You come up out of the mist onto the roof of England, and there they are along the skyline — nine great towers of piled stone, some taller than a person, standing in a line against the sky. Nobody living knows who built them, or why. And beneath your boots the very ground has made up its mind: from here, the rivers run east.
This is Nine Standards Rigg, crowning Hartley Fell at six hundred and sixty-two metres on the great watershed of England. It is the parting of the waters. Everything you have walked so far — the Lakeland fells, the valley of the Eden — drained west, to the Irish Sea. From this ridge onward, every beck and river you meet is bound the other way, east to the North Sea, carrying you at last towards Robin Hood's Bay.
The Nine Standards themselves are at least eight hundred years old, and their purpose is a genuine mystery. Nobody wrote it down. They simply stand, weathered and patient, among the most evocative landmarks of the whole Coast to Coast. Generations of shepherds, drovers and now walkers have passed beneath them, and each has inherited the same unanswerable question — who piled these stones, and to what end.
And around them lies the summit's other famous feature — deep, black peat bog, so soft and so fragile that the route is split into three seasonal paths, steering walkers this way and that to let the ground recover. Look, first, at the cairns themselves — nine of them, each a tapering tower of drystone, ranged along the edge of the fell where they catch the eye for miles.
Second, notice how carefully they are built: not random heaps but shaped, deliberate structures, some conical, some flat-topped, the work of real skill. Third, turn and read the land — west behind you, the long green fall towards the Eden and the Lakeland hills; east ahead, the darker, wilder moors of Swaledale opening out, and beneath you the exact seam where the water divides.
Fourth, watch the ground underfoot — the peat hags, the black pools, the bright green moss that marks the softest bog, and the way the path is cut and cast about to spare it. And fifth, find the little viewpoint indicator nearby, a stone toposcope that names the far summits when the cloud lifts to let you see them. So who raised the Nine Standards? The honest answer is that no one knows.
Some say they marked the ancient boundary between Eden and Swaledale, a line of stone giants dividing two dales. A better tale claims they were dummy sentinels — dummy soldiers, built to fool marauding Scots into believing an English army was camped on the skyline, ready to descend.
And Wainwright himself, the man who dreamed up this whole walk, shrugged and offered the simplest theory of all: that the locals built them because they were bored, and it seemed a good idea at the time. Take your pick. Whatever the truth, the wonder of them is that they have kept their secret for so long, and every walker who reaches this ridge inherits the same delicious puzzle.
This is high, exposed moorland, and the boggy watershed demands map, compass and care — the mist can close in fast, and the peat will swallow a careless step, so keep to the marked seasonal path and don't linger if the weather turns.
From here the Coast to Coast drops east off the fell and down into Swaledale, towards the gaunt chimneys of the Old Gang smelt mills and two centuries of lead-mining history written across the moor. Take one last look at the nine silent watchers on the skyline, and begin your long descent to the North Sea. Walk safe.
