Monsall Head, Peak District

A new year and back to familiar locations, the Peak District. The meeting point this time was at the car park / picnic area near Great Shacklow Wood on the A6 between Buxton and Bakewell. An early start but we all managed to get there bar one individual who will remain nameless! Setting off around 10am, Helen P, Helen E, Paul, Edd, Rich and myself head south from the Car park passed a cave towards Deep Dale. It had been raining quite a lot, so the ground was quite muddy and the stream here was bursting down the hill!

My first mistake of the day quickly followed as I took a path right up to a dead end.. Quickly correcting we all walked back, back over the stream and over the stile, and there we were at the bottom of Deep Dale.

   We had a little break and avoided the large puddles of liquid mud and avoided the sheep as we wondered south westward through the dale. The sun was attempting to come out! and when it did it shown on a rather bleached sheep skull. Nice. Maybe a coincidence we spotted a bird of prey circling above.

We continued on for about a mile where the path crossed another path, and we saw another group of ramblers walking up the hill towards Deep Dale Lodge. We followed them up and crossed a field where we joined up onto Wheal Lane. We followed the road a bit when a gap in a wall gave a rather odd optical illusion with a car parked on top of a roof! We cut off the road and followed the footpath which meandered around the contours of the hill towards Taddington. I knew from earlier that this place might have a pub, to pickup some food possibly! Unfortunately we were a tad muddy and another country pub with a no walking boots policy. Oh well there loss.

We carried on through Taddington and headed pass the cross and across the busy A6 towards Priestcliff. We continued on up Broadway Lane towards Bull Tor where we ended up at some rather bumpy ground. We could now see Millers dale which was very pretty.

After instructing everyone else not to fall on the slippery mud, I fell on my ass twice! Doh! Anyway everyone else managed to get to the bottom of the hill and other the old railway line intact. We then followed the disused line westwards for about a mile to a pub where we got some lunch. Conscious that daylight is not on your side in the winter we didn’t stay for long and retraced our steps back to the Monsal Trail and headed eastwards.

We passed Litton Mill and left the main trail and followed the path up onto a higher contour of the hill. Helen P remarked about how square the tunnel was. Rich pointed out that it was a door and not a tunnel. Helen then pointed out why would a tunnel have a door! Oh dear. Coming around the hill and back down onto the Monsal Trail (disused railway) we had a quick look at the viaduct and then eastwards along the north side of the river through Monsal Dale we rushed as the daylight began to diminish.

We stopped briefly at a little dam which had my initials carved into the stone before we carried on down back to the car. Although tired we walked a fair distance and the weather held out.