Winster Snitterton

Date: 10 July 2010

Area: Derbyshire Peaks, West of Matlock

Distance: 8.5 Miles 13.7 km
Start Location: Winster car park (opp. Miners Standard PH)

OS Sheet: Explorer OL24
Grid Ref: SK 2389 6023

Outline: Winster, Wensley, Snitterton, Upper Town

See route, download GPX at Every Trail

Winster is a great place to start and or finish a walk, it has good walking in almost all directions, plus the small car park is only a short stroll from the Miners Standard one of our favourite pubs in the Peaks.

Walking down through Winster, along the lanes and alleyways leading to Main Street you can’t help but notice that the layout of the buildings is a bit odd, a jumble, fascinating and very picturesque, as cottages, garages, out houses and gardens seem to spring out of each other, in some quite disconcerting positions and directions.

In July the village holds a “Secret Gardens” weekend when visitors can go around the village looking in on a number of gardens that have been ‘opened’ by the owners. It’s a great day and you start to get an understanding of how this jumble of buildings grew out of the homes of miners, quarrymen and farm workers and their families through the centuries.

On reaching the grander Main Street head east, passing well out of the village past the school, on the north side of road pick up the path dropping diagonally through fields down the hillside to a small footbridge in the corner of the field. Entering the woodland follow the stream through Clough Wood and eventually start climbing up to Oldfield Lane. About 500m down the lane a stile on the right puts you on a foot path into the woodland and then bear right across the fields into Wensley.

Turn east past “The Stone Mushroom Farm” and take the path across the fields to Snitterton with its impressive Hall, Manor House, and cottages. Head south taking the track to Leawood Farm and Leawood Cottages. This is a good uphill pull but the views are fantastic and well worth stopping for.

The area from Oldfield Lane, Wensley, Snitterton, Leawood Farm and the next section over to Upper Town all lie adjacent to the eastern boundary of the Peak Park and the whole of this quarter is a super area to walk in. It is largely farm land, mainly sheep and cattle and the views that can be had over Matlock, Darley Dale, Stanton Moor and the moors across the Derwent Valley are some of the best in the White Peak. Also it is usually fairly quiet and feels a bit undiscovered. In eight miles on a beautiful sunny day we only met 2 couples out walking.

Just where the path comes on to the road at Upper Town lies Hollies Garden Centre, where as well as plants, drinks, ice creams and provisions are for sale. The planned route from Upper Town back to Winster was to take the public footpath along Moor Lane, across Blakemere Lane, up to the west side of Blakelow Hill to bring us out on Bonsallmoor Lane just to the north of Moor Farm.

Unfortunately, two of us, both with 1/ 25,000 map and different GPS’s  managed to get into a major navigation faff between Blakemere Lane, and Blakelow Hill where we ended up two fields to the east of the Trig pillar. We should have been three fields to the west. The excuses were many, poor sign posting, trusting GPS’s, talking too much, the heat, getting lazy at the end of the walk, bad eye sight, magnetic interference from the lead mines, but in reality it came down to not keeping good map contact in a detailed area, not counting off the fields and not checking our direction as we crossed each wall. That is basic stuff that we’ve done correctly many times before. (The GPX File available above shows the correct route)

Once we sorted ourselves out we took the footpath from Bonsallmoor Lane across the fields downhill and uphill across Bonsall Lane and uphill and downhill to the Limestone Way and back to Winster for a well-earned pint at the Standard.

NOTE to self take even more pictures and use the 1/25,0000 map more effectively.