A few miles out of the last village and halfway up the valley side, a lone pub stands next to a bleak reservoir. Here, the line of street lights comes to an abrupt end, and the road continues snaking upwards and into the horizon without them.

Climbing still higher, the road over-the-tops continues past a patchwork quilt of dry stone walled fields, and out into a rolling expanse of windswept heather and peat bogs.  Known locally as the 'Moors,' a handful of remote farmhouses lie scattered along their perimeter edge.

With the passing years, little changes here but the intermittent arrival of new wooden crosses and wreathes of flowers by the roadside.  But like landlocked driftwood, they’re soon swept away by the elements, and rotting and falling, they’ll eventually disintegrate and sink back into the sea of peaty moorland.

The road in question is one that I’ll always be able to trace in my mind’s eye, but it could be any one of those that riddle the Pennines.  The remote location and sweeping bends have long since made them a favourite haunt of not just the speed freaks, but of all the disparate groups who go there seeking a moment's solace from society.

Marshy and constantly brooding, the moors are a barren and inhospitable place.  Always slightly dark and unyielding, it’s as if the light seems to fall differently there.  A few valleys over, the Brontes brought worldwide fame to this unique landscape, but here on Saddleworth Moor, there are no such literary associations.  Notoriously, it’s infamy is that of the child victims of the Moors Murders who still lie interred here in some undiscovered hollow.  Forever sensationalist, the British press were quick to glib over the reality, and the tragic incident served only to reinforce that widely held perception - “It’s grim up North.”

So on a national scale, it’s perhaps unsurprising that little is ever mentioned of these moors.  The locals, however, are not the type to be swayed by popular opinion.  They know that obscurity will forever be a part of this area’s enduring charm, and they’re happy enough left alone to enjoy it.

With an etymology deeply rooted in Celtic, Nordic and Anglo-Saxon culture, many of the local place names - Midgehole, Cold Edge Dams, Bleaklow, Dark Peak, Blackstone Edge, Hail Storm Hill, Holme Moss, Bridestones, Marsden, Nant Sarah’s -  sound as if they could have been lifted directly from an epic work of high fantasy.  In everything from the behaviour of the people to their local dialect, a marked regional difference is patently apparent.

When the trans-Pennine M62 motorway was finally opened in the 1970’s, it was hailed as a milestone of engineering due to the difficulty of traversing the Pennine peat bogs at Windy Hill.  After almost losing heavy earth moving equipment in pockets nearly 7 metres deep, the construction teams finally resorted to simply digging out and removing the bogs en masse.  The extract below describes their experiences in the area.

Inevitably, as in many close knit communities where identity is so often derived from regional difference, the building of the new motorway was met with some local resistance.  An archive BBC documentary about its construction, "Highway in the Sky", bizarrely relates how one disgruntled Pennine farmer rigged up loudspeakers on the roof of his farmhouse in Moselden Pasture, and for who knows what purpose, subjected the construction workers to a routine blasting of the same looped rock song everyday.

Often jokingly portrayed as a latent fear of the wider world, this type of sentiment is parodied to perfection in the English comedy series "The League of Gentlemen" which is inspired by and filmed in the area. Here, in this uncannily poignant clip, construction workers are carrying out the surveying work for the New Road...

When so little remains constant, fighting change is invariably just a case of delaying the inevitable.  Strange, therefore, that up there on the moors, one resolute farmhouse seems to have somehow withstood the misfortune of once being situated directly in the path of progress.

Stott Hall Farm is the 18th century farmhouse which sits right between the 2 carriageways of the M62.  Now an icon synonymous with the area, the farm appears to demonstrate that whilst progress cannot be stopped, it can at least be diverted.  Urban legend persists that Ken Wilde, the now deceased tenant farmer who lived in the property, took on the state and refused to sell.  But once a motorway has been approved, compulsory purchase orders grant the right to buy up for destruction any property which impedes construction.  Far from being a testament to one man’s obstinacy, the reality was simply that the inclined moorland could not have supported the motorway, and the carriageways had to be split.

But beneath the romanticism of the myth lies a steadfast devotion to this land.  Even after the construction of the motorway, Ken Wilde remained farming here until he died and was buried high up on the nearby hillside.  Now in different hands, Stott Hall remains a working farmhouse.

The M62 opened this area to commuting urbanites who raised house prices beyond the reach of the locals.  But change was already coming in the shape of the collapsing textile industry, the closing of the mills, the high rates of rural unemployment, and the consequent exodus of the young to the cities.