After a very relaxing journey I stepped out into the metropolis of Macclesfield, waved in the general direction of the Macc Lads, then decided that if I was going to get up the notorious Buxton Road without expiring I would need some sustenance. The Waters Green chippy was just over the road, so chips and beans were purchased. Cash only! Anybody remember that stuff? Good job I slung a tenner in my pocket just before I left. Some of the best chips I’ve ever had actually. Can’t stand those white flabby jobs, and these were nice and crisp and brown. Off we head up the vertical west face of Buxton Road, a slow plod, with plenty of time to find somewhere to kip that night.
It made sense (eh?) to crash out near Macclesfield somewhere, preferably after getting most of the way up into the hills, and start fresh the next day. They can be a bit iffy about wildcamping in Macclesfield Forest so after I’d switched on my bivvy-spot radar at the start of the hill it was a stroke of luck to find a likely looking shed in the middle of nowhere. Closer inspection showed no lock (well, no door either!) – I’m not into breaking and entering, just the entering part.
Perfect. Make sure no sheep are watching while I set up my squat in their home, lay out my gear, and partake of a late snack whilst watching the sun set. From this elevation at 1500’ you can see pretty much all of Cheshire, the Wrekin over in Shropshire nearly fifty miles away, the skyscrapers of Manchester, and even the sea glinting near the Wirral also nearly fifty miles away. I spent a good hour just sitting there, and because there were no planes from Manchester airport the skies were fantastically crisp and clear.
A nice early night. Although sadly not that much sleep since a real wind blew up and rattled all the corrugated iron, and temperatures of -3degC outside didn’t help much either, even with two baselayers, two fleeces, and a down jacket on. I was glad I’d brought my Exped Winterlite mat rather than the Hyperlite, and even my -9degC bag was struggling to maintain any semblance of warmth.
Luckily nothing froze overnight in my various bags, so it was porridge and ovaltine on the 22g stove for breakfast at 06.30am.
Up and away by 7am, past the tiny church at Macclesfield Forest and a quick look round the graveyard. Further on there was also a minute chapel with the smallest graveyard I’ve ever seen. As a connoisseur of graveyard bivvies I’ll squirrel that away for another time.
A little ray of sunshine for each inmate
Another slow plod uphill brought me to the Cat & Fiddle Inn and decision time. I’d thought of heading down into Buxton for a second breakfast then on towards Millers Dale or somewhere. A quick spin of the route roulette wheel and it lands on red! Oh. OK, not Buxton then, looks like we’re going SE instead. Towards Monyash perhaps. Then I remembered the Flash Bar Café, on the Buxton-Leek road. Time for a second breakfast after all! A gentle amble across Danebower Hollow and its peat groughs and frozen puddles, then through the old quarries at Danebower, brings us to England’s highest village at Flash.
Order a mix-n-match veg breakfast and then sit outside in the bright sunshine with views right over towards Sheffield – I can see the mast at Sir William Hill from here. It reminded me of the final episode of Coogan & Brydon’s “The Trip” where they sit outside The Angel at Hetton and have breakfast in crisp January sunshine, except mine was half the price of theirs and had a much better view
. And mine had “oven roasted tomatoes”
with the stalks still on! How trendy is that?
Like any self-respecting café they also had some shelves stacked with extremely obscure ales, and this one took my fancy. Rich vanilla stout – from BearBonesTown brewery! Ah hang on, BearTown brewery. Close. Almost had it for breakfast but managed to stash it in my barbag just in time.
Now very chipper after my excellent breakfast, I made the snap decision to eat and drink my way down the Dove valley and see where we ended up – further and further away from a railway station for one thing. Because I’ve got a map on my bars it’s easy to look a long way ahead and try and plot a route taking in as many tracks and bridleways as possible. Things don’t always go to plan as this bridleway is slightly soggier than advertised having been commandeered by a farmer for drainage.
If you know where this spot is please keep quiet about it because it’s one of the most relaxing and idyllic corners I’ve ever found. I spent half an hour just lying in the grass listening to the stream and the birds tweeting, nobody else around, no roads nearby, and no other sounds. There was even a barn for a future cheeky bivvy.
Here’s a photo of a vehicle that’s seen life and suffered a lot of punishment, plus an old four-wheeled wagon as well…
After lots of random turns, dead-ends and various other route changes, a long and sweeping downhill bridleway sees me screaming into Hollinsclough to find a nice little trough for a water top-up.
From here a track leads on down the valley, past the arresting “Matterhorn” of Chrome Hill, and an entertaining splash through the ford. It’s not a proper trip unless you’ve wet your feet in a few fords.
A short lunch stop at Longnor ensued, for a cheese and pickle sarnie and an hour’s sit outside on the square with a coffee and bit of cake watching the world go by. This is the life, I could get used to this. No mileage, no numbers, no route, no problem.
Even I drew the limit at this water supply. Looked a bit chewy to be honest and probably more than a match for my Trailshot.
However this one was well worth stopping at for a few draughts of limestone-pure water. There are a lot of springs around here and after a friendly chat with the farmer he allowed me to cross his field to get to this one. It’s a very powerful resurgence with a short cave before it sumped.
Finally I came to Hartington, where my bike/eat/drink odyssey culminated in tea and scones, followed by a proper Bradwell’s ice-cream, and then my actual tea/dinner from the village shop. The place was surprisingly busy considering it was a weekday but on the dot of half-past five all the trippers suddenly disappeared and there was just me and the crows enjoying the late sunshine overlooking the duckpond. The visitors had probably all been taken away on electric golf-cart things to be repaired in underground workshops like in Westworld, ready to be brought out next day for another round of visits to the olde englishe cheese shoppe etc.
Cheese, crackers, a couple of beers and an apple. Gourmet paradise. The trouble was I’d not found anywhere to kip yet and it was getting cold, so I did a tour round the tracks and bridleways surrounding the village hoping for another shed or barn or something since we were due another freezing night. I tried four barns and all were locked but finally I found an unlocked one and in we went. Straw on the floor, not too many hanging-sword-of-damocles tiles in the roof, excellent. I was just about to set up when I heard a tractor a short distance away. Peeping over a wall I saw him doing a bit of muck-spreading, at which point I flapped and lost my bottle because he was only a couple of fields away and may well be on his way to my field. Time to bail out.
Unfortunately by now it was getting dark and I needed to find somewhere fast. Whilst having tea, I’d decided to just keep going south next day, even further from any railway stations but I was rather enjoying the seat-of-the-pants roulette-wheel ‘planning’. As a result, I now continued south into the Manifold valley. I’d actually wanted to take my time exploring the valley, with its exceptionally interesting ‘disappearing limestone valley river’ (depending on the time of year, the Manifold gurgles away into various sinkholes in the river bed to re-appear several miles away down the dry riverbed at Ilam). But now a bivvy spot was paramount so I blasted down the old railway line, missing all the scenery, until I got to Weag’s Bridge. The valley is narrow and steep-sided, so I decided to head up the side on a tiny lane to try and find any flat areas – hah hah.
Just as dusk was setting in, I turned down a bridleway to the edge of the valley and to some relief found a tiny flat spot on the bridleway itself. Tarp up, kit stashed, and time for a quick beer before turning in. Time to chill after that slight panic, with just the birds gradually switching off for bedtime. Oh, and three or four planes going overhead which rather spoiled the ambience. Quite why planes are allowed to fly over national parks beats me, so much for ‘places for rest and recuperation’. Probably going to Manchester or East Midlands airports. Or maybe even just between those two, such is the lunacy of modern air journeys. I see France is banning internal flights of less than 2 hours with alternative train journeys. We should do the same.
Again, a very chilly night indeed. So much so that I woke at 6am to find the tarp frosted over, and both my 1-pint water bottle and milk bottle completely solid. Sigh.
Decided to pack up and get moving, luckily managing to chew on a couple of rather crunchy ‘choclatinas’ I’d bought at the last minute. Still, the early start rewarded me with a large hare running across the field, a woodpecker in the woods below, and even a large deer on the Hamps valley track – much too big for a muntjack but no idea what it was.
At this point it struck me that I needed a railway station to get home from later in the day! Uttoxeter was a potential but quite a long way further south, so I decided to head west to Stoke-on-Trent. Having thought I was about as high as one could get on the Staffordshire Moorlands already I was dismayed to find myself crawling up an extremely long hill up to the ridge overlooking Leek – here’s the trigpoint marked at exactly 400m on the map. Still, the views were sensational again, and I could see as far as Crewe, Chester and the Clwyds in the distance.
A bit of judicious nose-following kept me away from the suicidal A523 by ambling through various farmyards, fords, tracks and so on, finally popping out on the outskirts of Leek. I hadn’t actually checked the time since I woke up - the phone was showing 6% charge at that point, but by now weirdly it showed 48% and 08.50am. I’d already ridden for two and half hours and still no shops were open! As luck would have it a café on the square opened at 9am, so in I went as the first customer. After a very nice chat with the ladies at the counter, they rustled up another veg breakfast but sadly it was a tinned tomatoes job on this occasion. What a snob Reg is eh.
A bit more watching the world go by and then it was off down to try and find the Cauldon Canal. This was a bit more of a challenge than it seemed and I traversed all sorts of dodgy industrial estates and scrapyards to finally sneak through a little alley onto the canal. The change could not have been more abrupt and the dereliction was instantly replaced by a sylvan and bucolic scene of ducks, gently swaying trees, and sun-dappled mirror-finish canal waters.
I assumed I wouldn’t be catching the 12.00 to Milton Keynes on this defunct railway. It used to transport stone and sand from Cauldon Low and Oakamoor down to Stoke and beyond.
At this point my map ran out so it was a case of winging it through Stoke. It’s a very interesting place, despite frequently being a Crap Towns winner (sorry Burty!), and I need to come back and do some more exploring. Amidst all the multi-storey, building-gapped, underpass-burrowed, boarded-shop post-industrial wasteland of Hanley, there were some beautiful parks and obviously many handsome relics of buildings from its Potteries heyday.
Upon arrival at Stoke, it was a quick nip in to the ticket office to book my bike on the next fast train to MK (only 53 minutes away! Bonkers). Contrary to some people’s opinion, this was perfectly simple and took a matter of moments, and I was back in Leighton Buzzard in time for a late lunch.
It was certainly very strange being back out there again, and I kept having to apologise to people for having forgotten how to interact with them properly! But the roulette-wheel BaM approach worked as superbly as ever with loads of new places visited, people wittered on to, and random bivvy-spots found. Oh, and there was still a small lump of frozen milk in the container by the time I got home.
The Boners Are Back!
4/4, 4/12, 63/63