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ellarienToday we went out to behold the heather, and we saw that it was good.
We started by taking the train one stop out along the Hope Valley line to Grindleford. From there we walked up the stony track through Padley Gorge, a wooded ravine full of boulders, mossy and bare, and fine-bladed deep green grass, and lichened trunks and ferns and fungi, with a peat-brown stream running in a rocky bed far below. The track emerges in the same bit of open ground, popular with families of small children, that we briefly visited on Thursday. We followed a sunken track, its banks rich with heather and gorse, to a rocky outcrop, then crossed the road and climbed a heathery slope to more rocks. The stone of the district is Millstone Grit, a coarse, abrasive sandstone that was, as the name implies, used for millstones; the landscape is littered in places with failed or escaped specimens, to the extent that one wonders if there was ever a society for returning used millstones to their native habitat. The wind carves the exposed boulders into complicated, rounded shapes. We ate our lunch perched on the rocks, and then pressed on upwards, to the place where the view over the Hope Valley opens up, with Win Hill and Lose Hill and the Mam Tor ridge fading into the hazy distance, and the cement works putting out its habitual plume of smoke. From there the track took us on to the skirts of Higger Tor, beloved of rock climbers. We turned right there, and visited the ancient hill fort of Carl Wark. It's a natural escarpment, fringed in giant rocks; along the side not so defended is an ancient wall, loosely built of great stones with an earthwork behind. Then we took the track down from the saddle between Carl Wark and the higher scarp of Higger Tor to the Packhorse bridge in the Burbage Valley, and followed a track parallel to the stream until it rejoined the main one that took us back to the road and the Longshaw Estate. For a final grace-note on the day, a Red Admiral butterfly, clinging to a stem on the last bit of path before the bus stop, let me take its portrait.
That bit of landscape, with Carl Wark and Higger Tor marking the skyline, with great boulders shouldering through bracken and heather and bilberry and rushes, with the tiny golden cruciform flowers of tormentil and the tinier many-petalled white ones of stitchwort among the grass, with grasshoppers chirring softly and sheep bawling to one another among the rocks and brown streams running over stones, means more to me than I can easily put into words. I've seen plenty of more exotic and beautiful places, but that isn't the point: it's the Burbage valley where I go to feel both grounded and renewed. The longer I'm away from home, the more I appreciate it.
We started by taking the train one stop out along the Hope Valley line to Grindleford. From there we walked up the stony track through Padley Gorge, a wooded ravine full of boulders, mossy and bare, and fine-bladed deep green grass, and lichened trunks and ferns and fungi, with a peat-brown stream running in a rocky bed far below. The track emerges in the same bit of open ground, popular with families of small children, that we briefly visited on Thursday. We followed a sunken track, its banks rich with heather and gorse, to a rocky outcrop, then crossed the road and climbed a heathery slope to more rocks. The stone of the district is Millstone Grit, a coarse, abrasive sandstone that was, as the name implies, used for millstones; the landscape is littered in places with failed or escaped specimens, to the extent that one wonders if there was ever a society for returning used millstones to their native habitat. The wind carves the exposed boulders into complicated, rounded shapes. We ate our lunch perched on the rocks, and then pressed on upwards, to the place where the view over the Hope Valley opens up, with Win Hill and Lose Hill and the Mam Tor ridge fading into the hazy distance, and the cement works putting out its habitual plume of smoke. From there the track took us on to the skirts of Higger Tor, beloved of rock climbers. We turned right there, and visited the ancient hill fort of Carl Wark. It's a natural escarpment, fringed in giant rocks; along the side not so defended is an ancient wall, loosely built of great stones with an earthwork behind. Then we took the track down from the saddle between Carl Wark and the higher scarp of Higger Tor to the Packhorse bridge in the Burbage Valley, and followed a track parallel to the stream until it rejoined the main one that took us back to the road and the Longshaw Estate. For a final grace-note on the day, a Red Admiral butterfly, clinging to a stem on the last bit of path before the bus stop, let me take its portrait.
That bit of landscape, with Carl Wark and Higger Tor marking the skyline, with great boulders shouldering through bracken and heather and bilberry and rushes, with the tiny golden cruciform flowers of tormentil and the tinier many-petalled white ones of stitchwort among the grass, with grasshoppers chirring softly and sheep bawling to one another among the rocks and brown streams running over stones, means more to me than I can easily put into words. I've seen plenty of more exotic and beautiful places, but that isn't the point: it's the Burbage valley where I go to feel both grounded and renewed. The longer I'm away from home, the more I appreciate it.
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Burbage valley
Date: 2010-12-19 06:44 pm (UTC)