After a day’s break from my Manchester to Leeds trek to climb Bleaklow from Glossop, I set out once more.
Today’s walk is the longest in terms of distance, around 17 miles, and involving crossing the Peak District, which means a fair degree of elevation to. At the end of the day I will be in Penistone right on the edge of the historical Peak District and firmly in Yorkshire.
For the entirety of today’s walk I stuck closely to the Trans Pennine Trail. A brilliant, well maintained multipurpose path linking Southport with Hornsea. A bit monotonous in places but a fast and reliable way to get across the Peak District.
There was a hint of sun as I set out up and over the hill from Glossop to Hadfield.
But an ominously thick looking fog had descended over the National Park by the time I reached Hadfield. The woman who sold me my lunch in a Hadfield bakery asked if I was going up the Trans Pennine Trail. I said yes “but I hope that fog doesn’t also contain rain”.
Fuled up I set out to cross the Peak District bound for Penistone.
Today Hadfield has a little end of the branch line station, served by trains from Manchester Picadilly, via Glossop, only.
As the ghostly gantries at the end of the line attest however, Hadfield was not always where the buffers are. At one time Hadfield was just a calling point on the mainline between Manchester and Sheffield. A route that first opened in 1845. It was electrified in the 1940s and 1950s, the development having been in train since 1935. The first electric trains ran in 1954, however, the high speed service between Manchester and Sheffield was deemed to be a duplicate of the more southerly Hope Valley line which serves more places. So in 1970 passenger services along the line were axed, with freight following in 1981.
Conversion to a mixed use path followed in the 1990s. To my benefit today, but the overall detriment of northern England.
Picking up the Trans Pennine Trail, I quickly began moving up Longdendale.
After walking for a short way, I was out amongst the Peaks, into the National Park.
Today, Longdendale is part of Derbyshire like the bulk of the Peak District. But historically in one the bizarre quirks which used to define English (indeed British) local administration, it used to be part of Cheshire.
Not that there was anyone to complain when the county boundary changed. The valley inside the National Park is populated by one hundred people at most. Much of the valley’s floor was flooded in Victorian times to create a chain of seven reservoirs that provide Manchester with water to this day. It is also host to the incredibly busy A628, linking Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire, a constant sea of HGVs and delivery vans. A mighty line of pylons also nestles on the valley floor, uniting the electricity grids of both halves of northern England.
A few miles outside of Hadfield you cross the Pennine Way, wending its way sharply down from Bleaklow.
Then it’s back on the trail approaching the tiny hamlet of Crowden, the only place of any significant size at all in Longdendale, where the trees thin a bit (Longdendale means long wooded valley in old northern dialect) and you get excellent views of the Peaks on either side.
Down past Crowden, the Trans Pennine Trail passes close to the reservoir, the hills clearly visible on both sides.
Then the reservoirs begin petering out and the valley narrows. You reach the western portal of the Woodhead Tunnel, one and two constructed in the mid-19th Century, then replaced by three in 1954, which served as a railway tunnel only until 1981. The name “British Rail” is still visible above the gated off entrance.
After the Woodhead Tunnel, the walk enters a short, more strenuous section across moorland approaching the boundary between Derbyshire and Yorkshire. It is still not especially challenging as the Trans Pennine Trail is built to cycle path and hig accessibility standards. Initially there are great views back down Longdendale.
Then it is up across moorland along a farm track paralleling the A628.
After crossing the A628 once more, you head down a bridleway towards the county boundary.
The county boundary is a little brook flowing downhill into the River Ethrow. Already wending its way towards Stockport and its congress with the River Goyt to create the Mersey.
Then the track heads upwards, now in South Yorkshire, to where it crosses the A628 for the final time.
On the far side of the A628 a little lane runs downhill past a series of reservoirs (for Yorkshire Water this time rather than United Utilities) down to the little hamlet of Dunford Bridge.
Here the first signs of regular cultivation rather than moorland can be seen on the distant hills along with a forest of wind turbines.
Dumford Bridge is where the eastern portal of the Woodhead Tunnel can be found. And it is also where I stopped to eat my lunch. It being gone 13:00 and the walk being well over half done. Little pizza type things I had bought in Hadfield.
Lunch finished it was time to complete the final section to Penistone.
Apparently Barnsley Council initiated the idea for the Trans Pennine Trail in the late 1990s. Wrangling the other councils along the route and securing the Millenium Commission funding that kick-started raising the tens of millions of pounds (in 2000s prices) it cost to create it. For this reason – the Metropolitan borough council are justly proud of it. The sections of trail leading to Penistone are beautifully cared for. On the edge of the town I even saw a team of eight or nine ‘trail volunteers” out tending it.
This said it is still a bit of a slog, especially after the first ten or so miles through the Peak District.
At this point you are still walking through the Peak District National Park. The Trans Pennine Trail forming part of its Eastern boundary.
About three and a half miles from Penistone you cross a road bridge which marks the point at which you leave the National Park.
After the bridge slowly more and more houses appear on each side of the track as you reach the edge of Penistone. The country all around is still pretty hilly, but its highly cultivated, and nowhere near as dramatic as the Peak District.
Finally you arrive at the town centre. Passing where the town’s goods and engine maintenance yards used to stand. There are still a few signs today.
Penistone is a pleasant, quite affluent market town with connections via a sleepy little railway line worked by ageing diesels to Huddersfield and Sheffield. Lots of new housing has been built around the town. It historically was where Peak District farmers came to sell their sheep and cattle. They still do. Unlike other parts of Barnsley Borough it was never a great coal mining centre, and what mining there was died out before anyone who was alive today would have remembered it. If not earlier.
It feels very self contained and quite sure of itself. It even has a little independent cinema Penistone Paramount. One of the oldest in the country, just pipped by Birmingham’s Electric and Leed’s Hyde Park Picture House.
So that is halfway. Or slightly more. Penistone is apparently twenty seven miles from Leeds and twenty nine from Manchester.
Tomorrow I am entering flatter country. Crossing the Yorkshire countryside bound for Wakefield, once the most important settlement in the West Ridding of Yorkshire, it deputised for York as a centre of local government ruling over the likes of Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. Today it is the southernmost point of the West Yorkshire conurbation and the best place to base yourself for a final push on Leeds.
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
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