Guide to walks in the northern Peak District dales - England, UK

• Location
• Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Route
• Reviews
• Further Reading

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: it is often said that 50 million people live within one hour’s drive of the park.

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 features such as Winnats Pass and Cave Dale. 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 Southern 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.

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 lands-man 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.

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 and copper mining have left their mark and the vestigial traces can provide intriguing discoveries on many a walk. You may notice that the shallow lead rake workings are universally orientated east/west because this is how the veins intruded laterally. In village houses and churches we witness how the local stone has yielded to man’s desire to transform it into something more than the merely functional (although most limestone rock is crushed and wheeled away on lorries for other purposes).

The handsome spa town of Buxton would grace any national park, but limestone quarries to east and south sadly denied it any chance of inclusion. Nonetheless, the built environment and the rural landscape are by and large harmonious and the buildings are a fascinating part of the outdoor experience. Many people brought up on the doorstep of the Park – from Sheffield to Derby in the east, from Manchester to Stoke in the west and even down to Birmingham in the south – share an understandable desire ultimately to make their home in one of these distinctive communities. And this process ensures their reinvigoration and the restoration of many a humble cottage and the sympathetic conversion of retired barns.