Peak District Traverse - Review

Well, I've been back a week, blisters have more or less healed and the country is gripped by a heatwave that would probably have made for nicer walking than the clouds, occasional light showers, and solid drizzle on the Tuesday morning that I actually got.  Time to gather my thoughts then...

Beer!

This was a pretty good route if I say so myself.  Walking out of, and then into cities worked well, and if anything added to what was already a wide variety of terrain.  For sure, after the first couple of days there weren't many hills, but there was still plenty of climbing in and out of dales, even ignoring the detour to Buxton (which is probably for the best).  Indeed, looking at the twenty-five miles or so South of Edale, I'd have to rate that as a better walk than the featureless, boggy slog that is the last thirty to forty miles of the Pennine Way.  Now I love the Way, and I know its history and the reasons why it starts and ends where it does, nonetheless I do wonder if it might be a better walk if it started in the southern Peak District and finished at a more southerly point on the Scottish Border - say, a little to the West of Kielder Water.

Nag's Head.

I suspect my fourth day through the farming country of North Staffs, on the other hand, is never going to rank that highly in the annals of long distance paths.  That said, there were days on the Coast to Coast that weren't unlike it, barring the way that the footpaths were very rarely used - which was a bit of a shame.  I think if I did this section again, I'd want a larger scale map with field boundaries... and maybe a machete to deal with the nettles.

Things I learnt from this walk :

1) A torch of some kind is not a luxury.
2) Putting all your food and accomodation eggs in the same basket is not a good plan.
3) I can do 20 mile plus days, with pack, pretty much from the get-go, this is good.
4) I need to pay more attention to my feet if I'm doing this though.
5) Even the warmest of my sleeping bags isn't really up to a September night in Yorkshire.
6) On the other hand, a sweater makes a fine emergency pair of long johns.
7) The 'grand canyon' rucksack has altogether too many straps, and even the ones it should have are too long.
8) My HTC smartphone actually works perfectly well as a camera + blogging device, barring the way it has eaten one of my posts.  I may have to 'root' the thing to prevent this happening in future...

And enough blogging already.  Fear not, I am not going to update every week with my thoughts on politics or whatever.  The blog may return at some point in the winter with, 'Timmy goes Skiing'.

Stoke.

Oh, and if these photos were not enough for you, go see some more.

Stoke!

Miles today : 16
Miles remaining : 0

Boats, outside the Boat Inn.

I must admit, I'm expecting things to be a bit easier today, after the trials of Sunday, and a very long day yesterday.  I only have 16 miles to go, and coming out of the Peak District the going should be easier - no more dales.  But the rain is coming down, and my tent is wet and heavy, and the blister on my right foot is not happy about me walking forty-five miles or so over the last couple of days on it.  Maybe I should have brought some plasters...

As I get into Staffordshire it becomes apparent that the footpaths here are not well used.  In fact often I find myself in a field of long, wet grass, with no suggestion that anybody other than me has walked this way in a long time.  I follow the line given by my GPS unit, and generally speaking come up to a delapidated stile or a gate, often horribly overgrown with nettles, thistles, even holly.  And with no evidence for a path on the ground, it's all too easy to walk the wrong side of a field boundary, requiring either backtracking or more clambering over walls.

A couple of kilns survive the general devastation.

The worst of these comes a little way after lunch (a pleasant stop at the Boat Inn, Cheddleton), when I find not just a barbed wire fence, but a substantial stream blocking my path.  I manage to spot a place where the fence looks climbable, and there is a handy stepping stone and a muddy bank I can clamber up, so over my pack goes and I only lose a little blood getting over the wire.  Things go downhill a bit when the stepping stone turns out to have a large cowpat on it... and then much more downhill when the muddy bank is not, in fact, mud.  Nothing to be done but keep going, for all that the cowshit is ankle deep, and my hiking shoes do not reach to my ankles.  I walk another mile, literally in the shit, before I can find some water deep enough to wash it off.

I do eventually find some decent terrain on Wetley Moor, and then it's downhill into Stoke, the final mile or two along the canal providing a somewhat depressing end to the walk - fields of rubble and semi ruined buildings a testament to the area's lost industry.  The last few hundred yards through a park is nice enough though, and then I'm at the pub - and Austin has picked one reserved for the away fans for tonight's Stoke City / Tottenham game.  Yay.

An actual pretty bit of canal in Stoke.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

So, Yesterday...

On the way up Mam Tor - the bump on the horizon is Kinder Scout.

Actually, up until 7:20 it was fine.  Nice climb up Mam Tor, easy going on the Limestone Way and Pennine Bridleway, scenic if tough climbs in and out of Monk's and Miller's Dales.  Then I reach the Waterloo Hotel, expecting beer, food and camping... and it's shut.  I guess I could have called to check in advance, didn't get around to it.

This may have been a mistake.

But I can cope.  Looking at the map, Buxton is only five miles away, I can be there for nine.  Cars on the A6 are moving a bit so I look for an alternative, and sure enough I can take a byway for a mile, then a bit of road, then the Midshires Way into Buxton - it even passes through a campsite.  So I head off along the byway.

This was probably a mistake.

Soon enough I hit a snag - some of the byway is private, and a high metal gate bars my way.  I track around, climb a wall, and find myself on an old landfill site, surrounded by hissing methane valves and fat black piping.  In the end I reach the road, and then a bridleway heading Northeast.  It certainly looks like it should be the Midshires Way... with hindsight though, I know that was ten yards further down.  So I take the wrong turn, and after a couple of hundred yards it peters out... what to do.  I could backtrack and follow the road back to the A6, leaving me a bare half mile from where I started.  Or press on, I can see the lights of Buxton, just where my compass says it should be, and surely I will run into he Midshires Way if I'm not on it now.  I press on towards the lights.

This is very definitely a mistake.

Deepdale, in daylight on Monday morning.

At first it's easy enough, I regularly meet field boundaries but climbing them isn't too bad.  But as night falls it gets harder to see my footing on the walls, and I lose altitude, the lights of Buxton dipping behind a hill.  And then suddenly I'm facing a wall, and I can't see the field on the other side.  Peering over it is like staring into an abyss.  I now know this is Deepdale, a steep sided gorge that the Midshires Way crosses in a series of scrambles and switchbacks.  No way am I getting down there in the dark, with no path, so I head North along the edge of the chasm, looking for the A6.

Many walls and much barbed wire stand in my way, but eventually I'm just a few yards from the road, sadly those yards consist of a vertiginous slope, thickly wooded and so visibility is nil.  I take it on my backside, and use a suitably springy sapling to help me down the final eight foot sheer drop.
It's 9pm, and I'm still three miles from Buxton.  Thankfully I only walk one of them before some nice mountain bikers pick me up... there is just time for some beer and pizza before retiring to he aforementioned campsite.

Oh yeah, today.  Hartington, Alstonfield, childhood memories, pitched in the dark again, yadda yadda...

Three trails in one, Midshires Way, Pennine Bridleway and a cycle track.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Aaargh

Miles today : 23ish
Miles remaining : 33


I'm hoping the trick is to have a good data connection before trying to publish - we shall see.
Anyway, another nice day, and a good climb up to Hope Cross and down brings me to Edale, start of the Pennine Way of course and something of a place of pilgrimage for me.  I feel a powerful urge to head north, sod going back, go to Scotland instead...

But no.  At least now I can answer a question I might have asked a few years back when I finished here after walking the way southbound - what if I keep walking?

Wrote the above at lunch.  Turns out the answer is, a bloody nightmare.  May explain more tomorrow.

First Pennine Way signpost at Edale

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Technology Fail

So, wrote a big post but it is stuck.  Maybe I can post a little one?

Llamas.  Or maybe Alpacas.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

Peak District Traverse - Preview

So, the first bit of travelling with attached blog.  Not my first walk ever obviously...  This will be a four day route, totalling 67 miles or thereabouts, mostly through the scenic Peak District National Park.  I'll start in the fair city of Sheffield, renowned for its production of steel, cutlery and intelligent pop/indie music.  The finishing point will be in Stoke-on-Trent, famous for its pottery.

It's not a long walk, around a quarter of the length of the Pennine Way for instance, but four days is all I have.  Planning this, I had a few goals from the start - the route should be four days long, mostly in a National Park, and start and finish at places with direct train access to London with a reasonable journey time.  A glance at a map of the UK shows National Parks tend to be some way from London, and in fact the only one easily accessible by train is the Peak District, which has the Midland Main Line to the East, and the West Coast Main Line to the West.

That still leaves plenty of possible options for endpoints, so I've fairly randomly picked Sheffield and Stoke-on-Trent - the first 'cos my old friend Chris lives there and it is cool, the second as about the furthest South possible, so nearer to London and allowing more of a North-South traverse of the Park. Once I'd settled on the Peak District, there were a few places I wanted to include, a bit of the Pennine Bridleway, the stepping stones in Wolfcote Dale, etc. Then it just became a matter of ensuring each day was around 16 or 17 miles, with a pub halfway, and a campsite plus pub to finish.  Speaking of pubs - time to get to one and meet Chris.

This means getting a train though - and I hate trains. On this occasion I get on it OK, but the ticket collection machine refuses to work, so I have no ticket...  As it turns out, no Inspector arrives between London and Doncaster. I feel oddly disappointed. Changing trains at Doncaster, I manage to get the ticket - there are two references and I was using the wrong one.  Obviously.  But anyway... pub time!

Me, Chris, Austin and Claire.

Photos to go with this post can be found here.

And so it begins...

Just what the internet needs, another blog.

Well, it isn't as though I am forcing anybody to read it. Indeed, I'm not sure I really expect many people to do so, certainly for the time being. And frankly that isn't a problem... while I guess at some point in the future friends and family may use it to keep updated on whatever I'm doing, for now the thing is for my own benefit as much as anything. That will remain true in the future as well.

Essentially the thing is intended to be an aide-memoire, or even a substitute-for-memoire. I guess I have as much memory space in my brain as most people, but the fact is that while retrieval from it works pretty well for technical work related stuff, or plotlines of obscure 1970s TV shows, when it comes to my actual personal experiences it isn't so good. Maybe I have filled it up with the aforementioned TV plotlines etc, or maybe I've killed the necessary parts of my brain with beer, but anyway...

This isn't a problem with the day to day grind of work of course, I really don't need to be able to recall exactly how many coffees I drank on a given day. But when I'm off doing something a bit more exciting, which for me will mean some kind of expedition, it would be nice to have some sort of record, either in my brain or outside of it. So maybe the act of writing a short piece on what happened each day will help commit things to the grey matter... or if not, at least I can go back and read my own blog to find out what I was up to.

Eventually I suppose, it will be impossible to say whether I remember things actually happening, or me writing them down, or reading what I had written later on. I'm not sure that is terribly important though.

Of course none of this would be necessary if my mate Alex would stop wasting his time being a pillar of the UK's high tech engineering sector and just follow me around with a camcorder. Although, not twenty four hours a day obviously.

Anyway... enough wittering, on with the travelling. This will begin tomorrow with a little trek in the Peak District, an entry describing the plan for this may well turn up later.

Needed a picture for the first entry, so walked east for a bit, this is one of the 'Pirate Ships' by Tobacco Dock