By: Blonde Two
Yesterday I told you about the first part of this walk, climbing the Ladder Glen. This is what happened once we got over the top…
I had neglected to tell Mr B2 that our route to the Corbett Carn Mor (804m) was going to include peat hags; partly because I didn’t want to put him off the idea of a walk, but mostly because I didn’t know exactly what to expect, or even if we were going to be able to negotiate them.
And indeed, that was the feeling that we both had as we stood, huddled in our waterproofs gazing, mystified across the dark expanse. Writers use the words ‘alien landscape’ with abandon; my thesaurus suggests ‘outlandish’ or ‘unfamiliar’ as alternatives, but ‘alien’ really was the only suitable epithet.
Peat hags, for those who haven’t yet encountered them, comprise of ridiculously large patches of peat (you know the stuff, we wouldn’t dream of trying to walk in it on Dartmoor) punctuated by man-sized tufts of more solid greenery.
Mr B2 mentioned a maze, and he wasn’t far wrong; once we had ventured down into our first pit (it took us a while to pluck up the courage), we realised that we couldn’t see the white poles that were supposed to be guiding us through. We could have used the compass of course, but in the end we were concentrating so hard on differentiating between ‘solid’ and ‘sinking’ patches of peat, that we relied on Mr B2’s superior male sense of direction to get us from pole to pole.
We did eventually reach the other side (it took us a wee while) and whilst I will admit that the peat hag experience lent a certain amount of excitement to our walk, I am not sure it is one I want to repeat in a hurry, or after heavy rain. There were definitely some ‘sinking’ bits of peat and I couldn’t help but imagine missing Sassanach walkers swallowed whole and upright beneath my feet.
Southern softies. Everyone oop here knows you should stick to the tussocks.
You must all have very long legs then!
You should try the peat hags on the Pennine Way! If I’d stood on my own head, (good trick, that)I still wouldn’t have been able to see over them from the bottom of the troughs. (Though they may have put a flyover across them now to prevent sudden, permanent disappearance of walkers.) Some billions of pairs of feet have glooped across them since I was there. You were lucky to have poles to guide you, presumably white because the peat is so dark, but they wouldn’t show up very well in snow.