Our First Post-Lockdown Motorhome Trip Out to Edale

Zagan the motorhome’s found himself jolted back into life, standing on the sloping grass of Newfold Farm Campsite (previously Cooper’s Campsite) in Edale, a stone’s throw from one end of the Pennine Way in the Peak District National Park (N53.369836, W1.818771). We arrived two days ago, on a Sunday in July, which was a bad idea as it turned out, see below…

This is our first trip out in Zagan since we mothballed him after our panicked drive home from southern Spain in mid March, four months ago. Since then we’ve spent almost all of our time getting intimately familiar with the walls of our home and the small outside yard, grateful to have ’em both as we read the stories of full-timers searching out safe places to isolate in a world gone weird. It no longer feels to me as though we (Julie and I) are ‘in lockdown’ though, although we’re well aware that life hasn’t gone back to a pre-COVID-19 normal.

A few folks have asked how we were getting on when we were locked in ‘as free spirits unable to travel’. From a personal perspective, my emotions have varied throughout these past few months, but I’ve stayed positive overall, I think. In all the time we’ve spent travelling continental Europe we didn’t seek to insulate ourselves from some of the truly awful events that have befallen people there, particularly in the last century. We’ve visited concentration camps. We’ve stood and cried at the immaculate mass graves of soldiers, and pits in remote woods filled with the bones of murdered civilians. Cities like Sarajevo and Mostar, which were subjected to horrific sieges in the 90s, had us shaking our heads in disbelief. Ukraine astounded us, where the populace was deliberately starved to death in their millions in the 30s. Poland’s entire capital city centre was levelled by a vengeful army, just unthinkable. Dresden was deliberately burned from the air, killing thousands. Put simply, Europe had plenty of horrific sh*t happen to it and the more I travelled, the luckier I felt. Has all of this inoculated me to the horrors of a pandemic? No, but I strongly suspect it has helped me get it into some kind of perspective these past months.

The biggest fear for me was how well my parents would cope, locked in their home, surrounded by the virus for months. I’ve been amazed at just how upbeat they’ve remained, taking to baking, gardening, listening to audio books and waiting patiently for the world to re-open. We did our best to help, keeping in touch, shopping once a week and being there in case of problems. They got loads of help from my sister’s family, from neighbours and their local Breathe Easy (lung disease) support group too. In the past couple of weeks they’ve ventured out to their mobile home in Skegness, keeping their distance from people and taking precautions to avoid contaminated surfaces, but reveling in being ‘out’. Their view is, I think, that they need to live. A vaccine could be another year or more away. Trying to avoid all risk by staying completely locked away from the world, with just a steady flow of bad news from the media, is opening the door wide to a different kind of risk. As ever, all paths carry risk, there is never a risk-free option, we just have to choose which risks we want to take.

As my parents started to emerge, it felt the right time for Julie and I to follow suit so we booked into this site for five nights. We un-SORNed the van, re-packed it, filled up with water, diesel and LPG and headed up here, stupidly following our satnav as it avoided all the main routes and crammed us down narrow country lanes. The left hand wing mirror was the first casualty, lost to a tree as I squeezed between high hedges and oncoming cars. Next up came the pinch points, even tighter spots jammed tight with a thick mixture of weekend summer traffic, tractors, delivery trucks, cars, motorbikes, cyclists and us. The trip here was the first time we can remember where Ju had to get out three times and help reverse us back to untangle knot after knot of traffic. Some lessons we seem doomed to learn time and again: check the map, don’t trust the satnav, how many times???!!! Oh, and book to arrive on a Monday too – we have no reason to be needing to travel at the weekends when half the world’s on the move.

We finally managed to edge into the campsite entrance in convoy, with a motorhome up front and a campervan behind us. Ju nipped out and into reception, past the sanitizer and the ‘stand 2m apart’ signs and booked in with the couple sat behind desks. No masks in sight (although reading what’s happening in France and Spain, indoor masks for all might be just around the corner). There are no pitches here, just open fields with no hook-up, and we were asked to just pick a spot and park 90 degrees to the gravel road. It was busy on a Sunday, but there was plenty of space to pick a spot several metres away from others. Portable loos have been placed around the site, reducing the number of people heading to the single shower block, and we see staff from time to time walking around in masks, gloves and aprons, cleaning stuff we assume. We’re mainly using our on-board facilities, although Ju’s had a shower in the campsite block in the early afternoon when the site is mostly deserted. There are plenty of tents and campervans here, but they’re reasonably spread out and each group is staying away from the others. It feels safe enough to me, at least for us two.

Just outside the site entrance is the Old Nags Head Pub, a walker’s place, all stone slabs, hearty food and real ale. We stayed there some years back with friends, got drunk, sang and staggered off to bunk beds round the back for the night. It looks a tad less inviting with a chap in a mask leading folks in to their table, and we’ve avoided going in for now. There are tables outside, and another pub down the road with outside eating available, so we might give it a go. As Ju mentioned in a conversation earlier, it’s just that bit stressful not knowing what new little rules each establishment is working to. On the way here we passed a chap stood at a campsite entrance arguing he just wanted to say hello to his mates staying there. The owner wouldn’t let him in, saying that government rules don’t allow visitors. It’s a new world for us all to navigate, that’s for sure.

The main attraction in this part of the world is walking. The Pennine Way starts around the corner, running for 268 miles north to just inside the Scottish border. There’s a small gate with the route of the path carved in it, and a tiny plaque alongside, understated little monuments as you might expect in Britain. We’re surrounded by lovably-English feature names too: Ringing Roger, Jacob’s Ladder, Grindslow Knoll, Kinder Scout. A (very nice) stone cottage opposite the pub is up for sale for £750,000, a less-than-lovable price tag and I’m unsure I’d want to live in such a popular spot where the locals have to use ‘NO PARKING’ signs stuck to their wheelie bins to try and reserve their space (who am I kidding, I’d love to live up here).

Since arriving I’ve run a 6 mile route up the hills to the north and west, waking up the following day with aching thighs from all the climbing and rocky descending. It was absolutely beautiful up there, with the occasional splash of sunshine lighting up the smoothed-out barren landscapes and springy sections of dry peaty earth. The sight of such wonderful landscapes pushed light through my soul folks. The gritstone rocks of the Dark Peak are great for running, offering a ton of grip to the soft studded rubber on my trail shoes. I loved it, and the following day Ju and I headed up to walk the same route, extending it past Kinder Scout for a 10 miler. I was pretty much shot by the end and fell asleep in the afternoon, even as the nippers screamed and played on the adjacent field.

We stayed up late, for us, the past couple of nights peering into the sky in search of the Neowise Comet and the International Space Station. The ISS silently swooped over Zagan like a bright star wandering across the sky. The comet was a bit more elusive, but last night clear skies, keen eyes and a pair of binoculars gave us a glimpse of its faint smudge in the darkness of night. Its tail is said to stretch tens of thousands, if not millions, of miles across the solar system. Once it leaves it won’t be back again for another 6800 years, that sort of thing really does put life into perspective.

Today our legs ache even more so we’ve stuck to a short walk, all of 4 miles from the campsite up Mam Tor to the south and back. The path was pretty quiet all the way until we rounded the bottom of the Tor onto the paved route, which was suddenly packed! The hill’s iconic and easy to walk up, attracting lots of folks for the views from the remains of a bronze/iron age fort at the wind-swept summit. One side of the hill has long-since collapsed, shedding material onto smaller hills below, explaining the name Mam Tor: Mother Hill (it’s also called the Shivering Mountain). Below lies a collection of mines and caverns including the famous Blue John Cavern, named for the 250 million-year-old blue mineral it produces. To the east and west we could see the ridge paths extending off into the distance, with just a few hikers on them. They looked tempting, but our legs were aching and we’ve retreated to the van to eat and rest up ready for the next couple of days.

So, that’s it, we’re out! We’ve seen that lots of fellow motorhomers and campervanners are starting to head out too, including a good number heading for the continent. It feels like the right time to (carefully) start travelling again. Bearing in mind the potential for local lock-downs and the possibility of getting ill abroad, Ju and I are choosing to travel in the UK for the time being, but that’s only a personal perspective of course. Despite the troubles I knew Europe had experienced last century, those troubles didn’t happen to me, I never lived through them, so they could only ever partly prepare me for the fear and confusion of a pandemic this century. The levels of stress we’ve all been placed under have been huge and the way in which we’ll each choose to emerge back into the world will be a deeply personal thing. Whether you’re choosing to travel locally this summer and autumn, stay at home and not travel at all or head abroad on a long tour, may we wish the best of luck, health and success to you.

Cheers, Jay