Monday August 11th

Tintwistle and The Chew Reservoir

We wanted to avoid driving far and David's variant on the walk from Crowden to The Chew Reservoir seemed a good choice (and cut out a visit to Crowden completely!). Parking is on Stocks Green in Tintwistle and follows the cobbled section of Arnfield Lane. Rather than taking the Pennine Bridleway immediately before Arnfield Farm, we took the far more green and pleasant path leading from the farmyard. Being a warm day, the sheep were taking advantage of the shade of a wall.

Sheep being cool

The view up Ogden Clough is fairly typical of the recovering Dark Peak- a lot of heather, which is spread as brash (vegetative propagation) and a bit too much bracken, which is pretty invasive.

Lower reaches of Ogden Clough

Although the stile above Ogden Brook has been repaired, the path to it is smothered by bracken and the clear path takes you up to the gate on the Pennine Bridleway, where we were greeted by a goat.

Sheep waiting for us

The walk along the edge of Boar Flat above Ogden Clough is relatively level and very pleasant.

Above Ogden Clough

After the steep climb up Ormes Moor, we managed to find the more or less direct path across Wilderness to Chew Hurdles and the edge of the Chew Brook valley- a first!

The Chew Brook valley with the reservoir access road

On the way up to Laddow Moss we met a couple looking for "Featherbed Moss", of which there are many in The Dark Peak. It turned out that they were ticking off "The Ethels", a list of summits in The Peak District. Fortunately, we were going that way and invited them to come with us. They would have had to do a more or less direct ascent across unsympathetic terrain if they'd gone direct from where we'd met them. We took them up to the fence crossing the watershed between Chew and Laddow and followed the clear track to the trig point on this Featherbed Moss and parted company- they would return and continue up to Black Chew Head for another tick. We carried on to the familiar ground of Lad's Leap and followed the path back down to Tintwistle Low Moor, Arnfield Lane and back to Tintwistle.

On the path from Lad's Leap

A walk of 10.3 miles with 460m ascent. A variant that met with Jacinta's approval and avoided boring walking beside reservoirs.



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