The Road goes ever on and on; Down from the door where it began;
Now far ahead the Road has gone; And I must follow, if I can;
Pursuing it with eager feet; Until it joins some larger way;
Where many paths and errands met; And whither then? I cannot say.

[JRR Tolkien, Lord of the Rings]

Tuesday, 11 March 2014

Biggin Dale & Wolfscote Dale

Friday 7 March 2014

Following our February holiday, Colin sat all lonely for a whole week, until on Friday, much to his delight, he found himself involved in another outing. It was the weekend of the TGO Challenge Spring Gathering at the Snake Pass Inn, and we had belatedly added ourselves to the attendee list.

A perusal of the map of the area immediately around the Snake Pass Inn confirmed my suspicion that there wasn’t an afternoon-length walk from the car park that we haven’t done at least twice before, so instead we opted to stop en-route,  and take a turn down Biggin Dale and along Wolfscote Dale.

After an unpromising, rainy start to the day, things had improved remarkably by the time we parked up in amongst the lorries-on-lunchbreak:

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A lunch break sounded like a very good idea (even if, technically, it wasn’t a break as we weren’t in the middle of anything), and sandwiches and tea were soon despatched, before shoes were donned and off onto the Tissington Trail we headed. Those skies may have been a very pleasing shade of blue, but the photos don’t show the keen and fresh wind that was blowing.

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The wind was head on as we headed down Biggin Dale, which, for quite a while was lovely but relatively unremarkable. Then things got a bit soggy underfoot:

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I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think we’ve walked down Biggin Dale before, and thus I can’t be certain as to its usual state of wetness, but the way that the bed of this stream was made of grass, and the way that it flowed through the gates suggested to me that it is a stream that isn’t usually there.

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One of the gates was particularly tricky to negotiate without getting damp socks:

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The water left the path (flowing straight through a dry-stone wall) just before we joined Wolfscote Dale, where we have definitely been quite a few times before, although always in the opposite direction. The direction on this occasion made us notice a cave just a little way up the side of the valley, so we went for a closer look. Small and quite uninteresting, was the verdict, albeit with a good view:

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It was just before the end of Wolfscote Dale that we climbed back up out of the valley, to head back to our start point. We’d realised a short time before that our ascent path was going to be the one taken on a couple of Martin’s Christmas walks, which on those occasions had been a muddy, slippery affair. It was muddy and slippery on this occasion too, but definitely easier in ascent than in descent.

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When out of the wind and in the sun it was a glorious spring day (making me think that maybe I should have had the forethought to pack a pair of summer walking trousers). The stats for the outing were 6.9 miles walked with a touch under 1000’ of up.

1 comment:

  1. I've done that exact route a couple of times and no, that's not usually a stream.

    ReplyDelete