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used to walking, but had suddenly found that it was ruled off-limits by the landowner, in this case a vicar who rarely even made it to Darwen, as his parish was in Dorset. Two years later, another procession headed up the hill, this time to open a viewing tower that looks to be the very epitome of the Victorian age – dark, severe, yet lofty and ambitious, and built to celebrate its apogee, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Nominally, that is. The florid plaques on the tower’s base all celebrate the Queen’s longevity and list the aldermen who shuffled up the hill to applaud the dignitaries on that day in September 1898, but a more recent addition gives the game away. That is a plain crest that celebrates the 1996 centenary of the victory for the townspeople in gaining access to the moor that glowers above their streets.
    It may have taken nearly a century to get the real reason for the Darwen Tower inscribed on its side, but the ambition was explicit from the start. Letters in the local press supported the idea of a Jubilee Tower, but as long as it also served as a celebration of the townsfolk’s victory over their absentee landlord, the Rev. William Arthur Duckworth. With sweet irony, it was Duckworth himself, on one of his rare forays north to Darwen, who had to preside over the opening ceremony of the very symbol of his recent defeat. As I walked towards the tower earlier on that windswept Sunday morning, the mist whipping across the moor brought its shape in and out of focus. At a certain stage of semi-visibility, it looked like nothing more than a fat, raised middle finger, quite probably from the people of Darwen to the good reverend. From another angle, and in another stage of atmospheric opacity, there’s something undeniably phallic about it, and that’s probably aimed at him too.
    This is hard country. Old snow lay curdled in piles in north-facing clefts and gullies, or packed up against the dry stone walls, sullen lines of dirty sandstone augmented by concrete blocks and broken paving slabs wherever they’d collapsed. It’s a well-worn path, but you have to keep your eyes on the ground, as ankle-turning ruts and rocks litter the way. Wherever I looked, the whole scene appeared to have been painted by an artist with just three colours in his palette: olive green, battleship grey and a mucky ochre. Even calling it olive green gives it a continental raffishness that the month of March over Darwen can never possibly fulfil, but you get the picture.
    Around the top of the tower there are optimistic little toposcope plaques, telling you what you might be able to see if only the mist would thin a while. It won’t. Everyone who writes about Darwen Tower mentions not seeing anything. Official boasts claim that, on a clear day, you can see Snowdonia, but someone I read said that he’s been up there dozens of times, and never caught sight of it. The plaque facing Wales has long since been jemmied off the tower, but the other two are still there. I looked out into the fog that was zipping past like a battalion of ghosts, willing myself to see, as promised, the Old Man of Coniston or Kinder Scout, my ultimate destination on this tour of the north-west’s much fought-over footpaths. A couple walking a pair of very fat Labradors loomed out of the mist instead.
    Just for a minute, it suddenly cleared. Only enough to see the town of Darwen below, but given that I’d only been able to see for about 20 yards prior to that, the effect was startling. The town is a sprawl, but a sprawl of straight lines and right angles: long terraced streets in blocks and grids, angular great buildings, a vast chimney or two. It looked sharp and harsh, as if you might cut yourself on one of its edges. Suddenly, the cheerless moor and pompous little Victorian tower looked like softness itself, the swirls of tracks and billowing clouds of heather a vital antidote to all that lay beneath. Something clicked in my head about the umbilical