On a dark, dark night, the lights dotted along Edale are an inviting beacon for a rider alone on the hills around the valley. It is an imposing place. Looking westward, the edges and ridges surround you and as night falls, the cloughs and brooks which have carved its shape over millennia fill with deep shadows. The foreboding darkness, hides watchful eyes from view as you make your way out of the silent, misty gloom to the sanctuary of The Nag’s Head or The Rambler. Or heading up and out of the valley the enveloping blackness fills the space behind you silently as you ride to the moonlit moorland and the safety of the starlit sky.
With Edale Cross lit up brightly in torchlight, Jacob’s Ladder plunges away into the unknown murk and gloom. Beyond the first cut of the darkening pathway, the steep hillsides steal all light, showing only a chasm of inky blackness into which a lone rider must descend to find his way back to sanctuary.

Alone.

The hills loom over you quickly. The blackness swamps you, filling the space around and behind you with the void. The paths twists and turns guard malevolent mystery just out of sight.

The feeling of something watching you from the darkness never quite leaves you, and as you ride faster and faster into the pool of light ahead of you, you swear that something is behind you, closer, closer, beside you now…. but you dare not look away from the light cast on the path in front of your wheel.

Many travellers have told of the same. A presence. Something right by your shoulder but never quite in view. Some talk of a shadow, black as the hills it stalks, preying on the terrified travellers who venture into Barber Booth at twilight. Some talk of a fleeting glance of a dark shape within the trees, watching, watching the passing of the rider. Some talk of the sound of running just behind them, fearful glances to the right and left or behind catching only a huge shadow and the glowing red eyes of a hound not of this world. And they dare not stop.

They say a nod – no more – is enough to dismiss the creature, but none have ever dared to turn and face it to find out. Though maybe they have, and we will never know….

The hound, they say, is merely a guardian, protecting the spirits of valley folk long forgotten or a way of life not known to those who live there today. But for those lone travellers who have felt the breath of the hound of Barber Booth, such stories don’t lift the terror of being alone in the dark with a beast not of our world…

On those dark, dark nights, the lights of Edale cannot be met soon enough as they cast the shadows back to the hills to wait for the next lone traveller to drop into the dark…

Happy Halloween.