Stanage Edge, Derbyshire - Kiera’s Clifftop

Regular trains call at Grindleford Station on the trans-Pennine line between Sheffield and Manchester. On Sundays and bank holidays in summer, the national park also lays on a hail-and-ride minibus for walkers from Sheffield (service 284), which stops at the car parks below Stanage Edge, and at Hathersage. (tel: 30871 200 2233). There are numerous buses to/from Sheffield Interchange (which is close to the Railway Station) to Grindleford/Hathersage and just of this route to Fox House (a public house which is on the A6187 a short distance right from the end of step 1).

As this is a circular walk, it can start and finish at any of the points where public transport is available.

Seen from the floor the Derwent Valley, Stanage Edge can seem like a strange Stone Age fortress suspended in the clouds, its rock walls crumbling into a huge, curved buttress of bracken and heath. The mightiest of the Peak District’s gritstone escarpments, the crag near the Derbyshire–Sheffield border has long been an icon of the region. When the makers of the 2005 movie, Pride & Prejudice, wanted a suitably epic location for Kiera Knightley (as Elizabeth Bennet) to gaze across, it was here they chose. And with good reason. The cliffs themselves aren’t huge by British standards, reaching only 30m/100ft. But they sweep northwest in an exhilarating, 5-km/3-mile arc with a view matched by few places in the country.

From the lip of the precipice you take in a panorama ranging from the gentle uplands of the White Peak in the south, across the amphitheatre of summits enfolding the Hope Valley, to a shadowy expanse of windswept moors in the northwest, with names redolent of upland Britain at its most damp and desolate: Moscar, Derwent, Strines, Ughill, Brogging Moss and Kinder Scout.

Beginning on the floor of the valley at Grindleford, our route climbs up to Stanage via the magical broadleaved wood of Padley Gorge. An Iron Age hillfort and boulder mountain await at the head of the Burbage Valley by way of appetizers before the main course of the escarpment itself. From its highest point, High Neb, you’ll drop down almost to river level again at Hathersage, via a traverse of delightful Derbyshire farmland. But the fun isn’t over yet. To regain Grindleford, there’s one last climb into the heather and ferns, then a drop along the course of an old millstone quarry, swathed in luminous silver birch forest.

This isn’t a walk for fainthearts. Though rarely steep, it’s long, with a sustained initial ascent and all pubs and cafés are a short way off the route. But the rewards more than repay the effort. You’ll gain a vivid taste not only of the Peak District’s wildly contrasting landscapes, but also the ways in which it has been exploited over the centuries – for protection against invaders, as a source of timber and stone, and as somewhere to escape city life.

[1] From Grindleford Station, turn left and cross the bridge over the brook into Padley village.

(A) Grindleford Station sits at one end of the Totley Tunnel which at 5.7km/3.5  miles long is the longest tunnel running under land in the country. 

Following the lane into the hamlet, look for a public footpath signpost on your right indicating the trail uphill to the “Longshaw Estate via Padley Gorge”; a gate leading onto National Trust land. An old stony track  (with a stream down to your right) winds forward uphill through the woods, eventually emerging onto open moorland. Keeping the stream on your right follow a well defined path until you approach the 3rd bridge (be careful as you could easily have miss the first - this one has no signpost).  Just before the bridge veer slightly left leaving the stream and almost immediately you come to the A6187.

[2] Cross the road, and take the footpath directly opposite. Once through a gate take the right fork (north) up a well worn path.  Shortly you will see Carl Wark hillfort straight ahead in the distance.  There are a number of forks in the path but keep heading forward (northwards).  Shortly you will come to a wider path crossing; go straight ahead here through the boggy land (there should be signs of a path - depending on how many people have used the path recently!).  Make your way towards the centre of Carl Wark - the path does improve after about 50 metres.

(B) Carl Wark fort is an Iron Age hill fort surrounded on three sides by gritstone cliffs.  It was first mentioned in Roman records of the Brigantine uprising in 72AD.

Scale the fort (some climbs are much easier than others, so choose your path!) and cross over, dropping down the far side to join the distinct path to climb Higger Tor. 

(C) The name of Higger Tor is derived from the old Celtic word for “holy hill”.   

On the far side of the latter, take the trail that plunges directly to the road.  Cross this via a stile and from the opposite side keep straight ahead to reach a small lay-by, cross the road and take the path that heads straight for the trig point on Stanage Edge.

(D) Stanage Edge from "stone edge", is a grit stone escarpment famous as a location for climbing. The northern part of the edge forms the border between the High Peak of Derbyshire and Sheffield in South Yorkshire. 

 [3] Once on the Edge, the next few miles are easy to follow. A wide, well-worn, but stony path follows the rocks to the Long Causeway, shortly beyond which you cross a stile onto access land. High Neb, reached 30 mins later, is marked by a trigpoint, which you pass, keeping on the well worn path until on your left (low and easily missed) are cairns reached at SK225856.

(E) The Long Causeway is a Roman road that formerly ran, via a gap in the Edge, between Navio (Brough) and Doncaster. 

(F) High Neb (458m/1502ft), the ridge’s high point, was once the site of a lonely millstone quarry. 

[4] Here, a small breach in the Edge falls left to the main public right of way running below the rocks. The gap, however, is easy to miss. Follow the rocky path down to the left below the cliffs and keep left until a prominent fork is reached at SK229852, where you should bear right, dropping downhill to rejoin the Long Causeway. At the track, turn right and follow it around the side of Dennis Knoll plantation to the road, where you should turn left and then right after the cattle grid, as indicated by a way marker.

[5] From here, the well signed path runs along a wall then bends right towards Green’s House. Follow the wall (on the left and then right) and when you reach the buildings turn left and follow the driveway straight ahead between the buildings through a gate, dropping down between two walls. Then turn diagonally right across a field to a gate and on to a coppice (if you go up behind the trees, you'll find an old mill pond). Following the path forward use the stepping stones to cross a stream and then climb the grassy path, with the shell of a ruined chapel to your right.  Shortly after the second farm gate, turn right down to a gate at the bottom of the field and you are at North Lees Hall. Follow the track past the front of North Lees, and downhill via surfaced driveway to the road, where you should turn left.  

(G) North Lees Hall is thought to have been the inspiration for Thornfield Hall, Mr Rochester's house in Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre. It was built for William Jessop in the last decade of the 16th century.

[6] Just past the entrance to the campsite on your left, a finger post indicates the onward route on the opposite side of the road (right). This takes you up some steps and curving left, shortly passing  Cowclose Farm (on your right), and then across a fenced pasture.  Keep the fence on your right until you come to a style.  Continue towards St Michael and All Saints Church which is on the edge of Hathersage. Having crossed a small stream below the church take the steps up to a path; go left and then almost immediately take the right fork to reach a lane. (To visit the site of Little John’s grave in the cemetery, or go into Hathersage, go right towards the Church and return to continue the route).

(H) St Michael and All Saints, Hathersage is a medieval church said to date back to the 12th century with links to Henry I and his father, William the Conqueror but nothing earlier than the 14th Century exists today.  One of the stained glass windows by Charles Kemp was rescued from Derwent Chapel before it was submerged under the Ladybower Reservoir.  Allegedly Little John, companion to Robin Hood, is buried here.  

[7] Back to the route.  There is a steady ascent up the surfaced lane, look for a right fork over a style and follow the path forward then go diagonally right towards a gate (keep Toothill Farm on your left). Turn right onto the un-surfaced road and walk down to join the main road at the bottom.  Turn left up the road, looking for a way marked footpath on the right side of the road. This drops sharply to the floor of the combe and climbs up the other side to Mitchell Field (another converted farm).  Turn right on the track toward the buildings and at the first waymark sign on your left (only just around the bend - don't miss it) turn left off the track through an opening into a field. Keep climbing straight up the field and cross the road.

(I) & (J) Toothill and Mitchell Field are two medieval, typically Peak farmhouses.

[8] The short climb from the road is very steep. The path then follows the line of a wall on the right. At the junction soon after, turn right and follow the track down across open moorland in the direction of Over Owler Tor, bearing right at a fork to reach the quarries and woods below.  Shortly after a gate, there is a choice of paths, keep right here towards the wall, but when the path divides again, keep straight ahead.  The path winds down through the old Lawrencefield Quarry workings (the buildings scattered on your left - labelled “Millstone Edge” on OS  Explorer maps). Continue on this woodland path which will bring you out on the main A6187.

[9] Cross the road and directly opposite is the start of the onward path through Bolehill Quarry and the woods above Padley.

(K) The former Bolehill quarry complex provided 1.25 million tons of gritstone  to build the Derwent and Howden dams (where the Dambuster 617 squadron trained with Barnes Wallis’ bouncing bombs in 1943).  It was given to the National Trust after World War II.

Follow the main grassy path, which winds gently  through a silver birch woodland. Eventually the path narrows and becomes rockier and then descends to a junction. Turn right and through a gate shortly after. Go down two steep rocky slopes onto a flat grassy area. Go diagonally right in front of a stone structure, and then descend the long steep incline (once used to lower stone from the quarry down to the nearby railway line).   You will come to a path crossing, but take the much narrower path opposite, continuing downhill following the side of the incline.  At the bottom, the path joins a wide track.  Turn left and follow the track back to Grindleford Station passing Padley Chapel on your way. 

The engineering achievement that first rendered the Peak District accessible to Sheffield’s oxygen-starved Victorians was the Totley Tunnel, on the edge of Grindleford in the Derwent Valley. At 5.7km/3.5miles in length, it’s the longest tunnel running under land in the country. Navvies toiled for four years to excavate it, living and working in appalling conditions. Constant flooding and lack of air took their toll, as did the outbreaks of diseases that swept through the shanties at either end where the diggers slept cheek-by- jowl, often twenty to a cottage. But when it opened in 1893, the new rail route transformed the fortunes of the valley as people spilled from the industrial suburbs over the mountain to hike, picnic and build spacious new homes along the line.

At the tunnel mouth, Grindleford Station (A) serves as the gateway to the Peak for this generation of walkers and climbers. The station cafe, little changed in decades, occupies the old station waiting room, with cream-painted, tongue-and-groove walls plastered in rhyming notices warning the parents of unruly tots, “human fireguards” and anyone impertinent enough to request mushrooms to stay away. The café’s eccentric owner died in 2007, but his famous “0% fat-free” fry-ups and pint mugs of tea are still lapped up by devotees.

Grindleford Station sits next to Burbage Brook, whose peaty and frothing waters tumble through a series of waterfalls, providing a cheerful soundtrack as you climb the old stone-paved track through the woods above. Known as Padley Gorge, this is one of the last surviving tracts of a type of oak and birch forest once common on the fringes of the Peak District, but which has now largely vanished, the rest having been destroyed to produce charcoal for the iron industry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of the National Trust’s Longshaw Estate (former hunting reserve of the Duke of Rutland), Padley Gorge is now protected as a nature reserve, renowned among bird watchers as the nesting site of pied flycatchers.

The forest also provides a fragrant approach for walkers to the high moors. Our route follows the course of the stream to its headwaters on Burbage Moor, overshadowed by the sinister bulk of Carl Wark (B) – an Iron Age hill fort surrounded on three sides by gritstone cliffs, and on the other by an L-shaped wall of boulders. Little is known about the citadel or its original inhabitants, the first mention of whom is in Roman records of the Brigantine uprising in 72AD.

Higger Tor (C) a still more impressive boulder hill looming out of the peat bog to the north, may also have been used as a fort at one time, though its name, derived from the old Celtic word for “holy hill”, suggests ritual associations now long forgotten. 

A spur of the old Sheffield turnpike road separates Higger Tor from the southern battlements of Stanage Edge (D). Keep to the stepped path wriggling though the rocks and you’ll emerge close to the trigpoint that flags the finest view of the walk – if not the entire Peak District. From here, the Edge faces straight up the Hope Valley to Mam Tor and Great Ridge, with the escarpment itself tapering northwest in a grand arc.

The path along the level top of Stanage rocks offers some of the most inspiring walking in Britain. Yet considerably more people come here to climb. The BMC guidebook to the area lists no less than 1300 routes, from “moderate” to “E8”. Many reputations have been forged on these crags since the likes of Joe Brown and Don Whillans pioneered leads up the most famous formations. For sheer grit, though, none compare with the marathon, 3000- metre/9850-ft Girdle Traverse completed by Ron Fawcett in 1992 – still the longest unbroken rock route in the UK.

The jangling of harnesses recedes as you progress northwards, beyond the remnants of a paved quarrymens’ track and the Long Causeway (E), a Roman road that formerly ran, via this gap in the Edge, between Navio (Brough) and Doncaster. From here onwards, you’re on land belonging to the Moscar Estate, whose owner periodically asserts his rights to close it.

High Neb (F) (458m/1502ft), the ridge’s highpoint, was once the site of a lonely millstone quarry. In the bracken next to the path lie dozens of stone rings, left where they were carved more than a century ago.  Until the bottom was knocked out of the market by the invention of cheaper, safer carborundum (silicon carbide) in 1890, millstones from here were exported all over the world to grind grain, pulp timber and edge cutlery. Laboriously hand-cut, they were fitted in pairs onto wooden axles and rolled down to Sheffield for shipment.

From Stanage, our route drops downhill too, passing en route the beautifully restored Elizabethan manor house of North Lees Hall (G) , former seat of the Eyre family.  Charlotte Brontë, who visited this area in 1845, was captivated by the building and used it as a model for the Rochesters’ home, Thornfield, in Jane Eyre (Mrs Rochester, fans of the novel may recall, plunged to her death from a three-storey tower very much like the one here).

At the time, Charlotte was staying with friends in a vicarage at the nearby town of Hathersage . History doesn’t recall whether she was shown the Grave of Little John , hidden under a yew tree in the cemetery of St Michael and All Saints Church (H).   No historical proof actually connects the site with Robin Hood’s trusty lieutenant, but when exhumed in the nineteenth century, the remains included what onlookers called “a giant thighbone”. 

Two medieval, typically Peak farmhouses – Toothill (I) and Mitchell Field (J) – are passed as our trail approaches its final climb of the day, to the head of the massive former quarry complex at Bolehill (K). Over a period of seven years in the early 1900s, 1.25 million tons of the hardest grade gritstone were extracted from this “super quarry” to build the Gothic-style Derwent and Howden dams (where the Dambuster 617 squadron trained with Barnes Wallis’ bouncing bombs in 1943).  Over four hundred men and their families worked the site, living in a shanty village of tin huts erected on a series of giant terraces above Padley. Gifted to the National Trust after World War II, the land now supports a serene plantation of silver birches, teeming with woodpeckers and colonies of red ants.

The birch trees spill down the old terraces to the upper fringes of Padley village ,where the only intact remains of a medieval manor is an ancient stone-walled chapel dedicated to three Catholic priests hung, drawn and quartered in the pogroms of the Tudor period. Grindleford Station lies a short walk across the bridge.

Access to High Neb - The well-used path running along the top of Stanage Edge’s northern end – from Long Causeway, past High Neb and on to the main road at Moscar Lodge – crosses private moorland run as a grouse-shooting reserve. Owned by an old family of Sheffield snuff makers, it was technically off-limits to walkers until the CRoW Act of 2000 secured open access. However, you might find the path closed during the spring nesting season. But fear not: in practice, even though gamekeepers erect signs suggesting otherwise at stiles and gates, walkers and climbers may the high path, as long as they don’t venture into the moor itself and disturb his birds, and provided they do no take dogs along. Full details of access rights in this area are available via the Natural England website, www.openaccess. gov.uk.

Terrain: Clear footpaths through woodland, across moors and pasture (generally dry but 1 or 2 boggy areas), though with some moderate ascents.  Passes the Dark Peak’s most spectacular gritstone edge; ancient oak and birch forest; famous film locations; Little John’s grave.  Visit in late autumn, when the moorland colours are most vivid.  Take a day’s food and drink with you as there are no refreshment stops on the route (Hathersage, Longshaw Visitors Centre (at the end of Padley Gorge) and Fox House are just off the route)

Maps: OS Explorer OL1 & OL24.

Visitor Information: Castleton Visitor Information Centre Buxton Rd, Castleton (tel 301629 816572, www.peakdistrict.gov.uk/visiting/ic)
The Peak District National Park  (www.peakdistrict.org). 
The National Trust own the part of Longshaw Estate, which laps the bottom of Stanage Edge (www.nationaltrust.org.uk).
Information about the Peak District. (www.peakdistrictinformation.com)

Eating & Drinking: Grindleford Station, Hathersage (numerous pubs and cafes), Longshaw Visitors Centre, Fox House

Sleeping: Hathersage - YHA, Inns, B&B and Camping 

This route originally appeared as route number 44 in Walk Britain - Great Views in 2009 and was checked at that time by Sheffield Ramblers.