PARKHOUSE & CHROME HILLS
For Jim Perrin, these miniature mountains in the Peak District have a richness of character that goes far beyond their humble heights
“As you walk down from High Edge, you will notice Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill, fantastic and contorted like wrestlers contending with an invisible opponent.”
Patrick Monkhouse, One Foot in The Peak (1932)
THERE WAS A TIME when no right of way existed up either of these grand little hills of the White Peak. The CRoW Act changed that lamentable situation, and this whole miniature mountain range of former reef knolls in seas of the Carboniferous age which stretches from Aldery Cliff to High Edge that’s along the footpath leading down to Harpur Hill is now open to all. When I lived in Buxton years ago I used to run up here and race along its green and white gleaming tops and ridges with a pair of rock shoes in my rucksack, take in a couple of the polished gems on Aldery Cliff – The Arête and Mitre Crack – then slip into The Quiet Woman for a swift pint before lolloping back (I was never an elegant runner) over the spiky summit of Parkhouse Hill as a westering sun cast its stretching hump-backed shadow over green and pale uplands of the White Peak. I’d return home over the lesser tops at the west-north-west end of the hill group until I met the footpath again, and would descend reinvigorated through quarried wastelands to home and food and work again. Lovely days, and this a favourite brief excursion.
Is it worth travelling any distance to take in these lesser eminences? I’d unhesitatingly return a positive answer. They’re remarkable little peaks. They take root in mind and memory and grow in stature there, where size loses its hierarchical insistencies. I’m reminded of two hillocks in Platt Fields Park at the end of the street on which my grandparents lived. When I was three or four I ran up and down them daily, my octogenarian grandfather smiling on indulgently. When I went back decades later to look for these first hills of the mind, what had once seemed huge barely came up to waist level. Childhood imagination is more generous than those later acquisitive attitudes that overhaul and overlay it.
The whole ambience of Chrome and Parkhouse Hills, their entire locality, has a richness of texture and appeal that to me is still irresistible, investing their diminished stature with unfaded long-past gleams of first impressions. Come here if you can, bring your children here in the springtime – of the year and of their lives. Come in bright May or green June. Don’t come in dank days of winter when limestone is dark, dripping and sullen and lacks the emerald green of settings that add lustre to these finely cut gem-like hills. The region they inhabit lies at the head of a web of potential journeyings into the spectacular places of south Pennine limestone scenery.
This is how I first encountered their bizarre and somehow gargoyle presences. One spring half term my uncle Jack Charlesworth, who was a small tenant farmer on Mow Cop, had had reason to go over to Hulme End one Friday in his van. He’d offered me a lift, so I’d studied the OS 1:63,360 map of Buxton and Matlock, charted a route, and booked myself a bed at Ilam Hall Youth Hostel, intent on walking down the Manifold valley and back up Dovedale. When Uncle Jack dropped the thirteen-year-old me at the Manifold Bridge, I’d bounded away like a young roe into two days of sumptuous magic. Glowing memories flood back. On the Saturday morning in Dovedale Wood, by a long, clear pool in which reflections of rocks and trees rippled, I watched in fascination as the mayfly hatched in their thousands, rose to the surface, attempted to spread their gauzy wings and take to the light and dancing medium of air as the plump trout rose from shadowy depths. Scarcely one in a thousand escaped the carnage to ascend into the single day’s lyricism of their lives. By the time I’d danced my way through Mill Dale, been entertained by dozens of mallard chicks swimming in gaggles behind their mothers along Wolfscote Dale, skirted Hartington and Longnor, and arrived at Glutton Bridge, I felt as I was later to feel after long Himalayan approaches.
The peak that was my objective had reared into view. All that remained was to climb it: “not always an easy thing to do!” Parkhouse Hill is steep, its northern face shadowy, its crest sharp and exposed. It’s an excellent place to learn the crucial lesson in climbing, which is to proceed one move at a time and search out the gifts that geology brings. Slopes don’t bite unless you bounce down them. An easy transfer of balance from one hold or ledge to another, without lurching or grabbing, guards against that possibility. On Parkhouse Hill, very soon you’re at the summit, mildly vertiginous, space-surrounded, aerial and lofty. After a short descent into Dowel Dale the traverse continues ahead. I know you’ll enjoy this itinerary, for all its brevity. It may be in a minor key but there’s nothing sombre or melancholy about these tiny, playful peaks.
...bring your children here in the springtime – of the year and of their lives