Never resist steps into the unknown

Obsessed with perfect paths and tucked-away tracks, Will Gore looks back on a winding route that lives on as one of his earliest memories, in the first in a new series of reflections

Your first steps can stay with you a lifetime – particularly if you take them in the Peak District (Rex)

Steps. I couldn’t say how many. Certainly quite a few though, especially for a two-year-old toddler version of me, used as I was to the flatlands of Cambridgeshire.

The house itself was called Rivendell, named by my grandmother – we called her Mongo – when she and my grandfather had first moved there for the cleaner air of the countryside in the early 1960s. Within a decade she had been widowed.

She was, in fact, more Mrs Tiggywinkle than hobbit; and like Beatrix Potter’s fictional hedgehog, she was soft, homely – never spiky.

A young Will with his grandmother, Elizabeth Evans (Will Gore)

To reach the front door, steps ascended steeply, not quite in a straight line but in a zigzag from the road; through a garden that was mainly stone walls and rockery, until a strip of paving (or was it gravel? I can’t recall) on which there was a bench for summer sitting.

Looking back, I’m struck by the irony of my stout, elderly grandmother living at the top of what seemed such a hefty incline. Parking for cars was only available at road level, four or five metres below. But scale can be distorted by memory I guess.

Perched above the river Derwent and the Cromford Canal, Whatstandwell lies south of Matlock, outside the Peak District proper. Still, it has the character of a Peak village, parallel lanes dictated by the contours of the hill, kept separate yet connected at right angles by steep pathways. More steps.

In our towns and villages now, roads – and cars – are the absolute monarchs of the transport social scale. Pedestrians tend to be shunted to one side, onto pavements; or, indeed, sidewalks

We would walk all these steps, my mother and father and me, and Mongo – the steps that took us to Rivendell’s front door; and those which linked Top Lane to Main Street below (and even further down into the valley, to the railway, river and canal), as well as others leading up the hill to a green lane beyond, and eventually to Crich, with its tramway museum.

The steps of the village pathways were worn and weathered. There was a handrail in places I remember, though I was surely too small to reach it. To descend the passage leading from Top Lane was to plunge into semi-darkness, houses or trees to either side.

Will with his mother on the bench outside Mongo’s front door (Will Gore)

A neighbour of my grandmother’s was called Mr Brown. An amateur baker of sorts, we would visit his home to collect the wholemeal loaves he had made. (Give us each day our daily bread – and let there be light; to shine in dark lanes.)

In our towns and villages now, roads – and cars – are the absolute monarchs of the transport social scale. Pedestrians tend to be shunted to one side, onto pavements; or, indeed, sidewalks. Yet look hard enough and you’ll find plenty of routes that are out of reach for motor vehicles. Some of them are little used; shortcuts ignored, unloved and overgrown. We should take greater care of them.

Whatstandwell feels like a typical Peak village, even though it lies outside the National Park (Eamon Curry/Flickr/CC BY 2.0) (Eamon Curry/Flickr (CC BY 2.0))

Steep paths are a particular challenge to maintain of course, although they also tend to offer the greatest time saving. And in any case, who should resist steps into the unknown?

My grandmother died in 1982, shortly before my third birthday. We went to Whatstandwell again to clear furniture from Rivendell, and drove through occasionally on our way to subsequent holidays in the Peak District.

Our first steps stay with us, even as we search out those which come next.