New Walks in Central Nottinghamshire ... and Beyond

Start:  Red Brook Finish: Crowden Distance:  9 miles Total Distanced Covered:  15 miles The first morning of our walk and I was up at seven o'clock.  Breakfast  was nothing more than a drink called Rise and Shine, as I recall this was a powder that you mixed with water to make an orangy drink. After dismantling the tent we set off at nine o'clock out of the valley from the brook, immediately climbing steeply up to the Kinder Plateau to rejoin the official Pennine Way route.  We were soon going down again, leaving beside Kinder Downfall, a waterfall.  We sat nearby and got chatting to a warden from the Peak District National Park. The next stage saw us climb again to moorland and marsh on Bleaklow.  The conditions were pleasant and the path easy enough to follow and quite springy underfoot.  We had lunch on Featherbed Moss at 1.30. Many people find the section across the moors to Featherbed Moss tough but I didn't  have an...

Start: Edale Finish:  Red Brook Distance Covered:  6 miles After making our preparations the summer holidays arrived and we were ready to go. So it was that on Saturday 14th July 1979 my parents, sister and myself set off from our home in Nottinghamshire at 2 o'clock.  At around half past three we reached Edale and at 3.55 said goodbye to my mother as we began our epic trek along the Pennine Way. My father had decided that it should be a gentle introduction to the walk so the first day was a relatively easy six miles.  The previous year we had walked across the plateau near Kinder Scout.  I remember it being a real struggle going over the peat cloughs and heather and hadn't been relishing the prospect of renewing the acquaintance.  The return visit wasn't anything like as difficult and I think we must have avoided the worst of it.  It was still quite testing terrain to face first up and after two hours reaching the Kinder plateau it took ano...

In the summer of 1979 I walked the Pennine Way when I was eleven years old, along with my father and my sister who was nine.  The Pennine Way is the oldest and most famous long distance footpath in Britain running for 260 miles from Edale in Derbyshire to Kirk Yetholm in the Scottish borders through the Peak District, Pennines and Cheviots. I don't remember exactly when we decided to walk the Pennine Way but we had been told tales from when my father had walked it as a young man not long after it had been established. I also don't remember much of the planning for the walk.  We did one training walk of about five miles but that was it.  I do, however, remember quite a lot about the walk itself even though it was forty years ago.  I took a notebook to record a diary but only kept it up for a week.  The rest of this account is from my memories of the walk. For some reason we didn't take a camera so there aren't any photos from the walk itself. We all had ...