Wednesday Walk Millers Dale – 12 May 2021 – Stuart Firth
When I was a lad my ambition in life was to become a bread-butterer in a Subway sandwich shop. Imagine therefore how appropriate it was that I became what was known as a thick sandwich apprentice at Rolls-Royce and Associates, the design authority for HM submarine power plants.
On induction we were told to beware seductive foreign agents laying honey traps. Things were definitely looking up. Alas these daydream thoughts came to nought. Instead we learnt such arcane techniques as “Critical Path Analysis” and “Programme Evaluation and Review Techniques. What, you may well ask, has this got to do with this particular Wednesday Walk? Quite a lot actually.
On arrival at Millers Dale car park, it became evident that the ticket machine was so complicated that a PhD would have come in handy. There was even a flow chart displayed with about a dozen stages at the end of which one might be lucky enough to win a ticket. Happily after three or four goes, not only did I win a ticket but I felt sufficiently confident to try and help a rather exhuberant and garrulous Liverpudlian cyclist apply himself to the task. This was probably a mistake.
The machine was like a cross between a fruit machine and a game of snakes and ladders. One mistake and the process was brought to a juddering halt and one was sent back to the beginning. The trouble was the cyclist was incapable of keeping his hands off the machine buttons while it chuntered agonisingly slowly to the next stage of its convoluted process. Consequently he kept being sent back to the start.
By this time there were seven frustrated people behind him in the queue. I tried pinning his arms to his side to speed things up. However, his eel-like slitheriness enabled him to flash his card at the reader at an inappropriate moment so that he was about to be awarded a one-hour ticket instead of the full day one he wanted. There was now a crowd of twenty three other punters. We jointly wrestled him to the ground and successfully managed to complete the process on his behalf and sent him on his happy way. So it was in a slightly flustered state that the day’s activities began.
We climbed steeply out of Millers Dale up seemingly hundreds of steps whose “rise” was twice their “go” and whose “go” was too long for a single stride and too short for a double. There was a lot of good natured huffing and puffing and we soon completed the major climb of the day.
Once at the top, the views opened up and in good Buddhist style we walked in a clockwise direction linking up various farms along the way: Highcliffe, Fivewells, Chelmorton, Topleyhead, Calton and Cottage Farm. The terrain was never difficult and offered extensive views often including distant quarries. Rusty opined that the quarry industry at one time employed 15% of the Derbyshire workforce.
We came across Grove Rake – an impressive lead mining site which looked like a massive ditch and was home to a delightful clump of yellow violas. At the end of the Grove lay Illy-Willy water, aka Bank Spring pit in Chelmorton. We took lunch in the delightfully atmospheric church graveyard where we discovered the Lord’s Chair.
Photographs courtesy of Nicola Bashforth
After lunch, John Gwyther was pleased to shift the scale on a 44 tonne weighbridge. He had had a good lunch.
On our return, above Chee Tor, we came across a Sheffield University archeological team surveying the settlement marked on the map. We received an interesting impromptu lecture on the Roman (lead-mining?) remains from the supervisor who appeared himself to be of Italian extraction. Maybe his ancestors had built the place. And the vertiginous climb at the start of the day.
Back at Millers Dale station, we enjoyed the refreshments on offer and I discovered – stuck in my back pocket – the car park ticket I had been so pleased to “win”. Fortunately, there were no traffic wardens that day…