Thor's Cave, Manifold Dale

Well the weather was glorious today so we decided on a trip to Manifold dale.
We drove to the village of Wetton and having parked, set off towards Thors Cave, situated 250ft up a crag overlooking the Manifold valley, which was reached by an easy walk firstly on roads, then on a fram track anf finally along a footpath. The Cave have a large almost circular entrance, although dispite the dry weather today it was tricky to climb up into the cave itself, as the path to it was quite muddy and water dripping from the cave itself made the rocky entrance quite slippy. I managed to get into the first part of the cave but no further due to the slippyness of the rock floor. Although I didnt know at the time the cave is on the cover of The Verve's debut album A Storm in Heaven.

We left the cave and began the descent to the valley floor, Thor's Cave is a popular place to visit so  stone steps hav ebeen built to protect the side of the valley. The steps descend through a wood so they were muddy as little sunlight got through to dry them and we found the going very slow but we finally reached the valley floor where a bridge crossed what would have the Manifold river, however the river flows underground for part of its course in the summer months, so the bridge just crossed a dry stream bed.
We now reached the Manifold trail, a footpath built on and old railway line.

Our path took us over the trail and up the opposite side of the valley and into Ladyside Wood, we followed the path through the wood, it is not walked very much, judging from the overgown nature of the path. We emerged from the wood and headed towards the village of Grindon. I have to be honest, I was starting to struggle here it was very hot and I was starting to feel queasy. After a rest were continued on into Grindon. We had only walked about 2 miles but had already taken 2 hours, how intended route was to walk to Wetton mill back down in the valley and then over Wetton Hill back to the car. I really didnt fancy the climb up Wetton Hill the way I was feeling, so we consulted the map and decided to change our route and decided to return to Wetton via Weag's bridge.

We followed the road out of the village past farms and we were delighted to see a calf that must have been born only a few minutes early, his mum weas still cleaning him while he was trying to have his first feed. the road descended back down to the valley and we found a footpath that cut off a large bend in the road. This footpath took us through a nature reserve although we didnt see anything in the way of wildlife, but this path lead us to Weags bridge, which crossed the Manifold but again it was a dry bed.

 We were now on the road again which would lead us back up the hill and into Wetton. We again noticed on the map there was a footpath that cut out part of the road. So we left the road and scrambled up a steep bank again very overgrown and soon reached the road again. We followed the road up the hill and expected to reach Wetton after about a mile, after walking for quite a while every time we reached a bend in the road we expected to see the village in front of us but all we saw was the road continuing on between fields with no sigh of habitation.

Eventually we noticed a footpath leading to Wetton, which we werent expecting so we consulted the map again and worked out where we were, we had gone wrong again, 3rd walk on the trot! We had misread which footpath we had walked up and were on the wrong road! We left the road and followed the footpath up through a field and at the top we saw the Wetton in front of us. We walked down through a couple of fields and finally reached the carpark.

In retrospect it was a mistake to plan such a walk as we had today, it was more a day for wandering along on riverban not walkin up and down hills, but we live and learn.