The Edge of Darkness
Trail discovers the secrets of the Peak District’s dark side
Some walks start with a sign. I don’t mean a waymarking sign – I’m referring to a rainbow arching over the car park, a peregrine falcon flashing past, or finding a tenner where there’s no chance of finding its owner. Today’s sign was different. Three small fish lay in the path, halfway up the hill, miles from the nearest body of water capable of sustaining such creatures. But how to read such a sign?
I crouched over them, gave them a nudge with my boot, then decided, out of desperation, to interpret the fish in a positive way (it reminded me of the biblical feeding of the five thousand and all that). Yes, that was it, I’d been blessed on this mountain day with, erm… fish.
The northern edges of Kinder Scout have long been my favourite part of the Peak District. You only need to look at a map of the area and you’ll see the anvil that is Fairbrook Naze jutting out from the plateau, demanding attention. I consider the area from Blackden Moor and the Seal Stones in the east through to the Pennine Way in the west to be the northern edges. The best bit, if you like. Starting from the A57, just east of the Snake Inn, I like heading up to Seal Stones, walking the edge in a westerly direction, exploring as I go, then returning via Ashop Clough’s Snake Path or, as today, underneath the edge.
It didn’t take long to get that sense of being away from the world I’d just left. There’s something about those gritty peat paths that absorbs life’s worries quicker than other, harder landscapes. By the time the Seal Stones are looming large, you’re high up on the edge and the checkerboard is revealed. The spewing moorland to the north is tiled with square patches of heather, some freshly burnt, others covered in young growth and a few scraggy with older plants. I was in the heart of the grouse moors and this 11year cycle of burning back the heather in a staggered fashion (so there’s always a range of heather habitat for the grouse) is carried out on an industrial scale. Forget the ethics of hunting for a moment, I kind of like the effect. It’s like the spotting on the fur of a jaguar or the wing of a silver-washed fritillary butterfly.
The gritstone of the Dark Peak is particularly prone to being sculpted by wind. The paths here are coated with grit, the heavier parts of the eroded stones travelling less distance than the smaller, lighter granules, so a natural grading takes place. You’ve only to look
at the grit on the path to see it. In human terms I suppose their shapes are static, but if you stand on an edge with your face into the wind, you can feel the temporary nature of things. You can even be exfoliated by the wind-whipped grit on rougher days.
My point is, I love the shapes that the various monoliths form. Along this edge I like to explore as many as I can. I stand with my back leaning against the gritstone, seeing what the rockface sees. In woodland I’ll sit with my back to a tree and be absorbed that much deeper into the things around me, and it’s the same here. To race past this lot is one way to embrace the hills, but to explore the slowest movement of all, the weathering of rock, now that is another way completely. Over on the other side of Kinder there’s a collection of gritstone shapes worthy of any art gallery. Henry Moore would be envious, or maybe inspired.
But, there must be movement, even for Trail magazine’s king dawdler. So it’s westwards, into Fairbrook Clough, then out again heading for the snout of Fairbrook Naze, the most prominent point on Kinder. Gritstone is great for leaping
onto. It is, as the name almost suggests, grippy. So progress is spasmodic. Fast one minute as the heart races and gaps are leapt, then slow as the world and every stone in it is pondered. Down a few metres from the point of Fairbrook Naze a goblet of gritstone stands, grail like. You couldn’t make it up, the wind has such an imagination.
Heading west along ‘The Edge’ there is a moment, a reveal. Just before the limit of vision, beyond the chessboard moors, is the shining kingdom of Manchester. Looking at it from this distance is like looking into my family history and seeing those distant relatives who travelled up from their homes further south to find work in the depression of the 1920s and ’30s. Most of them left again, but a few stayed. It’s strange, looking at a vast area of the country and thinking I might have family ties somewhere out there in the shining city.
Moving along, the end of the edge gets a little predictable, so I cut the corner, plunging down the now walkable slope, straight to where the wreckage of two early jet fighters (F-86 Sabres) lay. Back in 1954 the jets hit the south-west edge of the westernmost tip of the Kinder plateau, spilling wreckage down the northern slope. Both pilots died. This was a very dangerous time to be a pilot, and not as a result of enemy action.
The journey back rolled along the base of the edge, like walking back along a beach after half the day spent on the cliff tops. Once off the main highway of the Kinder path, the bird life increases. Pipits, larks and wheatears are everywhere, along with one of their predators, but the less said about that, the better (because they’re rare enough already).
Being down amongst the lower moorland felt even more removed from reality. Down there, it felt like I was the first to walk the line of the edge for a long, long time. On the final leg of the journey, a heron lifted up from a boggy ditch only metres away. I had the answer to the random sign left for me earlier; that king of fishers couldn’t keep its breakfast down.
Sometimes things are just straightforward, and Kinder’s northern edges are a good example. They’re ‘just’ a great walk.