Hope, Castleton, Mam Tor, Lose Hill

Date: 24 July 2010

Area: Derbyshire Peaks, Hope
Distance: 9.3 Miles, 15 k
Start Location: Car Park in Hope (opposite the Woodbine Café)
OS Sheet: Explorer OL1
Grid Ref: SK 1709 8348
Outline: Hope, Castleton, Mam Tor, Lose Hill

See route and get GPX file from Every Trail





Route
From the centre of Hope take the road south over the bridge to a footpath on right, follow to Castleton, along the road and left in to the centre, keep left past the Nags Head heading south up the road to Cave Dale, at Grid 135 813 turn right and right again. Continue over two roads to reach the path to Mam Tor. Past Hollins Cross, Back Tor and Lose Hill.

Head south down to Losehill Farm, through fields, small holdings, gardens and roads to reach the centre of Hope.

Journey

This walk or versions of it can be found in scores of books, guides and pamphlets, it is a Peaks classic. As a result the section between the road below Mam Tor and Hollins Cross can get pretty busy. On Saturday it was not as bad, possible because no one was keeping the exhausted masses entertained with their death defying feats of trying to run down the hill while attached to flimsy sections of parachute fabric.

Joking aside, when weather conditions allow the parachutes and hang gliders to fly it is extremely compelling viewing and I’m sure on previous visits we’ve seen a couple of dozen or more of them floating out above Mam Tor.

Back Tor and Lose Hill were peaceful enough.

The weather for us was fairly close to perfect, the early mist faded away, the clouds stayed high most of the time and for long periods the light was very good allowing the detail in the stunning landscape to be seen clearly almost to the horizon.

From Lose Hill the most noticeably route off the hill leads down to the Edale Road at Townhead Bridge which results in nearly a mile of road walking to get back in to Hope. Try swinging more to the right, across the fence line and drop down via Losehill Farm, and into the back of Hope, there are more stiles to climb this way but a lot less traffic.

For the first time in many years we had a dog with us on the walk. We’ve been looking after our son’s 1 year old Cavestie dog while the family’s on holiday so the dog came with us. Louis was a great attraction and we spoke to loads of people about him. You can’t tell in the photos but he looks like a small, short legged Labrador with lots of cheeky character.

I’ve now look Cavestie up on the internet and found this on GreatDogSite.com “The Cavestie is a hybrid dog which is a combination of two different pure breeds. It's a cross between a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and a West Highland White Terrier”, which was pretty much all we knew anyway. Apparently cross breeding to form hybrids is quite common as people told us of several like the Labradodle, the Great Dogs site lists loads.

Louis was great fun and 9 miles was at least double any distance he’d ever walked before, inevitably he slept all the way home, had his dinner and stayed in his bed till 10 Sunday morning, Typical teenager.