To the east was upland England. Rolling hills, dry-stone walls and the lonely bleat and wail of sheep. To the west the flat expanse of the Cheshire plain, a rich carpet of gold and green made up a patchwork of wheat and barley fields, interspersed with towns like nearby Macclesfield. I was standing on the very edge of a major geological boundary, the Red Stone Fault. A fault line also in the character of the countryside and its people.
The Red Stone Fault is a massive crack in the earth’s crust that opened up some 150 million years ago pushing the land I was standing on up into the air. It is from this event that the contrast between the uplands and the lowlands springs.
The raised rocks of what is now the Peak District were exposed and wore away more quickly than the lower Cheshire Plain. The young rocks which originally covered the hard hills were stripped away to reveal the harder and older Gritstone underneath. Not even the huge geological chisels of the Ice Age glaciers could completely pare down the hard rocks of the Peak District, the rounded valleys and hills of the area are characteristic of glacial formation.
The flatlands of the plain were perfect for arable farming and villages sprung up amongst the rich fields of wheat I could see ripening in the sun. The exposed hills were more suitable for sheep farming and two different ways of life grew up side by side.
The story did not stop there though. The fast flowing streams of the hills at the edge of the Red Stone Fault attracted the eyes of the early industrial entrepreneurs. The first phase of the industrial revolution was not powered by steam but the water falling off the Pennines. Mill towns, like Macclesfield nestling underneath Kerridge Hill, sprung up in the shadow of the gritstone. The difference in the densities of the population to the east and to the west is as striking as the physical differences in the landscapes. The time had come to leave behind my solitary life.
From Kerridge Hill my route took me south along a series of footpaths that took in the high points along the gritstone ridge. Unfortunately, directly after walking over the interestingly named Tegg’s Nose, I took a wrong turning in the village of Langley and found myself walking along a quiet country road parallel to rather than on the Gritstone Trail.
On a number occasions while I was walking people asked me whether I had got lost, rather hoping that I would tell them some comic story which had me as the butt of the joke. The truth is with most of England it is impossible to be lost for long, though it is quite possible not to be where you think you are for ages. The important thing is not to care. I walked on and got a view of the ridge that I would not have seen if I had walked on the top of it.
After passing the shell of a closed motel on the A54 I began to think that it was about time I found somewhere to sleep and with the walk as usual obeying the Bethlehem Rule - once you start to look for a bed nothing becomes available - I walked on getting despondent at the lack of B and B’s and campsites.
The quiet road I was striding along took me past the village of Wincle and on down a steep hill to a pub in Danebridge which only seemed to open when there was a Z in the month. I realised that I was not going to get a B and B in this village either so I picked out a footpath route that would take me to Rushton Spencer, the village I had original planned to stay in the day after.
The walk from Danebridge to Rushton Spencer was a real delight. It was a warm summer evening and the folds of the land seemed to herd the sunlight into fascinating plays of shape and shadow. I enjoyed the fact that the country was wooded with hedges which surrounded fields of fat, flatulent cows. A lush lowland scene that I have often seen captured in the landscape painting of the eighteenth century. Those rural scenes of Arcadia much favoured by aristocratic Augustans who lived the good life. It seemed all the more merry after the bleakness of the moor.
The view that greeted me out of my window next morning was a fine sight of
the blue water of Rudyard Reservoir nestling in the fold of rolling green hills. A view
that could inspire any soul to poetry, coupled as it was with the soft sounds of lambs
bleating and the smell of an enormous English breakfast cooking for me downstairs.
According to the booklet I read about the area there is a local myth that a certain Mr
and Mrs Kipling
spent their honeymoon in the area in 1863. The myth has it that their
poetic son was named after the man-made lake that I was currently admiring.
Perhaps the great ‘If’ himself was the result of the poetic inspiration I was feeling.
Strikes me that the boy got away lightly, there is another pretty reservoir to the North
of Rudyard called Lamaload - and if his parents had conceived him nearer the
Pennine Way he could easily have been called Widdop or Gorple. I don’t fancy
anyone’s chances of being a nationally revered poet with a name like that.The B and B I was staying at was owned by the farmer of the fields I had been admiring, and his wife said it was OK to make my way down them to the flat bed of an abandoned railway which ran at the edge of the reservoir. From here it was an easy and traffic free walk back to Rushden Spencer where I had left my planned route.
Walking along an old railway track can be dull, almost boring if it wasn’t for the interest provided by the flowers and animals in the margins. One of the charms of walking on your own is that if you are lucky you see a lot more wildlife than in a crowd. Over the course of the summer I regularly saw deer, hares, foxes and on one occasion a whole family of weasels. Despite my good luck, however, most of these lucky encounters were frustrating brief as all I normally saw of the animal was a brief flash of a brown bum disappearing into a hedgerow.
Up ahead the view was dominated by an outcrop of gritstone known as The Cloud which towered over the Cheshire Plain like a fortress. I felt an odd nostalgia as I climbed to the top of it that morning. The view I saw was an echo of the landscape I had seen as I stood on Roseberry Topping looking over the flatland towards the Pennines. Roseberry had been the first real hill I had tackled, a sort of introduction to the Northern Uplands. On The Cloud I was finally saying goodbye.
It struck me forcibly as I stood peering out into the Cheshire Plain trying to pick out the Wrekin far off in Shropshire that it had taken me a mere 18 days to get here from those wet and windy North York Moors. Not for the last time it struck me how walking in England reinforces the sense that it is a small country.
The landscape of the last two days had been noticeably affected by man in a number of ways, one of the most impressive being the quarrying that has gone on in the gritstone outcrops. Being so hard and abrasive the rock was used from early times in milling, though large amounts have been more recently extracted for road building. One of the curiosities of the area is a 70 foot high pillar of gritstone that for some reason got left by the quarrymen when they worked here. The random hacking has produced a sort of cubist statue, the Old Man of Mow, that is a surprisingly good likeness of a human.
I personally can vouch for how abrasive gritstone is. As I walked across hard surfaces of these quarried stones my poor old boots shed slivers off their soles. The gritstone acted like a rasping file. When I accidentally scuffed my foot on the ground it felt like I was walking on a sanding machine.
That afternoon’s walking could not have been more different from the fortress
of The Cloud. After a short stroll down the hill from Mow Cop to Red Bull I left the
uplands and had my feet firmly planted on the plain, on the familiar gravel of a canal
towpath. I crunched my way along beside the Cheshire Ring Canal which would take
me west on the first stage of my walk across the Cheshire plain towards the Welsh
border.Having lived near the Grand Union Canal for most of my life, I guess I have always taken for granted the quixotic environment of the canalside. However, after so long in the hills I had fresh eyes for the canal and appreciated my first steps on the towpath.
In towns, in the summer, canals are cool, quiet corridors through otherwise busy streets. Backwaters of life that allow one to walk or just to fish with one’s thoughts and to watch ducks and the odd rat splash into the water.
Outside of town, towpaths make excellent long distance footpaths across the more crowded parts of England. Basically flat, these paths are not blocked by endless barred wire, crops or motorways. Also on the canal there is always built-in entertainment.
I always get a special thrill when a brightly coloured barge potters its way towards me. I love the individual designs of these boats. I particularly like their names, ‘Crackit’, ‘A Bodge Too Far’ reflecting the affection that the owners have for their boats. Given the above, I won’t deny, however, that best thing for me about walking the towpath across Cheshire to Wales was watching one of the boating holiday makers fall in the water.
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© Gavin Stewart 1996-2004