Sunday: Down dale
WHERE SATURDAY WAS airy, Sunday is cosy. Cradled for much of the day in steep-sided valleys with a river for company, this walk is a properly snug contrast to the breezy summits. It starts from Hartington, a few miles south of Parkhouse Hill in the broad valley of the Dove, which soon scrunches tightly into the gorge of Beresford Dale. The paths are white with snow; the crags dusted with whatever flakes can cling to the sharp contours; the trees frozen and still. The river, though, is a living, moving beast. Its green water ripples and eddies, skirts boulders and tumbles down weirs, throwing up enough spray to glaze low branches with thick ice.
The county boundary runs down the river bed and as you cross the footbridge above Pike Pool you move from Derbyshire into Staffordshire. It’s the spear – or pike – of limestone blading up from the water that gives the pool its name, although there’s a fishy connection too, as this river was beloved by Izaak Walton and
Charles Cotton. Walton’s meditation on fishing, The Compleat Angler, was published in 1653 and has been reprinted more times than anything other than the Bible and Shakespeare. A first edition will set you back £50k. Cotton, born at Beresford Hall, was a close friend and wrote a second part to later editions. They would fish together on the ‘fair Dove, Princess of rivers’ and Cotton built a one-room fishing house on its banks, with their initials above the door and the words Piscatoribus Sacrum-1674 (sacred to fishermen). You might glimpse the small square building through the bare trees as you enter the dale.
Cotton had extravagant tastes and bailiffs were regular visitors to his estate, whereupon he’d put the area’s Swiss-cheese limestone to good use and hole up in a cave until they’d gone. As you leave Beresford Dale for Wolfscote,
you’ll spot a couple of dark caverns up to your left – fun to explore even if you’re not fleeing creditors.
With each step south, the dale’s limestone sides pile taller and taller. It feels like a mirror moment to yesterday’s climb of Chrome Hill. There the ridge got higher and the blue wider; here the path burrows deeper and the sky shrinks to a wedge overhead. And like light focusing into a single beam, it lasers your view onto the close surroundings: the texture of the pinnacles and the runs of snow-sugared scree below, the filigree trees driving roots into improbable crevices, and a white-bibbed dipper braving the icy river.
Keep tracing the water south through Mill Dale and you’ll hit one of the most famous valleys in Britain: Dove Dale. But we’re taking a turn to the left, away from the beaten path. The waterway through Biggin Dale comes and goes with the rain. Normally underground, it bubbles up after a soaking and can even submerge the path at the junction. The trail soon reappears though, tilting uphill beside a tumble of mossy boulders, kept green by a trickle of moving water today. It feels wilder, and more secretive in this little dale. Even in high season it’s hard to imagine it getting busy like the main run of the Dove. It’s a National Nature Reserve, renowned for its summer flora, although it’s layered in tints of rock and ice today. The valley is so sheltered
“With each step south, the dale’s limestone sides pile taller and taller.”
I pause for a tea break: sat on a waterproof map case, back to a stone wall, face to the surprisingly warm sun. It’s bliss.
There’s one sneaky hill to edge over at the end, but it’s broad and rounded, lifting you gently to a panorama across the snow-white peaks of the White Peak and the sinuous shadows of the dales between. Look closely, and you can pick out the dragon contours of Chrome and Parkhouse; the hill-top yin to this day’s deep-valley yang. WALK HERE: Turn to Walk 12.
FREEZING BEAUTY
Spray from the tumbling River Dove lacquers the branches with ice.
ROCKY HIDE
A place to hide from creditors? Or a perch for lunch? Check out the caves at the top of Wolfscote Dale.