We set off along Kinder Road, passing the quarry – a path I have trodden countless times since – and the first sight of Kinder, the "dark peak", has never failed to lift my spirits and imbue me with a sharp sense of freedom.
Section 2: Passing playing fields and old quarries, the path crosses the Woodhall Hills and follows Fagley Beck to cross the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and the River Aire at Apperley Bridge, then follows the river past Woodhouse Grove School before climbing up to meet the A65 south of Rawdon.
From the slate quarries, the Watkin Path veers to the north-east to reach Bwlch Ciliau, the col between Snowdon and Y Lliwedd, which is marked by a large orange-brown cairn.
If you arrive by ferry at Yarmouth, you're just 2 miles from Freshwater. 1 Facing the quarry, take the left‑hand path out of the car park.
I begin my second day plodding up the path from Walltown quarry to embark on the most dramatic stretch of the wall.
Other witnesses, three Kenyan men, had just pushed carts loaded with rocks off the Nairobi-Mombasa highway and onto a dirt path leading to a quarry near the runway.
Their ancestors as far as the seventh generation followed the same hard path: they hauled nets, quarried the earth, felled trees, plowed and grazed the ungrateful, winter-blasted soil.
The owner, Qin Linzi, leads her staff in patriotic songs and talks about the path from working in a quarry at the age of 12 to amassing a fortune of 30 million renminbi (about $4.4 million).
Footprints of walkers and their dogs weave across the smoother white ground, along sparkling paths and tracks once followed by quarry workers and miners going to work and wagons taking stone for use on lower land.
