Today I boarded the 07:26 at New Street bound for Manchester.
More or less bang on time, the train wormed it way through the Black Country before darting across Staffordshire and Cheshire into the heart of Great Manchester. On my way to begin a walk from Manchester to Leeds. The first part being just over 15 miles from central Manchester to Glossop on the western edge of the Peak District.
I left Picadilly just after 09:00, taking a Greggs baguette and a couple of 600ml bottles of water with me.
Onto the Ashton Canal heading east out of the city centre. Just over a year ago, I walked the opposite way, coming from New Mills near the base of the Peak Forest Canal on the edge of the Peak District, into Manchester from the south. It was the final leg of my Three Day Walk from Sheffield to Manchester. The first long-distance multiday walk I had done in around… fifteen years.
It’s a truism, but it always strikes me how Manchester mixes the old and the new. The first mile or so along the Ashton Canal heading east is a panopoly of twenty years of the UK’s most intensive urban regeneration. Capital on speed – a blurring of the old and the new, dead industry and living apartment blocks – in the city where more than any other Marx and Engels were inspired to first figure out its gyrations.
Here and there though, a structure like the old gasometres, on the edge of an inner city area still “unregenerate” punctures the vista and provides a sight that’s truly quite distinctive.
I recalled, and Ordnance Survey confirmed, that this bridge is the boundary between Manchester and Tameside.
I like Tameside. If it was in the West Midlands then it would be Sandwell, another Metropolitan Borough concocted in the 1970s from a rich potage of proud, distinctive, interlocking towns and industrial villages. Like Sandwell – which takes it name from the Sandwell Valley Country Park, a green gash deep into the conurbation to the north of the Borough, Tameside is named after a natural feature: the River Tame, which flows out of the Peaks and meanders through the council area seeking its confluence with the Goyt at Stockport where it becomes the Mersey.
First up in Tameside is Droylsden, the Bearwood of Tameside. It is a smart little town, largely residential, that you could easily imagine being part of Manchester.
Something I had not noticed when I walked the Ashton Canal last year, partly because of the direction I was going, partly because the weather was atrocious, is that you can glimpse the Peak in the distance, once you are beyond central Droylsden.
One of those views that is rather more impressive in person than a photograph can capture.
After Droylsden comes Ashton-under-Lyne, Tameside’s largest town, its West Bromwich. More industrial and more distinct from Manchester than Droylsden.
At the canal museum surrounded by isolated New Labour era flats on the edge of Ashton town centre I crossed the Peak Forest running south down to Whaley Bridge where Peak District linestone was once loaded bound for North West industry.
After the canal museum and the Peak Forest I skirted Ashton town centre, searching for a way back to the canal, as the towpath peters out here. Glancing through a green metal gate into a carpenter’s yard just off one of the main roads I was surprised to see a goose. A pet or on guard duty?
Soon I found a lush green path beside the fast flowing Tame itself.
On the other side of the river runs the main trans-Pennine railway. Leeds in less than an hour, fancy that.
Soon I found my way back to the canal. Imperceptibly, just after Ashton town centre it transforms into the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, which eventually burrows through the heart of the Pennines to reach south West Yorkshire.
In no time I was approaching Stalybridge, the easternmost town in Tameside, right on the edge of the Peak.
Even more than Ashton, while it has become popular with commuters, Stalybridge remains a very industrial town.
I had made ridiculously good time from central Manchester. It was only just striking twelve so I stopped in central Staylbridge, bisected by the canal, for lunch.
Nice place. I really need not have carried a Gregg’s baguette all the way from just outside Picadilly Station.
I have only ever met one person from Stalybridge. A friend from University, who used to regale people with stories of all kinds of nefarious and sordid things that used to happen behind the bins at Stalybridge TESCO in the late 2000s.
So pleased I finally got to see it in person.
Unfortunately, for the first day of a long distance walk, all of the easy walking was in the morning. Over half way to Glossop from Manchester it was time to head into the Peak.
Heading out of town the gristone hills loomed larger over the houses. Eventually a footpath sign beckoned me out of built up Greater Manchester and into the rural part of the walk.
Climbing the hill initially the path was tarmacked (running up to a farm converted into multiple private dwellings with awesome views).
Then, after a slightly uncertain chamber across someone’s backgarden (it was a footpath) I was out on the hillside.
Truly spectacular views in all directions.
Entering proper moorland for the first time I spyed my first Peak and Northern Footpath Society sign. Truly a waymark that you are in north country.
Having scrambled up the slope, was nearly as high as I was going to get on Day One (or on the walk really – it’s a relatively low level one).
But to get down to the gentle Longdendale, at the foot of which Glossop nestles, I had to climb a little further, encountering spectacular views up and down the Pennies and west right across Greater Manchester.
Before beginning the gentle descent into Longdendale, seeing the great gash that it cuts in the upland landscape and then seeing Glossop in the distance.
Then I began a steady descent from around 350 metres above sea level, back into farmed country, approaching the mini-conurbation including Hollingworth and Hadfield which Glossop is a part of.
Approaching Hollingworth, an outlying village right on the edge of Tameside, through pretty countryside I neared the boundary with Derbyshire.
The boundary between Greater Manchester and Derbyshire hereabouts is the River Etherow.
Once on the other side of the River Etherow I was back in the Midlands for the first time since before Crewe roughly six hours previously.
Hadfield and Glossop are firmly ensconsed in gritstone country.
Soon I picked up an arm of the Trans Pennine Trail (this whole walk is an adaptation of the Trans Pennine Trail concept) and the Pennine Bridleway (the cyclist and equestrian version of the Pennine Way) as well.
This brought me out by the impressive Dinting Viaduct, right on the edge of Glossop town centre.
Glossop is the end of the line from Manchester. It’s an electrified railway, worked by Class 323 trains, same as the Cross City Line at home.
Feeling worn out and pack sore from the first day of intensive walking I stumbled into Glossop Town centre for just after 15:00, via a nice allotment with some seriously impressive views.
Glossop, has a nice, very kempt town centre full of historic buildings. Testimony to its past as a major textile centre, taking advantage of the numerous fast flowing rivers in the area. And it’s continued success as an industrial centre, commuter town, and homeworking hub. Handy for central Greater Manchester and the Peak District National Park alike.
Tomorrow, I am staying in Glossop to climb Bleaklow, the second highest mountain in both Derbyshire and the Peak. Then on Wednesday I am off up Longdendale to Penistone, on the Yorkshire side of the Pennines.
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
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Outline of a planned walking route from Manchester to Leeds, along canal towpaths, across the Peak District via the Trans Pennine Trail, then north from Penistone to Wakefield via the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, before walking up the Aire Navigation to the centre of Leeds