Rambling retirees pass golden jubilee milestone

Retired, full or semi? Active and out-going? Have walking boots, will travel? Love the outdoors and freedom to roam? Free Tuesdays?

For half a century an ever-changing band of happy wanderers, Ilkley-based, have answered this call and come hell or high water, all weathers, all seasons, experiences great and small, have taken it all in their stride. While the boundaries have widened across the Dales, to the Lake and Peak Districts, Scottish Highlands, Snowdonia, even to the Pyrenees, they have not strayed from their belief in sociable walking which first emerged from what was little more than a stroll in a local park.

Who would have imagined a group of golden oldies with no formal structure, no officers, no subs and no rules (bar one, no dogs) could flourish over five decades. “It’s as much a support group as a walking group, a sort of secular church,” says Stuart Holtam, one of today’s key players, unofficial of course. “It’s the friendships formed as much as the quality of the walks that has kept it going for fifty years.”

For those first two years they didn’t even have a name; sisters Doris Hurlstone and Ada Revill along with Clive Dougherty simply decided one day in April 1974 to meet each Wednesday for a walk until the Ilkley Leisure in Retirement group resumed that Autumn. Numbers grew as friends were invited along and the walks grew longer. In 1975 there was the first of what was to become many holidays, both at home and abroad, in Grasmere.

With a ‘membership’ drawn from a wide circle of West and North Yorkshire (as it still is), the group needed a title. Suggestions put forward in 1976 included Rombalds Ramblers, Olicana Oldies, Autumn Leaves and Wharfedale Wanderers; no one recalls who came up with the Evergreens but Ilkley Evergreens was the unanimous choice, indicative of the “attitude of mind and the activities”. From the start a generous spirit was evident: ‘Evenings with the Evergreens’ showing slides of their walks raised money for the Bradford Lord Mayor’s Cancer and Arthritis Research appeal, as did several long distance challenges including the Dalesway (at least twice) and Cleveland Way.

There was some degree of good old Yorkshire reluctance to part with ‘brass’ too in those early post-decimalisation days. The Ilkley Gazette (where reports regularly featured) noted one week that some Evergreens returning by bus were “rather annoyed at having to pay thirty new pence for a four-mile trip from Gargrave to Skipton.”

No one’s been with the group longer than Allan Ruddock, from Keighley who joined in 1985 and still makes an occasional appearance at 93. He’s led walks on four Continents for the Ramblers, did a memorable three-legged Yorkshire Three Peaks charity walk in nine hours 20 minutes and also headed a team of firemen completing the newly opened Pennine Way in 1965. Two years later in a professional capacity with the Fire Service he was involved in a desperate attempt to save six Leeds University potholers stranded by a raging torrent in Mossdale Caverns in upper Wharfedale. Allan and fellow rescuers worked tirelessly diverting the beck from the cave entrance but couldn’t save the students whose bodies remain sealed underground to this day; it is still Britain’s worst caving tragedy.

He regularly gave first-hand accounts of the rescue operation when leading the Evergreens past the caverns. Once, as they made their return to Kettlewell there was drama at the lower end of the scale to contend with. “Barbara Payne cracked a knee-cap on a rock in a heavy fall,” he recalls. “Initially we carried her in a fireman’s lift and struggled for a mile or so. Then someone saw a new, five-barred gate on the ground, so we put some rucksacks on that to make her more comfortable and carried her downhill. We took it in turns - fortunately it was a big group that day - several at a time to carry her two miles or so into the village. It was the day before Bonfire Night, what we know around here as Mischief Night, so what the farmer made of it when he found the gate at the bottom I don’t know. Happily we’ve not had many incidents.”

Word of mouth (the usual introduction) drew him to the Evergreens, being invited along by John Bottomley to a trip to Teesdale while doing a regular works fire inspection in Bingley. “It was a poor day for the walk, cold and wet with a chill east wind behind us. I noticed I was the only one wearing Goretex; the rest were only in basic equipment and Pacamacs. There was little or no habitation en route as we headed towards the bus pick-up point in Dufton. What could we have done if we’d had an emergency? The walk could have been a disaster but we got there OK and as I climbed onto the coach I noticed everyone else was soaking wet. The first words I heard came from Peggy Lambert... ‘Look, he’s dry!’ Goretex clothing had only recently become widely available.”

He raised his safety concerns and was told to get a first aid kit; this has been carried week in, week out ever since …well, not exactly. “One week when it was my turn to take it I realised I’d forgotten it. I told John, who was driving that week and he said ‘Don’t worry, we won’t need it’. But Sod’s Law, John fell on Moughton Scar, cutting his calf badly and we had to get him to Airedale hospital where he was seen, stitched and out in half-an-hour. You can’t see that happening today,” he says wryly.

Allan has walked all over the world and is firmly convinced home territory is best. “I’m often asked what’s the most enjoyable walking country and I say without hesitation, the Dales, there is so much variety.” And what of his walking companions? “I’ve known hundreds of Evergreens and met very few odd ones who’ve been hard to get on with. It’s a brilliant organisation.”

The thankfully-rare dramas have inevitably sparked a reaction: a basic first aid session and improved medical bag resulted from the collapse of walk leader Greg Garrett in Hardcastle Crags - one of only a handful of instances when medics and mountain rescue (and Yorkshire Air Ambulance in this case) needed to be called. Another call-out came on Whernside when Allan himself felt the effects of the steep ascent; he enjoyed a stretcher ride down courtesy of the Cave Rescue Organisation but didn’t need to be hospitalised. The group’s response was to buy a shelter, also carried weekly, to help keep any casualty warm.

The CRO team, incidentally, were asked at the time if it was annoying that a group of old folk were even attempting Whernside and required their services? “Don’t worry about that,” one of the team replied. “We all hope to be doing the same when we get to your age.” A donation quickly found its way to these volunteers without whom a mountain rescue service wouldn’t exist. All teams fund their own running costs; there is no direct government support.

As in all walks of life, time moves on: specialised outdoor wear and boots (both winter and summer) replaced stout shoes and basic leisure wear. Younger legs joined too as early retirement became more common, bringing more mileage in those boots and a need for different pace groups. As ever the Evergreens adapted; currently it’s a 10-mile main group, an 8-mile one and a 6-miler in the pipeline.

Another mid-1980s recruit, Dennis Taylor, was walking regularly with the Ramblers when one of them suggested joining the Evergreens. “Most people were leading walks of their own by then and I thought I could do that, so I got out the maps and asked myself ‘Where do we not walk?’ I thought of Whernside and saw there are three tarns to the north with a shingle beach, good incidentally for skimming stones, where few seemed to walk. That became my contribution to the walks programme and it is still being walked today.”

Its neighbour, Penyghent, is the scene of one of the Evergreens’ most memorable moments - their own personal flypast. Dennis, now 95 and a former BT engineer and manager, was also a qualified pilot, who flew more than 250 hours in total. He had something special in mind for his friends one Tuesday. “I knew they would be taking their lunchbreak on the summit so I hired a plane, a Piper Warrior, from where I flew, Sherburn-in-Elmet, costing £100 an hour I recall. I’d let one or two into the secret and so came alongside the hilltop and flew over them. Tony Cracknell got a picture but just in case he missed first time I went around the side and approached a second time.”

He too has nothing but praise for the group. “What I like about the Evergreens is there’s no constitution, no secretary or officers. People do what is needed to be done, what’s required.”

Former headmaster Stuart Holtam singles out IT specialist Tony Cracknell for his admin commitment over the last two decades. “His library of 200 plus tried and tested walks all within 90 minutes of Ilkley, digitally plotted route maps emailed each week to walkers with every possible detail, is an amazing resource and a great strength,” he says.

“We must have clocked up 50,000 miles walking in our lifetime,” reckon Roy and Pauline Weatherall, both 86, who keep brief hand-written logs of all their walks. They began walking with the Evergreens in 2001, at a time says Roy “when you never got in front of the leader. The one thing we liked about them was they never cancelled a walk.”

The group’s beliefs have always been to leave as you find, shut the gates, don’t trample crops, don’t disturb livestock and always approach the landowner if you need a favourable detour where there’s no public right of way. “We had a good relationship with a farmer on Fountains Fell enabling us to cut out a sizeable bit of road,” Roy recalls. “We borrowed a key from him for a locked gate further on and then dropped it off at the next farm down the track. It worked well.” Well, until Robert Taylor returned the key one day and was bitten by a free-ranging farm dog.

“Best thing about the Evergreens? Without a shadow of doubt the banter, says Frank Baildon, now 82 who walked more than two decades with the group. “The social side is the bit I miss but happily, about twenty of us old Evergreens still meet up the second Monday of each month at the Out of the Box cafe in Ilkley for an hour’s chat. This Monday social is great for me,” he says.

One of his many highs included taking Peggy Lambert up Penyghent at the age of 91. An inspirational and irrepressible figure in Ilkley life for generations, Peggy walked with the Evergreens over several decades and passed away a year ago, aged 103. She was a well-loved teacher at the town’s junior school and one of her former pupils, TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh dedicated an oak bench to her this April at the town’s Manor House, of which she was a long-time supporter.

* The Evergreens will mark the Golden Jubilee by revisiting two of their early walks: Beamsley Beacon on 4 June and the Doubler Stones, Silsden, on 9 July. A buffet lunch, slide show and archives display is to be held at St Peter’s Church hall, Addingham on Friday 5 July.