Bleaklow Hill & Higher Shelf Stones

Ideal day for a walk up Bleaklow Hill in the Peak District to see the site of the remains of the USAF Boeing RB-29A Super Fortress plane which crashed into a grough just below the summit of Higher Shelf Stones in 1948, leaving all 14 crew dead. The wreckage is strewn over the hillside, loose and available to anyone who is capable of carrying it away. Many of the families find this unacceptable, although there is a memorial and a tasteful plaque. The fact that such an horrific tragedy lies open to time and the elements in this way, gives the site a further desolate beauty, as if it needed it.

In spring, with the larks singing high in a brilliantly clear sky above the subtle reds, browns, purples and yellows of the moor, or in winter under a covering of snow, the peat iron hard beneath ones feet and long blue shadows cast by the low sun, Bleaklow is magnificent. Even when after weeks of rain one ploughs knee deep through clinging black ooze with little to see but the grey mist, there is still satisfaction in the wilderness and the wet, but love it or loathe it, Bleaklow cannot be ignored. 

Between the flanking cities of Manchester and Sheffield, Bleaklow is within an hours drive for several million people, yet this wild upland moor is well named, a wilderness of black peat, bog, and weirdly eroded gritstone. To the north is the trough of the A628, the Woodhead pass, with its chain of five reservoirs supplying Manchester. When built in the mid nineteenth century, this was the largest stretch of man-made water in the world and the two railway tunnels constructed about the same time were the longest anywhere. Southwards the plateau is incised by the lovely Alport Dale and the Derwent Valley whose waters are impounded in Sheffield's reservoirs of Derwent and Ladybower. From the foot of Ladybower, the A57 climbs to the Snake Pass, the first road to be blocked every year by snow heralding the onset of winter. The Snake Pass takes its name from the Snake Inn which was built in 1821. Originally called Lady Clough House, the name was soon changed as a compliment to the Duke of Devonshire, whose coat of arms features a snake.

The walk back to Glossop is down Doctor's Gate which was named after Dr. John Talbot a rector of Glossop, who lived from 1494-1550. The illegitimate son of the Earl of Shrewsbury, he probably used this road to visit his father who had a castle in Sheffield. The gate or way, which was used by packhorses until the new turnpike was built in 1821, followed the line of the old Roman Road which linked the front of Navio at Hope with Melandra at Glossop. The upper section with its intersection with the Pennine Way is the best preserved with upright paving slabs set between kerbstones, though the paving was probably done by seventeenth century quarrymen rather than being of Roman origin.

From: John and Anne Nuttall, 2003. The Mountains of England and Wales. Volume 2: England (2nd Edition). Cicerone. (Walk 13.1 Bleaklow).