Peak District

The day before the August Bank Holiday, my friend was restless to go somewhere and he threw out an invitation to a couple of us to go to the Peak District the next day. Having wheels to the Peak District, an England bucket-list item for me, was more than enough to outbalance any ideas I had about working on the holiday, and soon I was looking up walking routes.

It was supposed to be a three-hour drive, which we felt was reasonable for a day trip if we left early enough. As it turned out, a miscommunication with Apple Maps led us on a 1.5 hour detour (ending up, instead of in the heart of the Peak District, in the middle of a nothing town near Newark-on-Trent, which we should have been suspicious of before checking the map on arrival because there were no real hills to speak of). We grinned and bore it, took a detour back through Sheffield (an interesting glimpse of the industrial North) and got to the Peak District just before lunchtime.

Either because the guys were so eager to get out of the car at the first sign of cliffs and people with daypacks, or because the spirit of the trip was spontaneity, we stopped in a town not on any of the top 10 lists we had been looking at, called Bamford. I was a little disappointed not to maximize our time by going for something tried and true according to the internet, but I also don’t mind spontaneity (and to be fair, the last trip with this friend, to Suffolk, was quite rewarding running entirely on serendipity). What we agreed on was that we wanted to see heather, which the internet had told us was currently in bloom, and we had passed several alluring, purple-mantled hillsides on the drive already.

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We consulted Google and made our way along the residential hillside populated with rock-walled houses to the nearest pub/café (The Angler’s Rest) to use the toilet and ask for directions. We could see a rocky escarpment rising over the houses; it couldn’t be too far to check it out at least. Indeed, the bartender pointed us just up the road to a closed footpath—take it anyway—to Bamford Edge. The path climbed at approximately a 45-degree angle for a manageable amount of time puffing, and when we got out of the trees at the top, we saw a road where people were parked (ah…maybe we were a bit impulsive with our parking after all) and flocking to the cliff trail just above the road. And the trail wound through heather.

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The palette of the hills was slate-gray, cloud-gray, warm purple, bracken-green, earthy brown. The heather, with its cushions of small bell-shaped flowers and twisting branches, gave everything a springy, spongey look. The earth under our feet was also springy, as if broken down heather stems had just recently made a layer of soil over the root system. Sheep with black faces and curved horns were wandering freely through the bracken and clumps of sedge taller than them; a funny barking bird call drew our attention to a rooster-like red grouse announcing himself from a rock. The trail took us easily to the top of the cliff, which was more like a string of large ledge-shaped boulders embedded in the side of a nice green hill. The hill had been promising views all along, and delivered, even if the cliff itself didn’t rise too high above the ground. The palette of the view was jewel-green muted a bit by clouds, woven into sinuous patches by dark lines of trees and rock walls. At the center of it all was a steaming smokestack and a quarry, but it was almost far enough away to ignore.

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The coarse sandstone—gritstone—boulders that made up the Edge were eye candy in themselves, standing out in jagged gray against the soft textures of the heather and bracken, cracked and stacked and carved. We saw millstones piled haphazardly with boulders; I tried to imagine how they would have been useful there, but later learned the millstone carvers had once worked among the rocks and left these half-finished and unused when the land went to a snuff manufacturing baron who wanted to hunt grouse. Though the cliff wasn’t high, it was easy to stand on a rock ledge and get a deceptively dramatic picture against the green hills (there was practically a queue for the nicest ledge). Below us people were rock climbing.

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We wandered away from the crowd onto the gently sloping, heather-smothered backside of the hill and got a thrill when we saw a much bigger cliff emerging over the horizon. I imagined a sweeping valley opening between us and this rim of rock, but as it turned out, the intervening space was a flat moor, dipping and rising just enough to lift the distant escarpment into relief. We could see a trail bright against the heather in the distance, but it didn’t come anywhere near us; we only saw little sheep trails disappearing into the bracken. When Google assured us, however, that the pin we dropped on that cliff was only an hour’s walk away by established routes, and it looked to be even shorter as the crow flies, we took up our spontaneity again and set off straight into the moor.

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The sheep trail quickly petered out, but we pressed on. I pulled out my compass app, imagining, despite Google’s assurance, getting to the middle of the moor and seeing nothing but heather for miles. It wasn’t just heather under our feet; starry green mounds of moss and golden bunches of grass and rushes sprouted between shrubs. Any of these plants could make healthy barriers to walking, but there was almost always another sheep trail. We were thoroughly in sheep territory. They eyed us from behind their sedges and scattered when we got too close, their bright woolly bums hightailing it through the purple. The purple and the gold and the gray and the green lay flat and windswept all around, saturating the air with something like melancholy, something lonely and gothic but not unwelcome, like a Brontë novel.

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We never did lose sight of the blue ridges on either horizon. Our path wasn’t straightforward, however, as we picked our way through the layers of vegetation and as the ground got boggier. Toward the end we had to dash through a waist-high sea of rushes over less-than-solid ground (we also drew a parallel to the journey through the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, but our moor was nowhere near that ghastly). Instead of finding the path we had seen rising obliquely to the top of the cliff, we ended up approaching the cliff directly and finding a break where we could scramble up. Actually, it was more of a walk up a grassy ramp between rocks. There must be something about the light and the scale of the landscape in the Peak District, or else our expectations, that make things look bigger from far away (this would not be the last time). This escarpment was more impressive than Bamford Edge though; it snaked farther than we could see in either direction and the ledge-rocks achieved a good dramatic height in places. Later I would figure out through internet sleuthing (since it wasn’t labeled on Google maps for some reason) that we had found Stanage Edge, one of the top 10 walks I had been interested in, after all. So our spontaneous intuition converged with the tried-and-true in the end.

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The top of the cliff revealed a plateau stretching away from us, rimmed all around by that stark squared-off gray gritstone, and below us was a wilder view than the one from Bamford Edge, rolling purple heath marbled with gold and green to the horizon. I was not surprised to learn that Kiera Knightley had stood on one of these ledges in a pensive/dramatic scene in Pride and Prejudice—though I don’t know which one, several of my photos more or less fit the bill when I compared them side by side. I couldn’t stop taking them; the rocks jutting out over the heath demanded to be framed at every new vantage point.

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One of the first things we noticed when we got to the plateau of Stanage Edge was what appeared to be a ruined castle in the distance. I had heard something about a castle somewhere in the Peak District, and though I didn’t think this was it, it still had promise. So we headed that direction along the photogenic cliff edge, which we paused to look over every few meters. We noticed in one of the flat rocks a roughly circular pool full of iron-colored water and a number carved in the stone above it, and joked about portals to Narnia. We really had no other ideas, though. Later we saw more of them, each with their own number and grooves leading from the edges of the rock into the pool, and the only new idea that came was breeding pools for the flies thick in the air. Internet sleuthing came to the rescue—they’re grouse troughs commissioned by that baron who wanted to hunt grouse over 100 years ago. I’m not sure what drinking troughs would accomplish, if more grouse were able to nest on the plateau or if it drew them into the open, or what. All the information I’ve found is from blurbs on photography blogs. We clearly weren’t the only ones to be drawn by the pools’ mystical-quirky aura.

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But back to the castle—the closer we got, the more apparent it became that it was not a castle; the walls seemed to visibly shrink as we approached. It did happen to have something of a boggy moat around it, but the three standing rock walls enclosed an area about the size of a vault toilet. The stones in the walls were rugged enough to be picturesque (the internet thinks it was a game warden shelter or something from grouse hunting days), but our expectations were hard to recover from. We had to content ourselves with stunning views of the heathland instead.

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With our time short, we headed back along the cliffs, eventually reaching the official trail over the cliff we had seen from across the moor. This launched us on the last leg of our adventure, which was to loop for a few miles back through the countryside to find our car again. We walked on a narrow road past those jewel green, rock-walled fields, friendly horses grazing over the walls, stone cottages with gardens and names like Netherhurst (and available to rent on AirBnB), and even through fairyland-status woods with a waterfalling brook and wooden stairs disappearing up the steep hill that we couldn’t not follow (it turned out to just cut the corner off the road we were on and land us back in Bamford).

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Back on the long, long traffic-choked road home (after cake at The Angler’s Rest), I did my internet sleuthing to figure out where we had been. I was tickled to discover we had found Stanage Edge and bummed to discover we had missed seeing the nearby estate that inspired the setting of Jane Eyre, North Lees Hall, which our loop had circumvented. It was too short a visit. But on the whole, spontaneity and heather season treated us well. I’ll just have to go back.

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