Blackden Brook

One of the consequences of working away from the UK for weeks at a time is that I end up appreciating home so much more. If I ever took it for granted I don't any more. After getting back from Italy I was determined to get out onto the Dark Peak moors to walk and climb.
One of the first opportunities came with the visit to Derbyshire of my friends Simon and Jan - we always try to get out for a day when they're up from Ipswich. This time I was going to take them to the Upper Derwent moors, using the weekend bus service that shuttles up alongside the Derwent and Howden Reservoirs on summer weekends. However, it turns out there's an interval of a few weeks in May during which the roa is closed to private cars but there's not yet a bus provided. So we thought again.
It was many years since I'd walked up onto the north side of Kinder taking Blackden Brook from the Snake Road. That's decided then.

Simon at the start

Blackden Brook is a deep V that heads up south away from the road. It's quite a long valley curving gently away until it rises steeply from under the rim of Kinder's northern rim. The small path seems to have little footfall and is hardly eroded. Once alongside the brook itself the path is narrow, sometimes jumping the brook, sometimes on flat sediments and often on the steep valley sides a few metres above the stream.

The valley narrows

It's not a path to fall off and there are places where the walking involves the use of the hands. We wandered along in the May sunshine and saw no-one, just a succession of pretty pools and tumbling waterfalls, hemmed in by the valley.

The climb up to the Plateau

Towards the end you start to climb and the valley floor steepens and becomes bouldery. The path hardly matters here as you scramble over and between lumps of brown gritstone gaining height rapidly now to reach the Kinder Rim path.

Looking north from the Rim

Immediately on gaining this point we saw other groups of walkers for the first time. The rest of the walk was on more familiar ground for me; along the rim westwards to Fairbrook then north to Fairbrook Naze, the steep ridge running down towards the Snake Inn on the A57. The plateau has changed over the last few years as the project to reduce the erosion starts to change the environment. Largely gone are the plain chocolate peat banks flanking the streams which created tufted islands of heather and bilberry hags. Onto the peat now grows grass, turning the landscape green and pale Naples yellow, a prairie landscape that seems to shimmer in the breeze.

A grassy landscape on the plateau

And so down the naze and back to the road in an hour. I love this landscape of moor and rock. It feels like home.

At the top of Fairbrook Naze