Thanks to all my readers for coming along for this journey along the Peak Way - which is ending up almost as long as the run itself. The first post discussed the history of the route, and the ultra-lightweight kit I packed to run/hike/camp along the 160-mile footpath. In the second post, I described the first two days of my run - from Stockport to Bamford - and my realisation that my plan of covering 50km/30+miles per day with a 7-8kg pack in c.26-degree-heat was perhaps too ambitious to be fun. This post will take me from that cliffhanger (Bamford-Edge-hanger?) to the end.
Day Three: Bamford to Matlock (52.5km, 1143m ascent)
I woke up on Day Three with a decision to make. Before setting off from home, I had put all my plans into a Google Sheets spreadsheet, along with information about places en route where I could source gas for my stove, as well as breakfast and washing clothes. According to this spreadsheet, on Day Three I was supposed to be running from North Lees campsite (a few km from Stanage Edge) down to Middleton Top, which lies between Matlock and Carsington Water. This was already supposed to be a 51km day, but I had cut short the previous day’s run by about 10km, stopping for the night in Bamford rather than North Lees. Compensating for that missed distance would bump Day Three up to 61km. I was now more mindful of the terrain than I had been when designing the run, and I realised that, until Baslow, it was likely to be slow-going along Stanage, Froggatt and Curbar Edges, and through Bamford, Moscar and Hathersage Moors. Did I really want a mega-long day? Or would it be possible to change ALL my plans for the remaining days? I’d intended to run long distances from days 1-5, and then a short distance on day 6, but could I even this out, so that day 6 was longer but days 3-5 were shorter than planned? I’d also chatted to the cycling woman at my campsite the night before, about whether I wanted to abandon my Peak Way FKT attempt altogether. Would it be more fun to simply run for a few hours each day, then find a campsite, lie in the sun by a river and read a book, and amble to the local pub for dinner each evening? How would I feel in the future, looking back on it, if I made that decision? And, however attractive that proposition felt, it did pose logistical problems, because I did need to get back to Stockport on day 6, by whatever means, as the Premier Inn were storing my backpack for me.
Once again, I tried to get up early and set my alarm for 5am, but I was just too tired from the day before, and I didn’t manage to get everything packed away and myself dressed and breakfasted until about 8am. As I set off up the road in Bamford, to where I’d left the Peak Way’s route the night before, I thought that I would leave making a decision until later in the day. That’s the beauty of carrying camping kit: you can be so much more flexible than when staying in B&Bs.
The first couple of hours took me back up that 40% incline out of Bamford - which didn’t feel so steep after a good night’s sleep and 3 flapjacks - and up onto Bamford and Moscar Moors. Here the Peak Way follows a slightly irritating hairpin path heading north up Moscar Moor for 5.5 kilometres, then doubling back and going back south along Stanage Edge - but only a few metres beside the footpath I’d already taken. Simply cutting across at Crow Chin, at the base of the hairpin, would have snipped about 5km off. Buoyed up with the enthusiasm of a new morning, I didn’t feel too annoyed by this, especially as the hairpin path opened up vistas onto the surrounding moors that I’d otherwise have missed - but I reflected on how grumpy I’d have been if I’d decided to push on the previous night, and had covered this in the dark.
This thought also occurred to me as I ran along Stanage Edge, and saw the point at which I’d have had to descend in the dark to North Lees campsite. Had I stuck to my original plan, it would have involved a rather hairy scramble down the rock face. Now, instead of feeling a bit inadequate about my decision to stop in Bamford the night before, I felt smug and vindicated. Perhaps I wasn’t a crap, slow runner after all, but a sensible manager of risk. And the moors were looking beautiful in the sunshine. And I was getting used to the pack’s weight and feeling stronger in my quads and shoulders. Everything felt better than the day before. Long-distance running always highlights the extent to which our minds and bodies are integrated. I find that fatigue, hunger and thirst tend to make themselves felt through grumpiness and, vice versa, grumpiness and self-criticism make me fixate on discomfort, blowing up any tiredness out of all proportion.
From Stanage Edge, the path crosses Hathersage Moor, and then drops down to follow Burbage Brook into Upper Padley and Grindleford. The brook was simply stunning, full of families picnicking on its banks and children splashing. I would have loved to have stopped here for some lunch and a paddle, but I didn’t have anything other than semi-molten kit-kats in my running pack, so I pushed on and, a few kilometres later, came across the glorious Grindleford Community Shop, with tables and chairs in dappled light beside the church. Despite my intentions to steer clear of sugar when running, and to fuel on savoury things like sandwiches and crisps, I had two slices of an excellently gooey chocolate cake and a coke, and they were wonderful. They were also rocket fuel: I have very little memory of charging along the next section, along Froggatt, Curbar and Baslow Edges, and into beautiful Baslow, where I stopped at the post office a couple of hours later and bought a sandwich.
Baslow is on the outskirts of the Chatsworth estate, and its wide, level paths were an opportunity for some actual running. It felt to me that Baslow marked a boundary: the gritstone of the Dark Peak was giving way to the White Peak’s limestone, the north’s moorland was increasingly replaced by vibrant green fields, and the undulation was levelling out into rolling hills rather than distinct summits. I like a bit of rugged moorland as much as the next woman, but the shady, lush surroundings of the southern parts of the Peak District - as well as the frequency of villages and towns with shops for supplies - were incredibly welcome at this point in my run. I scrolled through my watch’s screens, and saw that I was not only coming up to the halfway point of the whole route’s distance, but that I had covered more than two-thirds of the ascent. It felt like a decision had been made for me: I was definitely going to finish the Peak Way, and from now on, it would be significantly less hard work. It was about 5pm at this point, and I made a plan: I would stop in about 5km’s time, in Bakewell, for some food and then I would press on to Matlock, about 16km beyond Bakewell, for the night. At a rate of about 6km per hour, I wasn’t likely to get there until about 9pm, so I promised myself a reward: I would stay in the Matlock Premier Inn, instead of a campsite, which would give me the opportunity to wash and dry my now-stinking clothes and air my tent. (Because I was reaching campsites much later than I’d initially intended, there hadn’t been enough time to do any laundry.) And to wash myself.
The 16km from Bakewell were, as predicted, a bit of a slog and I saw the riverside path from Rowsley into Darley Dale getting darker and darker, but it was a good decision. Although I got to the Premier Inn after the restaurant had closed, I had a glorious hot shower and ate a Domino’s delivery pizza and chips in bed and felt nearly human again.
Day Four: Matlock to Alstonefield (42.83km (c.27 miles) and 1009m ascent)
A massive perk of staying in a hotel rather than camping is that getting ready to leave in the morning is so much quicker: I managed a lie-in until about 8am, and was on the road by 9am, whereas when camping, it was taking me over 2 hours each morning to pack up and depart. However, the rapidity of my packing was offset by the fact that, almost straight away, I passed a coffee shop and couldn’t resist stopping for 2 croissants (my favourite ultra-running fuel), a cappuccino and Wordle. I then faffed around, trying to get out of Matlock and getting lost on the paths around the Heights of Abraham, which are a combination of private ticket-entry-holder-only roads and public rights of way. I somehow ended up in the private section and had to scale a fence to get out of it, which felt like I was trespassing the wrong way around. Don’t follow my GPX route here! There were nice views from the top, though.
I think the 30km section between Matlock and Ashbourne was probably my least favourite of the whole Peak Way: much more built-up and traffic-filled than anywhere else (apart from the zone around Stockport), and, although Carsington Water was pretty, it was also rammed. I bought a sandwich at the visitor centre, ate it fairly rapidly under a tree, and moved on.
After Ashbourne, though, Things Got Beautiful. I knew that this area is gorgeous: the previous year, I’d taken my girls to camp at a site at Hulme End, and we’d done some hikes along the River Manifold, above which the hills rise steeply and spectacularly. The Peak Way doesn’t follow the Manifold river, but instead travels north along the River Dove, which is similarly gorgeous and, on this hot calm evening, was being enjoyed by hundreds of families with picnics and splashing children. It felt quite odd to be silently running through their midst: it was a reiteration of a sensation I often have, of inhabiting a more solitary life from all those seemingly happy two-parent families. I know that some of this is an illusion - I am part of a family, with my 3 brilliant girls, after all - but a pernicious effect of trauma and bereavement is the way it picks you up out of your previous life and dumps you on an isolated island, which no-one else can access because they don’t have the same forms of experience. Long-distance running definitely feels like the right activity for such a solitary island-dweller.
A danger of running along a straightforward riverside path is that I don’t pay attention to the internal markers, and treat it as a simple ‘finishing strait’. This means that I stop looking after myself: I stop eating, telling myself that I’ll have a proper meal when I finish. And this happened as I ran along the River Dove. My sense of constantly being ‘nearly there’ was also exacerbated by my misuse of the Ordnance Survey mapping app. You can’t change the scale of a paper map, and I know that a certain distance on paper - 4cm, say - always translates to the same 1km distance on the ground. But on an app, you can change the scale: when I zoom in, almost as far as possible, to the 1:25k scale, I know that the distance across my phone screen translates to roughly 2km on the ground. But, obviously, when I zoom out, the distance covered on the map shown on my screen can be 12km or more in reality. I know all this. But yet, there is some part of my wishful brain that thinks that, even when I’ve zoomed out, the distance between two points is STILL only 2km. So I kept telling myself, as I ran along the Dove, that ‘it’s only 2km until the turn-off to Alstonefield’, when really it was more like 10km. And this meant that I didn’t eat or drink properly, so that, when I finally did reach the turn-off, I wasn’t in a brilliant physical state.
I staggered up the steep hill from the Peak Way to the campsite at Alstonefield, and decided to stop at the pub, The George, for food and drink before setting up my tent. It was lucky I did, as the pub had only just stopped serving, and the lovely landlord agreed to make me a delicious meal of chilli and rice. If I’d turned up 30 mins later, I think I’d have had to make do with crisps. I had a good night’s sleep at a very civilised adults-only campsite called Smithyfields, and appreciated its beautiful loos and showers.
Day Five: Alstonefield to Buxton (46.87km (29miles) and 848m ascent)
Throughout this run, I found it extraordinary how well I felt each morning. I had expected to stiffen up overnight and take a while to get moving the next day, but it was the reverse. The first few hours of each day were almost euphoric, and it was these moments that really made the run a glorious experience. A few years ago, a friend said to me, ‘you’re so lucky to be able to do these runs’, and that comment has really stayed with me, throughout a lot of events in my life which have felt profoundly unlucky. It’s good to remind myself that, although I have lost an awful lot over the last three years, I’ve been very lucky to have my health, to be able to build my fitness back up, and to have running as something I’ve been able to fall back upon; something which, when almost everything else has felt untrustworthy and unreal, has been indisputably solid and graspable and real.
The first hour or so on day five was no exception, and it was glorious, in the early morning sunshine, to continue following the River Dove, now through Wolfscote Dale, and into Hartington, where I stopped for a coffee and pastry at the farm shop. When I had initially woken, rain had been bucketing down, but it quickly stopped and the clouds cleared. After Hartington, the Peak Way diverts onto a cycle route along an old railway line, and this was flat and offered easy running. It was exposed, though, with few places providing shade, and by the time I reached the village of Monyash, I needed a short sit-down with a flapjack on a bench. A group of women, out for a hike, approached me, and one of them looked me up and down and asked me how far I’d come. I told her I’d run about 115 miles in total, but only about 10 miles that morning; and that I had about another 50 miles to go. She looked shocked.
‘Why?’ she demanded.
‘Well, it’s a holiday,’ I replied.
‘Are you doing it for charity?’
‘No, just for fun.’
‘Are you running to meet someone? or to join up with some friends?’
‘No, no. I’m on my own.’
‘Don’t you get lonely?’
‘Not really.’
She paused, trying to think of any other credible reasons why someone would run 160-ish miles. ‘Are you like that guy…David Goggins?’ she finally asked.
‘Who?’ I had no idea who she meant. She smiled and tutted, not unkindly, and wished me a pleasant day running, and I wished them a pleasant day hiking, and we all moved on.
A couple of kilometres after Monyash, the Peak Way passes the remnants of an old lead mine, called Magpie Mine. After a bit of googling, I discovered that it’s said to have a ‘widows’ curse’ upon it. In 1833, nearly 100 years after the mine first started operating, miners at Magpie lit some underground fires to prevent miners at the adjoining Maypitt mine trespassing - but the fires’ fumes killed three Maypitt miners and, although 24 Maypie miners were tried for murder, they were all eventually acquitted. The Maypitt miners’ widows apparently cursed Magpie mine, and it never made a decent profit again. There are lots of people I’ve cursed since becoming a widow, but I don’t think it’s been similarly effective.
From the Magpie Mine, the path drops down into Ashford in the Water, a pretty settlement on the edge of the River Wye. I stopped at a cafe here for two toasted teacakes, a coke and a slice of pistachio and orange cake, which I wrapped up and put in my bag for later. After Ashford, the path stays close to the Wye, rolling up and down through the welcome shade of Great Shacklow Wood and Taddington Wood. Woodland trails, which are turned into softly sprung floors by years of compressed pine needles and twigs, are my favourite running surface and, with 200-kilometres under my feet at this point, even the muddy indents in the path felt as cooling and luxurious as a spa treatment.
After a little while, the ramshackle pedestrian path met up with the Monsal Trail cycle route, and although it was navigationally straightforward and level, it was much harsher on my soles. These had continued to blister since Day Two and, by this point, I was running with two layers of Compeed plasters on the balls of each feet. I had developed similar blisters during runs of over 70 miles in the past, but in those races, I’d assumed that, if the run had been much longer, then the blisters would have become race-endingly painful. In actual fact, what had happened on this run was that I had simply got accustomed to them, and although I let out a yelp every time I landed on particularly sharp stones, it wasn’t until the final day that I even began to worry that I wouldn’t be able to carry on. I think there are numerous ‘running pains’ which are like this. For about two years, I’ve had a slight soreness in my right knee, at the very front of it, on top of the kneecap. It’s not exactly painful, just…there and a bit sore, and it gets more sore the longer I run. I was worried that the soreness would potentially end my Peak Way attempt, and indeed, the knee pain did begin towards the end of Day One. But at this point in Day Five, it occurred to me that I hadn’t been at all conscious of my knee for about three days now. The soreness had just…gone. As had the ache in my shoulders from my backpack. My body seemed to have quickly adapted to what was required of it, and strengthened, and I was very grateful for it - and made a mental note not to catastrophise should blisters or sore knees impinge on long runs in the future. It does seem to be possible to ‘run through’ some forms of pain, and come out on the other side.
The Monsal Trail passes through two long tunnels - Cressbrook and Litton - which were cool, dark and damp, and a beautiful rest from the relentless heat. At the beginning of the week, the weather forecast had predicted an end to the heatwave around now, but the rain that morning was a distant memory and I was very hot, and covered in a fine layer of dried salt. I was almost disappointed to leave the tunnels, and longed to sit by a river. When the Peak Way temporarily diverts from the Monsal Trail to follow the Wye more closely through Chee Dale Nature Reserve, it was tempting to ignore the pathway’s true route and to stick to the (much shorter) cycle path - but it was this longing for a riverbank that kept me honest. And I’m so glad that I didn’t take the shortcut, because the section through Chee Dale ended up being my favourite of the entire Peak Way. There were herons, and limestone stepping stones, and climbers hanging overhead on the crags around Chee Tor, and it was cool and green and beautiful.
When the path left Chee Dale and Wye Dale, I told myself that I must be nearly at Buxton now - and I did my trick of zooming out on the OS map app to confirm that, yes, it ‘must be only 2km from here’. But of course it wasn’t. It was more like 8km, and I’d also failed to clock ‘Deep Dale’ on the map, which is a dramatic cleft in the landscape, plummeting the walker to the base of the gorge and straight back up again. As I emerged, sweaty and dusty, at the top, I found that I was in a small campsite, and a friendly Dutch (I think) couple waved at me from beside their campervan, and asked where I’d come from and where I was going, and offered me a cup of tea, and were interested to hear about the Peak Way. I wish I could have hung around and chatted for longer, but the sun was threatening to set, and I wanted to press on to Buxton in the daylight.
Day Six: Buxton to Stockport (39.36km (24.5miles) and 720m ascent (and 949m of DESCENT!)
Finally, on my final day on the Peak Way, I managed to get up early and was up and on the trail by 7.11am. I knew that it would be my shortest day, in terms of distance and time; that there was more descent than ascent; and that it was almost literally ‘all downhill from Buxton to the finish’. My only deadline was to reach Stockport in time to walk to the Premier Inn, where I’d stayed just under a week ago, collect the backpack I’d left there, and then get to the train station in time to get the last train to Swindon, around 7pm. My mind was focused and determined…but my body was not. On my left foot, the blister on the ball of my foot had spread, into the gap between my big toe and second toe, and walking was suddenly incredibly painful - so much so, that I started worrying that I’d refractured the breaks I’d sustained during lockdown, in Jan 2021, when I’d dropped a 6-pint bottle of frozen milk on my foot. Still, I was too close to the finish to stop now, so I limped on, up and out of Buxton.
As I exited a small wood onto the unimaginatively but aptly named Wild Moor, I admitted defeat and took a couple of Solpadeine tablets. With 20 minutes, I was running - slowly but happily - across the rolling moors, down towards Errwood and Fernilee reservoirs, and through Goyt Forest. I had mentally prepared myself for a lot of urban running on this last day, so the moors and water and woods were completely unexpected and absolutely stunning. After a few hours, I reached Whaley Bridge - which was more like the urban terrain I’d been anticipating - and I stopped for a coffee and two pains au chocolat. Then there were yet more Moors - Whaley Moor and Park Moor, dropping down into the grounds of the National Trust property Lyme Park - and then the Peak Way suddenly turned right, and there I was, back on a canal towpath, just as I had been on Day One.
The familiarity, and the accompanying sense that I was really on the home strait, gave me an incredible boost, and I started running steadily and continuously, for the first time since Day One. The kilometres passed quickly as the canal went through the suburbs of Stockport. I wondered if I could keep up the pace until the finish, but I decided it was more sensible to stop and refuel, so at Marple, I called into a local supermarket for a coke and 2 croissants. As I was sitting on the small wall in its car-park, drinking and eating, a man approached me and asked where I was running. When I said ‘Stockport’, he offered me a lift. ‘Haha, no thanks,’ I replied. ‘I’ve run nearly 250km. If I was going to have given up and accepted a lift, it wouldn’t be in the last 8km.’
‘God, you must actually like running,’ he commented.
‘Yup’, I replied, and started packing up.
As I ran off down the road, he followed me with his car, winding the window down and calling out, ‘are you sure you don’t want to get in?’
Unsure where this was going - whether it was ‘just banter’, or whether he was on the cusp of turning nasty and threatening - I was glad when the path turned off the main road, and away from his car, and back towards the river. Now I was heading north-west, retracing my steps from Day One, back through Chadkirk and its dressed well, back past the field that, a week ago, had been hosting a busy car boot sale but which was now empty, back along the River Goyt, back into and up the steep forested area that borders Woodbank Memorial Park, back into the park itself, back along the wide paved paths alongside children tottering on small bikes with stabilisers and dogs and leads, getting faster and faster and closer to closer to where I’d set off at 9.33am on Sunday morning, and then I was there, at the entrance to the park, at the mock Grecian pillars and at 15.32 I could stop my watch and stop moving.
My time on The Peak Way, in numbers:
My GPX file of the route is available here
Estimated distance on OS maps app: 254.41km
Estimated ascent on OS maps app: 7,226m
Estimated distance on Garmin Connect’s Course: 254.41km
Estimated ascent on Garmin Connect’s Course: 7,559m
Actual distance that I covered, according to Garmin: 265.4km (on the trail; plus distances to and from campsites, which I didn’t record)
Started: Sunday 28 July, 09.33
Finished: Friday 2 August, 15.32
Overall elapsed time (including time not on the trail, before I started my watch and after I stopped it each day): 125 hrs 59mins 43 secs (or 5 days 5 hrs 59 mins 43 secs)
Overall elapsed time on the trail (ie. the time between starting my watch at the beginning of each day, and stopping it at the end of each day): 63 hrs 55mins 59 secs
Just in awe...
Congratulations on your epic run Rachel - absolutely awesome achievement. Really enjoyed reading all of your fascinating articles about your Peak Way adventure.