Holiday 6 - 13 May 2017 Edale

Day 1 - Travel to Edale

A day of driving, made good time ~5 hours Southampton - Edale ~230 miles
So that's M3 / A34 / M40 / M42 / A42 / M1

Stopped off at Warwickshire services half way.  I was looking for signs of the difference between north and south.  Past Lecistershire the traffic petered out quite a bit.

I was using a Garmin sat nav, which did pretty well.  On the preperation I noticed it was doing something strange on the M40/M42 changerover, throwing in a couple of A roads.   I kept to what it said and it did have a spurious come off and back on the motorway scenario.   Chesterfield was a bit confusing and I followed the A61 further north than I should have done, but the sat nav corrected fine.

Past Warwick castle was the furthest north I have ever travelled.  I'd heard bad stories about the M1 congestion but it wasn't too bad.  There was a long stretch of lane conversion road works at 50 mph - but if anything this temporary thing helped traffic flow.

The local roads to Edale and the farm we stayed at were fine, only right at the very end going to single track.

Day 2 - Initial trail walks

Today we set out and walked some of the basic trails.  The morning was spent walking 4 miles on the Penine way.  The afternoon was spent walking about 2 miles in the other direction which leads to a second farm.  Beautiful weather and a lot of people on the trails.  Had lunch at the Coopers Cafe in Edale which served some nice sandwiches.

Day 3 - Trip to Manchester

I've never being to any big cities, and Manchester now marks the furthest point north I have travelled.  Edale is a direct train so I thought this was my one chance to do it.  I was expecting a lot of run down and seen better days type of city centre.  But Manchester seemed like it has had a lot of redevelopment mixing the old buildings with new.  There are some classic old architeture like the Corn exchange, or the Midland hotel - but also some new pedestrianisation of the city centre.  What looked like a neat tram system also ran through the centre which seemed a lot better than an underground or fragmented bus network.  We had a good walk round a nice lunch, did not quite make the art gallery as it was tricky to find (once we'd given up, someone asked us for directions!)

Day 4 - Chatsworth House

Took the car out today to find Chatsworth house, about 20 miles away.  We got there as it opened, and spent the morning looking around the house and the afternoon walking the gardens.  The house had a fashion and sculpture twist as well as giving a family history.   The gardens were beautiful with lots of features.  This included a hedge maze, and a water walkway down to the house.


Day 5 - Walking, Grindsbrook and Ringing Roger

Today we tried some of the harder climbs.  At the top of Edale we walked along Grindsbrook which was a weaving path alongside the river.  This ended with a quite hard climb to the ridge we we declined.   We tried another route which was a path climb up onto Ringing Roger which gave some spectacular views. down onto the valley.

Day 6 - Walking, Penine Way and Jacobs Ladder

Did about 5 hours of walking today back to the Penine way we initially did some of on day 2.  This time we followed the trail on to the climb at Jacobs ladder a long spiralling climb up to the ridge  This took us onto a ridge and we stopped at a high point at a group of rocks.  This walk took us to the open country proper and the views were spectacular.  On the way there and on the way back we saw two RAF Tornado's flying overhead.