Category: Derbyshire
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Creswell Crags
Creswell Crags, that limestone gorge separating Nottinghamshire with Derbyshire, has a bit of celebrated status in archaeological circles — specifically the Palaeolithic, the Ice Age. It turns out the Neanderthals were around here some 60,000 to 40,000 years ago when Creswell was a desolate, tundra like scene, with grasslands stretching as far as the eye…
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The Snake Path
What a change from yesterday. Blue skies and autumnal warmth. William Clough and the Ashop valley. William Clough, a notorious climb up to Ashop Head, the route of an ancient path from Hayfield to the Snake Inn. Yesterday’s post featured Ashop Clough, down which the Snake Path descends. On the 29th May 1897, an agreement…
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Ashop Clough
A rather cloudy circuit of the Kinder Scout plateau with the clag briefly clearing on Fairbrook Naze to open up this view of Ashop Clough, a deep gorge down which the ancient path from Hayfield to the former Snake Inn passes. The aim had been to visit the newly recognised highest point of the plateau,…
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Mount Famine ridge
Looking back towards the village Hayfield in Derbyshire from the ominously named Mount Famine. The name is supposed to date from the late-18th to early-19th-century Enclosure Acts when local landowners agreed to parcel up the land between them including common land. Farmer who once provided services and a proportion of their produce to the Lord…
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The Mass Trespass, the Pennine Way, and some new Corona Restrictions
The Kinder Scout Plateau is dotted with Gritstone boulders and rocks of all sizes that, over the ages, have been sculpted by the wind and the rain, many taking on animalistic shapes. This day marks the anniversaries of two important events in the history of access to the hills and mountains that we take for…
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River Kinder
Some may have noticed I didn’t post yesterday. While Harrogate and the Yorkshire Dales were basking in sunshine watching the cycling world championships (this was Saturday!), 50 miles away, west of the Pennines, we were suffering twenty-four hours of torrential rain. I managed to take half a dozen photos with my phone of mist-covered hills…
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Cromford and High Peak Railway
Stopped off in the Derwent Valley, a Unesco World Heritage site on account of its 18th/19th-century cotton mills considered to be the birth of the large-scale factory production. It was where Richard Arkwright introduced the latest technology at the time for spinning cotton. But ignoring the mills I headed up the 1 in 9 Sheep…
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Tissington Spires
Dramatic limestone formation in the gorge of the River Dove in Derbyshire. Open Space Web-Map builder Code
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Peacock
Almost had peacock for dinner. This fine bird wandered nonchalantly within the range of the dog. It would have been a feast fit for a king, peacocks featured regularly of a medieval king’s table. More for display though. Peacocks are native of the Indian sub-continent but were familiar to the ancient Greeks who considered them…
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Viator’s Bridge and the River Dove
The White Peak is the name given to the southern half of the Peak District, because of its predominate limestone geology and also by comparison with the millstone grit northern half of the Dark Peak. During the last ice age, deep running north-south gorges were cut in the limestone plateau by the runoff of glacial…