Mountain Portrait
Jim Perrin describes his longstanding affection for this Peak District ‘pimple’, with its commanding views over the surrounding landscape
Jim Perrin fondly remembers that Peak District ‘pimple’: Win Hill
DID EVER such a lowly hill have such a wealth of exclamation marks bestowed upon it? Especially one that rejoices in a local nickname like ‘The Pimple’? For all that, Win Hill is a summit for which I have long affection. One dismal morning in early February 1967, when I was dawdling over a brew in the barn at the back of Mo and Jacky Anthoine’s cottage in Nant Peris, I had an urgent message to ring my good mate Bill Bowker, then an instructor at Birchfield Lodge Outdoor Pursuits Centre in Hope, which was run by Manchester’s Wood Street Mission. For the most part it ran courses for disadvantaged kids from poor areas of Manchester and Salford – the milieu from which I’d emerged just a few years earlier. When I spoke to Bill, he explained that one of the other instructors was hors de combat and likely to remain so permanently. Would I please get across to Derbyshire that day, to start instructional duties in the morning? I’d be paid £7 a week all found, train fare would be added to my first week’s wages, there was an equipment allowance, a dinner would be kept for me that night, and the centre minibus would pick me up from the last train at Hope station. If I was going to be any earlier I was to ring and let them know.
So that was how I came to escape from the Stygian winter gloom of Nant Peris and be living for a year in Hope, with Win Hill in my back garden. And what a wonderful year it was, until the late autumn outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease shut down both countryside and Birchfield Lodge! During those ten months I climbed Win Hill several times a week, and it remains a delicious memory. It may not have height, but what it does have is position.
Here’s good old Paddy Monkhouse, whose obituary I wrote for The Guardian (of which he was northern editor) a very few years after I left Hope. He gives you the most lucid topographical overview of this fabulous little hub of a hill, from the isolated summit of which you can see every scrap of worthwhile high land in the Dark Peak:
“From its most easterly corner the Kinder Scout plateau throws out a rib of hard high land which runs pretty near level for two miles before rising to the little rocky knob which is the top of Win Hill. The Roman road [from Melandra near Glossop] climbs on to this rib. It is firm and pleasant underfoot. It does not hurry…”
Nor should we, for a gem like this. I’d suggest you find a parking place off the Edale Road near the Cheshire Cheese or Hope Cemetery, cross the railway by the Twitchill farm track and continue past there to reach the OS pillar on its resistant plinth of millstone grit, settle with your back against it, and just enjoy the view.
The first time I climbed Win Hill, in 1960, I wasn’t allowed to do that. I was with that wild old northern character Len Chadwick – he wrote the weekly ‘Fellwalker’ column in the Oldham Evening Chronicle – and he’d planned an itinerary that began in Hayfield, traversed Kinder, arrived at Win Hill and from there launched out across the Derwent and onto the long edges of the Eastern Peak. Too much for the boy of 13 I then was! The last time I saw Len I was working at Birchfield. Bill and I had been out with a group on Windgather Rocks. We were back at the minibus when Len came shuffling down the lane beneath at his usual express speed. He’d suffered a great deal in his life as a Japanese PoW, had lost his teeth courtesy of a rifle butt, and his memory was fading. But there was a glimmer of recognition, and a few prompts even brought back my name. But there was always the sense when you kept hill company with Len that he was someone who “flies the thing he dreads rather than seeks the things he loved”.
Ultimately, my too-youthful apprenticeship to his hard miles acted as aversion therapy. I like to dawdle over my hills now.
And Win Hill’s perfect for that, especially by this Twitchill approach (the longer one from Yorkshire Bridge and Thornhill is a little more arduous, but not by much).
What I best remember are moonlit nights when we ambled back after a pint in the Cheshire Cheese, and recounted the story Eric Byne used to tell of how, one blustery night in 1932, friends of his had been lying in the heather by Hope Cross when a Roman legion marched past along the lane, helmets and curved shields glinting in the silvery light. We never saw them, though we lived in Hope. Paddy Monkhouse – a rational man – doesn’t mention them; but he does advise that, from the summit, “the descent south-west to Hope is steep but plain, and commands imposing views of the hills above Castleton.” I agree.
MAP: Ordnance Survey 1:25,000 OL1, The Dark Peak
FURTHER READING: Patrick Monkhouse, On Foot in The Peak (1934); Eric Byne & Geoff Sutton, High Peak (1966); Gordon Stainforth, The Peak (1998); Roly Smith’s First and Last is invaluable background on the Peak District National Park
FACILITIES: Plenty of pubs and cafés in Hope if and when we ever return to a Covid-under-control world. Edale’s just up the Noe valley, but can be very crowded. Buses and trains to Bamford and Hope, though be aware that Hope station is some distance from the village of the same name. Accommodation is plentiful: campsites, camping barns, youth hostels – take your pick
“King of the Peak! Win Hill! Thou throned and crowned That reignst o’er many a stream and vale! Star-loved, and meteorsought, and tempest-found! Proud centre of the mountain circle, hail!” Ebenezer Elliott (‘The Corn Law Rhymer’)