unconventional ways. Firstly, I decided to walk from north to south. This might not seem like such a revolutionary act; a walk is a walk – can it really matter which is the beginning and which is the end? And yet the majority of people who complete the Pennine Way start in Derbyshire and breast the finishing line in Scotland. The theory, it seems, is to keep the sun, wind and rain at your back rather than walking for three weeks with the unpredictable and unhelpful meteorological elements of the British summer full in the face. Accordingly, all of the guide books are written in that direction. But as a poet, I’m naturally contrary. If most writers are writing prose, then mostly I’m writing something else. Poetry, by definition, is an alternative, and an obstinate one at that. It often refuses to reach the right-hand margin or even the bottom of the page. Prose fills a space, like a liquid poured in from the top, but poetry occupies it, arrays itself in formation, sets up camp and refuses to budge. It is a dissenting and wilful art form, and most of its practitioners are signed-up members of the awkward squad. So against all the prevailing advice, against the prevailing weather, and against much of the prevailing signage, I undertook to walk the Pennine Way in the ‘wrong’ direction. Walking south also made sense because it meant I’d be walking home. From what I’d read about the Way, almost every section of it offered multiple opportunities and numerous excuses to give up rather than carry on. I was going to need a consistent reason to keep going, and the humiliation of failing to arrive in the village where I was born seemed like the perfect incentive.

Secondly, and even more optimistically, I announced publicly that I would attempt the walk as a kind of modern-day troubadour, giving poetry readings at every stop, bartering and trading my way down country, offering only poetry as payment. Early in the year, I put the following page on my website.