Stoodley Pike

One Friday evening I drove over to my place in Todmorden. Waiting at a red traffic light on Halifax Road I spotted Stoodley Pike on a distant hill and thought I must have a walk up there. On Saturday morning I saw it again while out walking the whippets on the high fields. I decided I would touch those blacked stones before the day finished.

So that afternoon I took a Cadbury Ripple and thought I decided I would only eat it when I was on the balcony part way up the pike.

I parked the car on a patch of grass near a farm house and a muscular bruiser of a man approached before I could kill the engine. I poked my head out of the window and, before he could smash if off my shoulders, asked if it was okay to park there. I thought the grass may be part of his farm but he and a friend had a gun and target set up in a field and he needed a screwdriver to make an adjustment. When he asked, “Got a flat head in there, mate?” I had no idea what he was talking about. I was going to take off my hat and ask if my head was flat enough but he must have seen confusion in my eyes and said it didn’t matter. Not sure if it was my accent but he asked if I was from Manchester. Confirming this he pointed to the open gate which lead up to a gun which was perched on bonnet of a car.

When I heard the eardrum-splitting noise it made I said I was scared of guns. Bruiser’s forehead creased with confusion. Apparently some lads from a shooting club in Manchester were due to visit and he’d thought I was one of them.

With the confusion over I put Michael McIntyre’s autobiography audio book on my mp3 player and set off walking. No matter what time of the year or day you walk up there’s always someone about. However I passed only five people on the path up there. Four said hello, one looked into the mid-distance and pretended to be in deep thought.

I reached the pike and the earth flattens out as though something was meant to stand there. How did they get diggers and trucks up there? There isn’t even a cycle route up there. When I was boy the pike seemed taller. Its 37m high but in my boyhood mind it was nearly as high as Blackpool Tower.

Mmmm, not in bad nick for something about 160 years hold, I thought. I wondered which was the last stone to be put in place. It was completed in 1856 at the end of the Crimean War. There was a monument there before (that commemorated the defeat of Napoleon and the surrender of Paris) but it was struck by lightning in 1815 and collapsed.

Some poor dude had shinned up the pike in 1889 to add the lightning conductor. It worked as the stone has been struck many times since.

I ascended the spiral stone steps to get to the balcony. This is done in complete darkness. In 1889 a grille was added to the top step to allow more light but it doesn’t help much. If you don’t have a torch you have to put your hands on both sides of the walls and just fell your way. Someone told me they had come across a dead sheep but I have’nt so far. I should have been playing The 39 Steps audio book as that’s how many steps there are to reach the balcony.