Well, its been quite a while since I added to this blog, what with golf and the cold spring, we haven't been out and about However, today was a great opportunity to get he boots back on and stretch the legs. Most of our walks follow routes in a book of Peak District walks. These are split into easy, medium and hard, we tend to stick to the easy and medium and today's walk was the last of the easy ones we had to do.
The walk started at Chelmorton, a village south of Buxton ans was to take in the villages of Taddington and Flagg, before returning to Chelmorton.
We parked on the road between the church and the pub and started walking up a steep path by the side of Chelmorton Low the hill that overlooks the village, this hill is not accessible but contains on its summit a couple of round prehistoric barrows, our route took us up what is known as a lead rake and is presumeable an area from which lead ore was extracted. Certainly, we walked through and area full of hump and hollows, which we have learnt to associate with the remains of lead mining.
As we reached the to of the rake we came to a bridle path and made a detour to see the Five Wells Chambered Tomb. this is a Megalithic Tomb reputed to be the highest in England. To be honest, there wasn't much to see, just a few stones, which apparently are one of the only chambers left standing, although in the past archaeologists had uncover 12 skeletons. It was rather sad that there was nothing saying what the site was, there was not even a sign identifying it.
We retraced our steps back to the route we were on, and continued to walk through farm land, to be honest it was a rather uninspiring. Although we did see plenty of Sky Larks, Meadow Pipits and a Wheatear, there were also lots of Swallows, at least they think summer is on its way.
Soon we reached the summit of Sough Top and looked down onto the Village of Taddington, pictured at the top.. Before starting down the hill we stopped to eat our lunch and spent a while looking over the hills and valleys to the east of us, attempting to identify the various dales we could make out. I also spotted a very impressive Church in the distance but could not work out where it was, it certainly dominated the village it was in and could well have been at Tideswell where the parish church is known as the Cathedral of the Peak.
After our break, we descended into Taddington, rather unfairly described in our book as a bleak one street village. We did not linger and started to climb out of the village up the road to Flagg, I do not really like walking on roads and prefer fields and fortunately once we were out of the village we left the road to head across fields towards Flagg. Flagg is a tiny village with a street, a tiny church and school and a nice tea room, where, after watching a very large herd of cows being taken in for milking, we stopped to enjoy a cream tea.
We then commenced the final part of the walk back to Chelmorton, sadly the directions in the book were not very good and we could not follow them, however we did spot a bridle path that seemed to be going in the general direction, so we followed it and found ourselves back at the top of the lead rake we had walked up at the start of the walk. Although this wasn't where we were supposed to be we followed it back down to the village and the car.
All in all it was a pleasant walk and it was nice to be out in the Peak District again, but we have done lots of far more interesting walks.
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