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Book: The Wild Rover: A Blistering Journey Along Britain’s Footpaths by Mike Parker
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Authors: Mike Parker
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told the filthiest jokes after a couple of sweet sherries at Christmas. Hovering ethereally in the shadows was Northumberland, a mysterious distant cousin that everyone’s heard of, but no-one’s really met. And judging from the statistics, the Peak District was the staple of every family, the good time had by all, but who rarely gets so much as half a shandy bought for her afterwards.
In the Old Nag’s Head, Pennine Way and Kinder Scout ephemera coated the walls of the Hikers’ Bar, a name announced on the door. Another front door led into the Locals’ Bar, and it was evident that the divide was pretty absolute. It probably has to be: Edale has been so thoroughly consumed by the Great Outdoors industry that the locals need to create and police their own corners, from a bar in the pub to a section of the vast village car park that was marked as ‘VILLAGE PARKING ONLY’. I camped the night in my van at the top of the car park (it’s not encouraged, of course) and was mildly amused to see that, even when the whole place was empty save for me and one other camper van, locals very pointedly made sure that they still used their designated spaces.
Immediately south of Edale is the ‘shivering mountain’ of Mam Tor, somewhere else that I’d wanted to visit for years. It’s almost my ultimate destination, as a spiritual pilgrimage to one of the great mother mountains of Britain, but also as a far more prosaic, positively spoddy one too, a chance to see our most spectacular abandoned modern highway. Mam Tor’s colourful nickname comes from its sheer precariousness as a vast pile of regularly shifting shale, just as it meets the firmer limestone to the south. Landslips are commonplace, which makes it a feat of towering optimism to have lain a trans-Peak road across its southern flank in 1810. This grew into the A625, a stretch of road notorious for its hairpin bends, unyielding gradient and harsh winter weather. Bits of the carriageway collapsed regularly and were patched up until the next slip, all causing terrible headaches for the Highways Agency and Derbyshire County Council. In February 1977, at the end of a wet winter that had itself followed a drought summer, the mountain shivered and the road buckled. Cracks and steps, some two foot deep, appeared in the asphalt. It was stitched back together once again, but as a single carriageway controlled by traffic lights. With more slips inevitable, the road was finally closed to all traffic in 1979. I can well remember the intriguing gap on the map in road atlases of the time: two thick red lines of main road failing to meet in the middle, and with the legend ‘No Through Road at present’ between them. I’m really quite ashamed that it had taken me this long to visit.
Getting there 30 years late was no anti-climax. In truth, it was way better than I’d dared hope, even after looking at so many photostreams of it from my fellow nerds on the internet. The old A625, after just three decades of abandonment, is a salutory lesson in the vanity of hoping to conquer Mother Nature, here on one of her very own named peaks. The shattered road drops away in cliffs, its layers of make-do-and-mend tarmac giving it the look of geological strata that had been painstakingly laid down over millennia. Faded white lines and Cat’s-eyes point into cracks, holes and sheer nothingness. Above sat Mam herself, calmly waiting, occasionally shivering, and in total control of all she surveyed.
One unfortunate by-product of the A625’s closure was that the adjacent Winnats Pass, a narrow defile through limestone turrets, has seen a considerable rise in traffic thundering through. The thin road is a 1:5 hairpin rollercoaster, and on a bright March day it was plenty busy enough; it must be a nightmare on a bank holiday Monday. Winnats Pass has an honourable place too in the story of our fight for access to our wild places, for it was here that national Access to Mountains rallies were held
In the Old Nag’s Head, Pennine Way and Kinder Scout ephemera coated the walls of the Hikers’ Bar, a name announced on the door. Another front door led into the Locals’ Bar, and it was evident that the divide was pretty absolute. It probably has to be: Edale has been so thoroughly consumed by the Great Outdoors industry that the locals need to create and police their own corners, from a bar in the pub to a section of the vast village car park that was marked as ‘VILLAGE PARKING ONLY’. I camped the night in my van at the top of the car park (it’s not encouraged, of course) and was mildly amused to see that, even when the whole place was empty save for me and one other camper van, locals very pointedly made sure that they still used their designated spaces.
Immediately south of Edale is the ‘shivering mountain’ of Mam Tor, somewhere else that I’d wanted to visit for years. It’s almost my ultimate destination, as a spiritual pilgrimage to one of the great mother mountains of Britain, but also as a far more prosaic, positively spoddy one too, a chance to see our most spectacular abandoned modern highway. Mam Tor’s colourful nickname comes from its sheer precariousness as a vast pile of regularly shifting shale, just as it meets the firmer limestone to the south. Landslips are commonplace, which makes it a feat of towering optimism to have lain a trans-Peak road across its southern flank in 1810. This grew into the A625, a stretch of road notorious for its hairpin bends, unyielding gradient and harsh winter weather. Bits of the carriageway collapsed regularly and were patched up until the next slip, all causing terrible headaches for the Highways Agency and Derbyshire County Council. In February 1977, at the end of a wet winter that had itself followed a drought summer, the mountain shivered and the road buckled. Cracks and steps, some two foot deep, appeared in the asphalt. It was stitched back together once again, but as a single carriageway controlled by traffic lights. With more slips inevitable, the road was finally closed to all traffic in 1979. I can well remember the intriguing gap on the map in road atlases of the time: two thick red lines of main road failing to meet in the middle, and with the legend ‘No Through Road at present’ between them. I’m really quite ashamed that it had taken me this long to visit.
Getting there 30 years late was no anti-climax. In truth, it was way better than I’d dared hope, even after looking at so many photostreams of it from my fellow nerds on the internet. The old A625, after just three decades of abandonment, is a salutory lesson in the vanity of hoping to conquer Mother Nature, here on one of her very own named peaks. The shattered road drops away in cliffs, its layers of make-do-and-mend tarmac giving it the look of geological strata that had been painstakingly laid down over millennia. Faded white lines and Cat’s-eyes point into cracks, holes and sheer nothingness. Above sat Mam herself, calmly waiting, occasionally shivering, and in total control of all she surveyed.
One unfortunate by-product of the A625’s closure was that the adjacent Winnats Pass, a narrow defile through limestone turrets, has seen a considerable rise in traffic thundering through. The thin road is a 1:5 hairpin rollercoaster, and on a bright March day it was plenty busy enough; it must be a nightmare on a bank holiday Monday. Winnats Pass has an honourable place too in the story of our fight for access to our wild places, for it was here that national Access to Mountains rallies were held
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