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.