Tag Archives: moors

Walk from Buxton — Axe Edge Moor

August 24, 2018 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

We started in Buxton — old spa town, regency architecture, mummers and dancers in fancy dress in a square (Mark murmured about the horror but I rather like them), lovely park suitably filled with follies and screaming children and people with money. It does have an old sacred well spilling out geothermal waters — St Anne’s.

I was thinking about going to Poole’s Caverns, following in the tracks of Romantic poets and such, but you have to walk through a chintzy gift shop to get there — you don’t even get a cliff face and a gaping dark mouth to enter. It was full of people. We fled. We are getting old crabbit maybe, but that is hardly a good way to spend an afternoon. The woods just, however, are beautiful, despite being sandwiched between Go Ape and a caravan park.

I wanted moors and wide open spaces and we found them, but really it was a bit grim. I don’t quite know why it feels so different on this edge of the Peak District. The day was grey, to be fair, but this was as good as it got really…

The sheep, as always were amusing

There were remnants of mining up here in the form of pitted ground, the earth peaty and carved away oddly by water

There was a lovely little area with three bridges and a confluence of streams, that also came with about 40 french kids and a number of other walkers so we fled that too. This tower might have, thus, been the highlight.

And this beautiful glowing in the sky, which I have never seen before

Or this moment when we thought we were close to the promised land of the pub.

Like so many of our walks, we had such high hopes but the Cat and Fiddle had been closed for years and we had to make our sad, cold, hungry way back to Buxton.

The Wilds, Travel

Loch Lomond to Inveraray

January 6, 2018 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

With some Resting and Being Thankful in between…

Country Walks Without a Car, The Wilds

Grindleford to Hathersage: Quarries, Millstones and Little John’s Grave

September 25, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

We took the train to Grindleford with a walking plan in place, but as the train wheels span us forward across the moors our hopes were quietly dashed by the mist setting low and low across the peaks. We sat in Grindleford Station Cafe and had the best bacon and egg sandwich I may possibly have ever had, pondered plans. Set off in the wrong direction for Padmore Gorge. Turned around.

We walked through midday’s leafy dusk, boulders covered with moss and great thick trunks of trees rising from massive gnarling roots, the rush of water, twisting branches of oak dark against the emerald green. Some of the leaves glowed golden, already beginning to turn with the coming fall but the day was warm enough to climb the gorge in T-shirts.

The map showed a stone circle, an old settlement, which we decided to leave the gorge to try and find. We failed in this, but found instead a haunting landscape quarried from the earth long enough ago that its edges have been blunted, harsh planes softened by soil and growing things. Spectacular mushrooms that hardly seemed real.

We climbed out to find ourselves on a strange branching isthmus of earth, quarries falling away to each side. A multitude of paths not marked on our map, bracken and white birches. We climbed down and then up again.

A graveyard of millstones. This uncanny landscape the creation of backbreaking labour, skill expended and so much of it in vain. Moss grows on these rolling stones left to sit here across centuries, no longer needed to grind our wheat. The story is that this is Napoleon’s fault, that damn war and shifting technologies which I partly make up and poorly remember as a good story, initial provenance possibly M. John Harrison via Mark, unverified by wikipedia.

Then we crossed the road, and climbed up up onto the moors, the mist retreated to a more picturesque degree and revealed the glories of the Peak District, one of my favourite places on earth.

A woman was flying a drone, it’s ominous buzzing and angry red lights filled me with terrors imagined from places where these military toys carry surveillance and death. We left her quickly behind, the wild beauty of this place swallowed up the ominous, fragile metal thing. How soon it would rust away here, as though it had never been.

And then, briefly, the sun came out.

We continued down, down into Hathersage. Sent tired feet in search of Little John’s grave, thought of Robin Hood.

Thought more of dinner. Walked down beside the river and were sent wrong by directions to the pub. Encountered mist rising.

Then we retraced steps, climbed again, tired, the sun setting across the valley.

Happiness. More happiness in the Millstones Pub and the shape of pints and Yorkshire puddings of the very best kind, heaped with riches.

Country Walks Without a Car, From here to there, The Wilds

Marsden Moor

April 2, 2017 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

It’s spring, and that means finally a better chance to really get outside for a while, breathe deep, get out onto the moors with space all around. Happiness. We are so close now to moors and a little wildness, so close to the Peak District. A train ride away.

So today we took the train to Greenfield, and walked up along the canal to Diggle — that was crowded with Sunday walkers but nice.

Above all, the pair of Labradors that continuously launched themselves in flying leaps into the canal. They were glorious. I saw the first leap, and as we continued walking we could hear a new splash behind us after every lock, turned around to see them happily swimming back to a laborious exit.

Diggle is where the canal goes underground — the longest, highest AND deepest canal in all the UK.

We climbed up onto the Pennine Way, slowly leaving village, grass, and human beings behind us.

We climbed part of the way through the detritus removed from the tunnels beneath us…not only the canal, but three different train tunnels dug at different points. The view looking back.

Up to Brun Clough reservoir.

And then up across the moors. Golden brown enough still with winter to warm any desert girl’s heart, a little too boggy for our trainers — this is the way not taken:

This the old turnpike road we traveled:

Final freedom of Marsden moor before the descent to green fields:

Coming into Marsden:

And finally, the picturesque dignity of sheep (I jest, you know I do, I know too much about sheep now):

A delicious meal in the Brewery Riverhead Tap, and back on the train to Manchester. With a sigh I confess. We still have to go back to find the Roman road.

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City & Country, Walking

The moors

August 28, 2008 Andrea Gibbons Leave a comment

I walked out of Glenfall and down the road, past the Howwood Inn and up past the football pitch, down along the road that leads to…god damn, I’ve forgotten the little village, it’s where Michael lives, I remember walking down that road several times in company of Michael and Knoxie and Spider, too and from copious amounts of drinks, particularly one sunny Monday when I attended a barbecue with several chefs from the Johnstone area who tend to have Mondays off and I got a sunburn. First and last Scottish sunburn I must say, a unique event in the annals of history. One of the chefs lay comatose on the grass after a long wedding weekend, a wreck the like of which I have never seen after days of drinking and no sleep and a memorable but highly ill advised battle amongst the men with their wooden skean dhus which had left him with the most hideous bruises imaginable.

But today I made the first right up the hill and towards the moors, the sky was grey and it was raining, light rain, the sort of rain where the air is half water half mist and the wind blew hard against my face. Last I was up here was late spring and the day was clearer, Ben Lomond rose up in the distance covered in snow. Ben Lomond today lay shrouded in mist, unseen, looming on the edges of my imagination, the world reduced to the steep climb between the trees of Skipton wood, the gurgling of the burn to my right. I love the woods, and yet…and yet coming to the edge of the trees, seeing the green expanse of the moor rising open before me fills me with a fierce joyful sort of wildness. The wind screams up here, mist driven into your face, hair whipping around your head. Sheep watch you warily and if you come too close they bounce away (there is something about sheep running that always makes me laugh and I’ve tried to pinpoint why I find it so delightful but haven’t quite been able to put my finger on it). I wandered fiercely joyful along the curve of the moor, the bog of the old damn to my left, heather and moss and long grass beneath my feet, a sort of gothic elf today not having packed at all for moors so I had my trousers rolled up to my knees, long black socks, smart black trainers, black sweater…and I tried to take pictures but the moors in the rain defy capture.

It got exciting when I came to the first burn, having passed the hill where an early pict settlement supposedly once lay though nothing now remains…that too loomed large in my imagination as it could not be seen really through the weather. But the burn ran high, after a minute peering up and down in a vain search for likely rocks, I grinned and stepped into it, and continued to squelch happily on my way. The moors don’t go on far enough for me, they are over far too soon, and I had to make the left through the gate to pass the little farm. This time I was squelching through mud heavily enriched by cows, luckily I came to another burn and freed myself of the enrichment. And then back onto the lonely little country roads and winding down the hill and the sun came out to sparkle on the wet grass and summer flowers and pick out the shaggy coats of the cows as they stood watching me incuriously curious. This one was my favourite, all alone in his field and I spose unhappy in his loneliness, he stared at me and then followed me for 20 minutes or so, ambling slowly alongside the fence

I almost danced down the hill, past the trout fishery, down and down and back to Howwood. The world was gloriously beautiful as you can see and the small things full of wonder.

Once the sun was out the pictures came alive of course, the light against dark clouds extraordinary and beautiful. Still, the sun did not come out for long, and played hide and seek with the rain which never quite let up. It had almost disappeared again for the last look back to where I had come from: