The Lost Edge & the Big Moor
Discover ancient structures, solitary animals and a whole lot of empty – all just half an hour from Sheffield city centre…
Discover ancient structures, solitary animals and a whole lot of empty.
THE PEAK DISTRICT isn’t short of edges.
Some of them trip off the tongue fairly quickly: Stanage. Rushup. Millstone. Froggatt. Curbar. Others are a bit more obscure, but a seasoned Peak campaigner will probably have some memory of crossing them at some point: Birchen. Cracken. Longstone. Gardoms. Dobb.
Edges form when river valleys erode away the layered earth of the high country, forging deep dales and leaving steep-sided walls with exposed outcrops of millstone grit. So in the Peak District – and specifically, in the Dark Peak – where there’s a valley, there’s usually an edge at one side of it. But I missed one out in that list. White Edge. It’s conceivable that some of the hardiest Peak District explorers might not be able to put White Edge on a map – and if you can, CW salutes you.
The problem is that White Edge is the parent of three far more famous edges which sit in its shadow: Froggatt, Curbar and Baslow. These three are Peak District celebs, famed far and wide for their fabulous views and adventureplayground climbs and scrambles.
But generally, if you’re on one of those three, your attention is fixed firmly to the west, because that’s where the view is. So stop for a moment, and look east.
Way over there, across the moorland, is another edge, sitting like an extra step that has been set back from the staircase just to fool you. That’s White Edge.
It could seem like a redundant edge, presiding over nothing more than high moorland, like a dam without water. But that gets White Edge spectacularly wrong. You see, White Edge isn’t a leftover at the end of a landscape. It’s the frontier of a whole new one. And that landscape is called – rather prosaically – Big Moor: a vast swathe of off-theradar Peak District upland, forming part of an even bigger mosaic known as the Eastern Moors. At first glance (either at the map or on the ground) there’s very little there, just a big old wash of Access Land separating the Derwent Valley from the suburbs of Sheffield. But in fact it’s teeming with interest: ancient settlements, enigmatic inscriptions, stone-hewn poetry, remote weather stations, beehives. An abandoned reservoir. Bellowing stags. Snipe, curlew and pipit. Campion, celandine, coltsfoot.
For centuries, Big Moor was private land: initially for grouse shooting; later it lay in the hands of the utilities companies
which built Barbrook Reservoir. But its inaccessibility was also its saviour: ancient field systems and inscriptions have been preserved here in a way they never were on more open moorlands in other parts of the district. For the same reason, wildlife prospered too.
In 2000, Big Moor was opened to public consumption by the Countryside Rights of Way Act, but even then, it never attracted hordes of visitors. So those walkers who find White Edge and Big Moor tend to be curious, considerate souls – and intrepid ones, as there aren’t many paths up here.
“I don’t meet that many people up here, compared with other parts of the Peak District,” says Roger Temple. “But almost everyone I do meet, I end up having wonderful conversations with. If people love Big Moor, they really love it.”
Roger is a volunteer with the Eastern Moors Partnership, a match-made-inheaven pairing of National Trust and RSPB which convened to manage these complex uplands in 2012.
Before that, Roger created www.bigmoor.co.uk, a fabulous repository of knowledge about the place he loves. It features a complete inventory of every plant, flower and bird he has found on the moor. His bird list features 66 species spotted over ten years, including the resurgent ring ouzel.
He has found marsh orchids, dark green fritillaries and golden-ringed dragonflies. He also lists every stone circle, Bronze Age field system, trackway and inscription on the moor.
Among his favourites is the ‘hurkling stone’, a boundary stone at the northern edge of Big Moor. ‘Hurkling’ means crouching, and this lonely stone sums up a bit of the history behind the moor.
“It’s marked +MB, which denotes a boundary for the Manor of Baslow,” says Roger. “But the boundaries of places were often disputed. It’s not unusual to find some of them with very old vandalism, as a neighbouring estate staked its claim instead. You also find old waymarkers with questionable spellings, like ‘Sheaf Field’ and ‘ Hoope’.”
In late autumn and early winter, you’re also likely to hear a sound more common on Exmoor: bellowing stags. It’s thought that Big Moor’s colony of deer escaped from the Chatsworth estate a century ago, and has thrived, rutted and bellowed on the moor ever since.
And despite its apparent isolation, Big Moor tips its hat to our Pub Walks theme by having four good pubs on its outer limits: the Grouse Inn (visited on our walk this issue), the Robin Hood, and a pair at Owler Bar, the Peacock and the Moorlands (though the latter two are more of a chain-pub persuasion).
All of this, we think, turns White Edge from second-string outcast into gateway to adventure. But for good measure, our White Edge route comes back along the glory-hog scarps of Froggatt Edge and Curbar Edge, because ignoring them would be slightly perverse.
Secrets and superstars in one fantastic walk: that’s how to live life on the edge.