White Peak Walks: The Southern Dales. Mark Richards
Hill
Walk 26 Thorpe Cloud and Thorpe
Walk 27 Tissington Trail, Thorpe and Mapleton
Walk 28 Tissington Trail and Parwich
Walk 29 High Peak Trail and Roystone Grange
Walk 30 Harborough Rocks, High Peak Trail, Roystone and Ballidon
APPENDIX 1 Route summary table
APPENDIX 2 Recommended reading
APPENDIX 3 Useful contacts
Dove Dale from Bunster Hill
PREFACE
There is a pleasure to be gained in walking pastures old as well as new, as I have found this last year while retracing past expeditions. At the same time I have discovered many new aspects and exquisitely beautiful faces of the White Peak landscape. For all the subtle changes one thing remains the same: the quality of the walking experience.
The two editions of this guide span both a generation and monumental changes in guidebook production and in the world of communication. Thus it is that I am able to offer a new kind of guide, one that can enable you to share with others your own best walk experiences through the author’s website www.markrichards.info. Go to Peak Park & Stride within Walk Free for a bigger picture of the author’s own wanderings, and Contact Me for entries to MagaScene, where readers’ images and reflections will be displayed. Through this website this guide can bring readers closer together and also provide information about route problems or changes, with a view to improving future editions.
Gone are the handscribed pages and the intimate, if indulgent, line drawings of the first edition. No longer is the guide set in stone: the 30 structured walks offered here provide new horizons of shared enjoyment to a constantly unfolding story.
View back across the upper Hamps valley to Lower Green (Walk 2)
INTRODUCTION
National parks have their cultural origins in the US with Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, established in 1872. Yellowstone – managed for, and on behalf of, the American nation – was the first of over sixty major tracts of virgin natural heritage land purchased before Western-style despoliation.
Traditionally in England, by contrast, all land has been privately owned, until first the National Trust and then later the Peak Park Authority began to purchase particular areas of countryside for the public good and the welfare of the wild land itself.
In 1951 the Peak District – 555 square miles of breathing space between the cities of Manchester and Sheffield – became the first National Park in the UK and rightly so. It has everything a truly national landscape should: cultural integrity, geographical variety and vitality, treasured wildlife habitats and a diversity of recreational opportunities. In short, it is a landscape of the emotions, to treasure and inspire for the health and wealth of the nation. It is also ideally situated for the recreation and well-being of a huge ‘doorstep’ population.
Swallow Brook valley and Chrome Hill from the summit of Hollins Hill (Walk 13)
Bunster Hill and Thorpe Cloud from the path rising from Mapleton (Walk 27)
This much-loved upland marks a major landscape transition. Suddenly the placid woods and pastures of middle England are exuberantly transformed into modest mountainhood. Soothing ridge and furrow farmland turns to high rolling pastures and enchanting craggy dales. It is here that the North is born upon the swelling slopes of the emergent Pennine chain, the distinctive spine of England. The oldest folk name for the area is Peakland, ‘land of the peac-dwellers’. Derived from Old English, it captures the characteristic pointed hills of the area known as the White Peak.
The White Peak takes its name from the underlying limestone, in contrast to the flanking scarpland moors of millstone grit, expressively known as the Dark Peak. The core carboniferous limestone formed in a tropical sea some 350 million years ago was ringed by coral reefs, the basis of such amazing little peaks as Parkhouse Hill and Thorpe Cloud. The millstone grit that once overlaid the limestone was scoured away by glacial erosion. Where it remains, this coarse rock dominates the near eastern, northern and western horizons of the White Peak in the form of escarpments and heather moorlands. Some of these feature in this book and its companion volume The Northern Dales as they make patchwork incursions and offer fascinating viewpoints and perspectives into the plateau.
Bronze Age to Barn Conversions
Almost every hilltop in the incised plateau of mountain limestone at the centre of the Peak District is crowned by a Bronze Age burial tumulus, locally known as a ‘low’. (Both the highs and the lows of the Peak are elevated and uplifting!) Man has always found a sustainable living and ancestral inspiration in this special land. Stand upon the summit of Mam Tor or in the midst of Arbor Low stone circle and you feel the enduring magnetism this rolling hillscape exerts. Faintly traced over the limestone uplands are hints of a long agricultural past. The grey-lichened irregular enclosure walls chequering the plateau eloquently express that continuing sense of longevity, proof that man and nature have succeeded in finding a durable common cause.
Despite the damp climate, the permeable carboniferous limestone bedrock has given the capture and year-round availability of water a heightened importance for human settlement and farm livestock. All White Peak and even some Dark Peak villages keep alive the ancient practice of well dressing, founded on the perennial fear of a loss of life-giving water. These colourful and imaginative displays attract visitors throughout the summer. They may seem symbolic in this age of piped mains water, but whether you consider water God-given or – as the pagans felt – a reward for a respect for Mother Earth, it can never be taken for granted. It is ultimately part of nature’s dominion.
Herb-rich White Peak pasture near Alstonefield (Walk 21)
The sensitive wanderer may concur that Peakland is a pastoral rhapsody. With sheep and cattle the mainstay of agriculture there is a special pleasure in striding through a succession of herb-rich meadows, past grazing flocks and herds, occasionally pungent with the whiff of field-spread slurry. You may spot the odd landsman checking his stock, quad-biked, or aboard his tractor mowing or harvesting silage. Rusting machinery may be spotted in field corners making a link with the recent past. Intermingled with this farming life another more intimate and eye-catching world exists. Through the summer months a wealth of wild flowers clings to field margins, rocky ledges, secretive dales, woods and byways. Many walkers halt before a lovely scene and on lifting their cameras find they are drawn to focus instead on the enchanting petals delicately swaying in the foreground, like the delicate blue flowers of the meadow crane’s-bill against the irregular backdrop of rustic field walls.
Black Lion Inn, Butterton (Walk 3)
Although full of recreational opportunities the Peak District is every inch a working landscape. Stone quarries abound in both rock zones, some dormant and others active, a dominant component of the modern economy. Lead mining has left its mark and the vestigial traces can provide intriguing discoveries on many a walk.