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

• Location
• Contents
• Introduction
• Sample Route
• Maps
• 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 little peaks as Parkhouse Hill and Thorpe Cloud. 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 Northern Dales as they make patchwork incursions and offer fascinating viewpoints and perspectives into the plateau.