Rest Days
Rest days can be incorporated into any walking holiday package at an additional £50.00 per person per night

Solo Travellers
Solo travellers please contact us or use the booking form to send your proposed itinerary including dates, and we will price accordingly. Where possible, we take advantage of existing bookings from other clients to ensure you receive a cost effective service.

Alternative Itineraries
For alternative itineraries to those provided for this route, please contact us, or use the Booking Form to submit your proposed itinerary and number of participants and we will quote accordingly.

Walking Season Dates
Prices are based on the walk starting after 1st April and ending before 30th September. For walks outside those dates, please contact us. We provide a reduced out of season service, but still manage to meet the needs of most customers who contact us during this period.

Walk Information

The Stanza Stones Walk is a collaboration between iMove, Ilkley Literature Festival, Simon Armitage and Pennine Prospects. It is a 44-mile upland walk from Marsden to Ilkley visiting the six Stanza Stones carved with poems written by Simon Armitage, the walk is devised by Mick Melvin.

In 2010 Ilkley Literature Festival and imove began a unique and ambitious project: commissioning leading UK poet, Simon Armitage, to create a series of poems responding to the landscape of the Pennine Watershed in the run up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Festival asked letter carver Pip Hall and her apprentice Wayne Hart to carve Simon’s poems in six atmospheric locations along the Watershed from Marsden, where Simon was born to Ilkley, the home of Ilkley Literature Festival. Each stone took weeks with Pip spending days out on the moors. At each end of the Trail, on Pule Hill and Ilkley Moor, local drystone waller Nick Ferguson created a Poetry Seat – where you can sit and admire the view or even write your own poem. Both these initiatives were supported by Pennine Prospects, a South Pennines rural regeneration company.

About the Stanza Stones Project by Simon Armitage
For many thousands of years people have been coming to moors around West Yorkshire to offer their prayers and express their desires in the form of carved stones. The Stanza Stones poems are my contribution to that unbroken and ongoing dialogue, and consist of six carved poems sited across the South Pennine Watershed, all celebrating or paying their respects to the element which gave shape and form to this region, namely water. The water that sculpted the valleys, the water that powered the industries, the water we take for granted but which is our most precious life-giving substance.

Each carved poem describes water in one of its many forms, hence a Beck Stone, a Puddle Stone, a Mist Stone, a Rain Stone and a Dew Stone. The Snow Stone, the first to be carved, is situated in an old quarry on Pule Hill above the village of Marsden where I was born and grew up.

In my experience the moors are both brutal and blissful, an essential part of our ecology, economy, our vocabulary and our subconscious. So as well as being landmarks in their own right, I hope the Stanza Stones act as beacons of inspiration, encouraging people to engage with West Yorkshire and Lancashire’s great outdoors in thought, word and deed. And those looking hard enough might stumble across a seventh Stanza Stone, a secret stone left in an unnamed location within the Watershed area, waiting to be discovered and read.

OS Explorer Maps
OL21 - South Pennines
288 - Bradford & Huddersfield
297 - Lower Wharfedale & Washburn Valley

Guide Books
"Stanza Stones" by Simon Armitage - Published by Enitharmon Press - ISBN: 978-1907587306

"Stanza Stones PDF Download" by Tom Lonsdale - Published by Ilkley Literature Festival.

ViewRanger Digital Maps
Digital Maps can be viewed on a modern smartphone using an appropriate ‘app’, which is usually provided as part of any map purchase. Brigantes are happy to recommend ViewRanger for all your digital mapping and mobile navigation needs.

The ViewRanger Shop provides Ordnance Survey maps for all parts of the UK, as well as the National Trail and selected Long Distance Paths. Map segments can also be purchased ad-hoc, allowing you to cover any walk you plan to take.