Back to the Derbyshire Dales 29/09/10

Dovedale is the southernmost of the Derbyshire Dales, in fact the River Dove forms the border between Derbyshire and Staffordshire. We arrived at a very busy car park, Dovedale is a popular walk so it wasnt suprising to see lots of people there.
After crossing a bridge from near the carpark a path leads up into the dale, the lower part is quite open with limestone exposed hills, Thorpe Cloud being an imposing hill with scree slopes on one side and Bunster Hill on the other.
After short walk past the foot of Thorpe Cloud there are some stepping stones across the river, which is a popular place for a lot of the families who were there. We continued up the dale which was now becoming quite wooded and climbed quite steeply to a point called Lover's leap, from where we got a view of one of the first rock formations in the valley called the 12 Apostles (pictured), a series of rock pillars. shortly followed by Tissington Spires and a rock arch called Reynards cave.
The valley started to narrow and the path went across 2 wooden jetties as the both sides of the valley came right down to the river, soon we reached Lion's head rock (you need a bit of imagination here) then the impressive Ilam rock a tall bare rock pillar ending in a sharp top. Continuing along the path we arrived at the Doveholes two caves with pretty big entrances. The path then continued until we crossed a bridge and arrived at the hamlet of Milldale, 3 miles up the Dale from where we started. This was a good place for a stop and a snack, so we sat by the river and had something to eat and drink.
Setting off again we left the dale and started a sharp, rocky, quite muddy, but thankfully not to long a&climb to reach farmland above the dale and after crossing several fields full of sheep and cattle we arrived at a track that lead down to a minor road. We walked along the road for about a mile as it climbed between farmland, passing one farm where it was nice to see some Shetland (maybe) ponies and suprisingly 2 llama, or Alpaca as it turned out.
We eventually left the road and crossed more farmland as we headed for Bunster Hil,l fortunately we didnt have to climb this but we did traverse the hill about half way up until we reached a "saddle" in the ridge, this was quite a tricky walk across a rocky hillside. Once we crossed the saddle we descended sharply into farmland which we crossed and finally arrived back at the carpark we had started from.
The walk in total was about 7 miles, the longest we have done so far, the dale for the most part was easy walking and apart from the steep climb out of Milldale not bad going at all. Although the dale itself was busy particularly the first part once we left Milldale we saw very few people. It took us 4 and a half hours including the break at Milldale, not bad going for us as we do stop and look around a lot unlike some of the "route marchers" that we see.
Not too many flowers around but thats to be expected at the end of September. There were lots of ducks on the river and hawks in the sky too high to indentify, and more goldfinches, must be a thing about Derbyshire.
-----