The long way round
The Peak District has got a brand new long-distance walking trail... and it’s brilliant.
RITAIN’S NEWEST LONG-DISTANCE path isn’t just a walk. It’s a story.
It’s called the Peak District Boundary Walk, and in 190 stunning, surprising miles it follows the outer edge of Britain’s first-ever national park.
As it goes, it tells the saga of how this hotch-potch of jumbled-up geology earned that pioneering place in our history. It celebrates a fiercely dedicated woman who once rode the entire boundary on horseback. It suggests the whole thing was defined by a dramatic race against the Lake District. Heck, it even dares to ask you what a national park actually is and how you make one.
But even if you can’t be bothered with any of that, there’s one final truth to the Peak District Boundary Walk. It’s absolutely beautiful.
TRAIL PIONEERS Julie Gough (left) came up with the idea and enlisted Peak uber-walker Brian Couzins (right) to help create the perfect route. u POINT OF ORIGIN Buxton Town Hall marks the beginning and end point of the Peak District Boundary Walk. EARLY ESCAPE Soon after leaving Buxton, the Boundary Walk heads into the underappreciated upland of South Head.
WE’LL GET TO the history in a bit, but first: the trail itself. The Boundary Walk has been lovingly prepared by the Friends of the Peak District, a voluntary organisation which dates right back to the very foundation of the national park in 1951.
And it wasn’t just a case of tracing the boundary and finding the closest footpaths to it…
“It had to be as close to the boundary as possible but also as scenic as possible,” says Friend of the Peak District Julie Gough, who hatched the idea some two years ago.
“It was a careful balancing act. There was no point missing a real highlight just because it was a little way off the boundary, or struggling through a grotty bit just to follow the line.
“It’s really about celebrating every landscape the Peak District has to offer, so we didn’t want to compromise on the quality of the walking.”
To start the process, Julie sought the help of a man with a unique perspective on the Peak District. In 2006, financial software engineer Brian Couzins took it upon himself to walk through each of the national park’s 555 square miles – covering every grid square of the Ordnance Survey Explorer map within the park. Seven years and 1346 miles later, he managed it. Country Walking doffed its hat to Brian then, and we still do now.
So Julie and Brian sat down in a pub (which is where all such endeavours should begin) and traced out the boundary, sketching out a possible route.
Julie then invited the Friends’ armada of members and pals to walk the route in sections, tweaking it using their local knowledge. “They were absolutely brilliant,” says Julie. “They’d come back going, ‘oh no, you don’t want to do that, it’s horribly overgrown – you want to go this way instead, it’s much prettier and easier’. Or ‘oh, you can’t miss such and such out – it’s gorgeous!’ And it allowed us to create the most perfect version of the boundary walk.”
Lastly, Julie walked the whole thing to check it all hung together nicely. And it did.
The route breaks down into 20 stages, running clockwise around the leaping-salmon imprint of the boundary from the beautiful spa town of Buxton. The shortest stage is six miles, the longest eleven.
It heads north first, passing the outlying hills of Kinder Scout before ascending into the Dark Peak landscapes of Dove Stones and Saddleworth. It reaches its northern apex in the town of Marsden, then comes south-east via the moorlands above Sheffield and Chesterfield. Lower down it delves into the softer acres of the White Peak, reaching its southern apex in the green acres of Ilam, where the rivers Dove and Manifold meet.