A World Apart

Carey Davies backpacks around the rim of Kinder Scout and revels in wild glory just 20 miles from central Manchester.

I OPEN THE TENT DOORS WIDE, wrap myself up in my sleeping bag, and lean out into the night cradling a steaming hot chocolate in my hands. With the tent fabric rustling gently in the wind, I take in the sights, sounds, and atmosphere of the dark landscape.

Everything immediately around me is ancient or prehistoric: the layers of peat under my tent; the mountainous escarpment of 300-million-year-old Carboniferous sandstone on which I’m camped; the great wild plateau behind me, filled with plant and animal life that has been on the planet for many millions of years, some of it dating back to the time of the dinosaurs. The soft roar of nearby water falling through rocks merges with the wind into a natural white noise, and the night sky is visually hypnotic, with the band of the Milky Way vaulting above the peak of my tent and silhouetting the dark crags nearby. I think of that light landing on my retina after journeying through space for eons; only the ruler of deep time can measure all this.

Yet amidst all this, I am also aware of the gleaming and glimmering of modernity; a world on a totally different timescale. Two or three times an hour planes lumber overhead and descend in wide curves towards the lights of Manchester, which shimmers in its hill-ringed basin to the west like cooling embers in the crater of some huge volcano. In the centre of the metropolis, I can just about make out the lights of the USB-stick-shaped Beetham Tower, only about 20 miles distant as the crow flies. I think of the booze-fuelled chaos of a Saturday night in central Manchester, and it seems a world away. Closer to hand, the lights of lone cars creep their way across the dark moor below me as they summit the Snake Pass, a road that is only a bit lower than my 2,000 foot-high roost.