The Peak Way was devised by Ken Reece, from Stockport, as a lockdown project in 2021, and it was launched the following year. On the 70th anniversary of the Peak District National Park, Reece set out to create ‘a walking route that would offer some of the most spectacular views and showcase some of the most interesting heritage/points of interest in the stunning 555 square miles of the Peak District’. As Reece describes, the resulting footpath is a ‘best of’ compilation of the Dark Peak and White Peak areas, and the idea of running it continuously hugely appealed to me. I’d only dipped my toes into the Peak District beforehand, and I mainly associated it with the Kinder Scout right-to-roam protests of the 1930s, but I knew that there was a huge amount more to the National Park to be explored. I’ve been wanting to do a running-and-camping trip for ages: I love the idea of being completely free to run as long as I want, and to stop wherever I want, waking up to sunrises in stunning places. This felt like an ideal route for that sort of trip, as, in the midst of the natural beauty, there are also lots of opportunities to restock with food and drink. Also, I have only one week a year in which I am freed from childcare and domestic chores, when I send the kids to a residential summer camp, and I was determined NOT to spend that week catching up on housework - and I couldn’t think of a better way to do that than to take myself completely away from the house and chores and electricity and wifi and, indeed, most belongings. Finally, it occurred to me that, because The Peak Way is such a new route, then if I managed to complete the distance it would likely be a Fastest Known Time, which was a minor but still attractive incentive!
I worked out that, once I’d factored in travel to the kids’ camp, and travel to the start of the route in Stockport - and the same in reverse - then I’d have a little over 5 days in which to run The Peak Way, which is officially 155 miles (but my total mileage, as calculated by the GPS trace, was 165 miles). This meant running around 30 miles a day, which felt very doable - although, as I’ll describe in the next part, I underestimated how hard it would be! First and foremost, I wanted this to be a holiday, not a race, so my intention was to use up all the time I had, rather than trying to cover the distance in the fastest possible time. So I did complete the distance continuously and non-stop - ie. I didn’t leave the trail - but I did sleep at night en route, rather than just keeping going overnight. I know that it could be run much much faster than I did it.
I also decided to run it ‘self-supported’, according to the rules and regs of the Fastest Known Time website. ‘Unsupported’ means that you’re not allowed to access any form of support other than water and foraged plants/berries etc on the trail: you have to carry all your main nutrition with you. That sounded….heavy and a bit self-flagellating for a holiday. ‘Supported’ means that your mates or crew can meet you along the way, either running with you, or supplying drinks and food or first aid. That didn’t feel necessary: as I’ve said, this wasn’t really a race. So I opted for a ‘self-supported’ event, which meant that I could access support that is available to the general public (food shops, campsites etc), but not private support (no camping in friends’ gardens, for example). I also ran it solo, and I hired a GPS tracker from Track Trail, so that I would have a record of the run and so that, if anything went dreadfully wrong, I could press the SOS button.
So, I had a skeleton plan. I would drop the kids off at camp on Saturday 27 July and then get the train to Stockport that evening and stay at the Premier Inn. I would then start running after breakfast from Sunday 28th July, and I would have to be back in Stockport by about 6.30pm on Friday 2nd August, at the latest, because I’d need to get a train back to where the kids were at camp that night, in order to collect them first thing the following morning. So that gave me 5 full days and 1 shorter day to cover the c. 160 miles.
Day 1: Stockport to Edale (26 miles (41.6km), 965m of ascent)
I woke up to clear blue skies and blazing sun, and wandered up the road to the beginning of the route, at the entrance to Woodbank Memorial Park - and took an obligatory selfie by a mock-Grecian entrance gate. The Peak Way begins with a straightforward run through the park, which was a good opportunity to begin to get used to running with my 7kg pack.
It’s an odd physical experience. Unlike running with an extra 7kg of body weight, which would be evenly distributed around my frame, a heavy pack concentrates all the weight in one place, relatively high up, and shifts your centre of gravity. The pack didn’t bounce at all, and was cinched tight to my torso, but I did feel much more unbalanced than usual, and was glad of the straightforward terrain. From the park, the route roughly follows the river Goyt to the village of Chadkirk, where the local well had been ‘dressed’ with a stunning tableau that used natural materials (leaves etc) to depict women engaged in traditional methods of dyeing, bleaching, stretching and drying cloth in the fields - a nod to Chadkirk’s industrial heritage.
A few miles later, the path meets and follows the Peak Forest Canal up an impressive and steep series of locks in Marple, at the top of which there was a canal boat serving excellent coffee and cakes. I clung to waterside paths - the canal and the Goyt and Sett rivers - for another 14km, and was averaging around 7-8mins per kilometre. This was much slower than usual, but it felt comfortable considering the heat (in the high 20s) and the pack’s weight and I thought that I was probably on course to get to the campsite around 4pm, as planned.
I usually find that slow running offers the perfect physical condition for letting my mind wander. I think there’s a sweet spot in which regular but not-too-taxing physical movement, like jogging or hiking, stimulates the brain into fluent thought. If it’s too slow and easy, I find that my brain is lazy and sluggish; if the physical labour is too hard, then my body is too taxed with breathing and pumping oxygen around itself to think. But there’s a lovely middle-ground, and lots of people, from Wordsworth to Murakami, have commented upon the capacity of walking and running to bring about that fluent creative state. My therapist is convinced that the right-left motion of running enacts the same bilateral stimulation as EMDR, a form of therapy in which rapid engagement of the right and left brain hemispheres, usually by moving one’s eyes back and forth, helps the brain process trauma and consign it to the past. I believe that no-one knows exactly how EMDR works, but it has a near 100% success rate - although, in a similar way to how I’m immune to the pain-relief medication in the epidurals used during childbirth, EMDR didn’t work on me. But I might give it another go. Anyhow, despite singing the praises of slow running for brainwork here, I found that throughout my entire week in the Peak District, I barely thought about a single thing. I reckon that I had so worn out my brain with writing over the previous month, that my body needed an opportunity to give my brain a rest and focus on corporal matters alone. All I thought about was the mental arithmetic of running: adding up the time I’d spent running so far, how much was left to go, and what time I might arrive at my campsite each day.
24km from Stockport, the Peak Way reaches Hayfield, which, judging by the number of hikers and posters for guided walks, is considered the gateway to the Dark Peak. I took an hour for lunch in the sun here, and then set off along the quiet road towards Kinder Reservoir. At the northernmost tip of the reservoir, the path heads north, up ‘William Clough’ and onto the high moor. My late father lived in Nottingham, where a stretch of the A52 is named Brian Clough Way, after the football manager. When I first visited the Peak District in my 20s, and came upon all the ‘cloughs’ there - steep-sided valleys, with streams running along the bottom - I thought that William Clough must have been Brian’s brother, and wondered why one got an unlovely dual carriageway named after him, while the other got a stunning piece of moorland. At the top of William Clough, the path bimbles south-eastwards around the highest point of the moor - around 600m up - and I remembered how much I love running on gritstone, which is nasty and abrasive if you fall over, but grippy enough to make slipping a rarity. The waterfall of Kinder Downfall was almost completely dry and, at 4.30pm, the sun was getting lower and casting a silvery light onto the rocks, so I sat for 10 minutes and watched a sheep hopping from rock to rock.
As this suggests, I had slowed down considerably, finding it impossible to move with much speed or elegance through stony, uphill paths that were heavily curtained with heather. At Kinder Downfall, I knew that I had another 10km to go, before stopping for the night at Edale. Usually this would take me between 1 hour and 90 mins, depending on the terrain, so my fantasy about a cuppa tea and a sit down with a book before dinner started to recede. Still, I was having a nice time, moving well and enjoying the sunshine, although my pack was starting to rub painfully on a bump on my collarbone, where I broke it as a child.
At Kinder Downfall, the route turns south, towards the highest point and the trig point at Kinder Low. As I headed towards it, I was ambushed by a memory of having my photo taken here a few years earlier, holding hands over the trig point with my late husband Pete. We’d been on a weekend away for his birthday, staying at a pub in Edale, and we’d hiked the Edale Horseshoe route, and a stranger had photographed us there. I had remembered the photograph, but not its location, and seeing the trig point again - with other couples now being photographed beside it - momentarily took my breath away. It’s something I really resent about grief, being ambushed like that, all the time, by memories - by a place, a word, a smell, a fragment of a song. I’ve developed a nervous tic when it happens: a jolt in my face, where my upper lip jerks left and up, and my shoulders raise and stiffen. I debated going up to the trig point, and confronting the memory head on, but actually I realised I really needed the loo, so I found a patch of heather and had a wee. I don’t know if that’s a meaningful gesture, pissing on the past or something.
After that it was downhill most of the way into Edale. The Peak Way comes off the moorland, not by Jacob’s Ladder, but a slightly longer and less steep route, and then follows the easy wide path into Upper Booth, and through fields, into Edale. I stopped my watch as I came to the point where I’d begin running the following day, and walked down to Fieldhead Campsite, a calm spot by the river. I set up my tent in a quiet ‘adults-only’ area, had a blissful hot shower, got dressed and meandered up the road to a pub - which, as it was a Sunday, had already stopped serving food by 8pm. Disaster! After a bit of faffing with trying to order delivery mezze from a Turkish place (which had also closed), the pub agreed to fill my dehydrated pack of bolognese with hot water, so I sat in the beer garden with a pint of lager shandy, a pack of crisps and my ‘adventure meal’, before wending my way back to the campsite and falling asleep straight away.
Day Two: Edale to Bamford (26 miles (42.17km) and 1461m ascent)
Now, today was *supposed* to take me on a 50km run from Edale to a campsite, North Lees, slightly off Stanage Edge. But, as we’ll see, I stopped short, and was very glad of it.
I set my alarm in Edale for 6am, but once I’d slowly woken up, made a breakfast of another rehydrated packet meal (Firepot banana porridge - pretty delish), coffee (made with this totally indispensable filter, which I take wherever I go) and orange juice (bought in the pub the previous night), and packed up all my stuff, it was somehow 8.30am. I realised that, on future days, I’d either have to get up much earlier, or would have to significantly curtail my morning route. Anyway, it was another gorgeous sunny morning, and I walked up to where I’d left the path the previous evening. My legs didn’t have a trace of stiffness in them, and I realised that, if I stuffed a folded sock under each bra strap - where it hits my shoulder - then the pack’s straps wouldn’t rub on my collarbones, and this was a total game-changer. Today was going to be one of the longest days, but I felt good and ready.
This day’s route began with a climb up onto the top of Mam Tor, which is only a couple of kilometres due south of Edale, but reached on the Peak Way via an 8-km route that first heads south-west and then east to the summit. Because Mam Tor is so close to Edale, I’d envisaged reaching it in about half-an-hour, but the ‘detour’ and ascent meant that it actually took me over 90 minutes. This set the tone for the rest of the day: I was continually pissed off that everything was taking much longer than I expected, and it meant that, by the end of the day, I realised that I needed a significant change of tack to put me back into holiday mode.
Despite the crowds, running along the ridge between Mam Tor and Lose Hill is pretty pleasant, with wide paths formed by stone slabs, and some gentle downhills. There’s then a steep descent into Hope, where I reached just before midday, and decided to buy an early lunch in the mini-supermarket. This was the day with the fewest amenities en route, so I knew that I would have to take every opportunity I got to fill up on food and water. From Hope, the route goes north and steadily uphill along an old Roman Road. I stopped here and put some preventative plasters on the balls of my feet, where I’ve recently developed an irritating - and extremely painful - proneness to blisters. I didn’t have blisters yet, but I could feel the beginning of ‘hot-spots’. In a race, I’d have just pushed on through, but I was still very much in the early stages of the overall 5-and-a-bit-day run, so I made myself stop and deal with them. I’m not entirely sure whether it made much difference in the long run, though.
About 10km after Hope (a friend texted me at this point to say that he and his wife thought it was hilarious that I was now officially “beyond Hope”), the route drops down into the Upper Derwent Visitor Centre, which sits between Ladybower and Upper Derwent reservoirs. I’d hoped to be here for lunch, but it was now about 3pm and, once again, I was pissed off: why was it taking so long? Why was I so slow? I’d wanted to be at my campsite by about 4.30pm, and that was nearly 30km away. At this rate, I’d be there gone midnight. Of course, the answer was that, with my pack, I found it pretty hard work to run at all, unless the path was flat or downhill, and completely non-technical. So I was almost entirely walking, but my expectation of pace and time was still geared around running: I was still mentally calculating that I’d be covering about 8km each hour, when, in reality, sometimes I was only covering 4km. I finally sympathised with my children, who are regularly unimpressed when, on a hike, I tell them that our lunch stop is ‘only 30 mins away’ (because that’s how long it would take me to run it), and it ends up being more than double that.
This negative mental state meant that I was resentful about the next section, in which the path runs north along the reservoir for a few miles before doubling back on itself and venturing south and south-east, up onto Howden and Derwent Moors. It wasn’t the first time in the day that I contemplated cutting across and taking a shortcut. The early stages of the Peak Way are full of such temptations. It’s only a few kilometres due east from Hope to Bamford, for example, whereas the Peak Way’s route between those points takes nearly 30km. But I didn’t succumb. I ploughed on, getting hotter and crosser as I moved upwards towards the cairn at Lost Lad.
From then on, though, I was at least heading in the right direction - south - for my campsite. The sun was getting lower, and the moorland scenery felt familiar from my runs on the North York Moors, and the weird gritstone rock formations were so striking, that I couldn’t help but be cheered. And I knew I had to make a decision. It was now 5pm. My intended campsite wasn’t anywhere near a pub or shop, so if I did stay there, then I’d have to be certain that I’d make it there in enough time to do the 30-min walk down through the fields into Hathersage before the pubs stopped serving food. Considering that the campsite was almost 20km away, over steep and rough terrain, that seemed pretty impossible. Another option was running down into Bamford - where the Peak Way goes anyway - and continuing a further kilometre to a food shop at the garage; eating dinner on the hoof; and pressing on to my booked campsite - but this would almost certainly mean running the last hour or so (which was on exposed moorland), and setting up my tent, in the dark. Not a deal-breaker, but not necessarily that fun. The third option was to camp and eat dinner in Bamford, and then try and make up some of the missed mileage the following day(s).
In the event, the decision became a lot clearer when, at 7.30pm, I started descending into Bamford. The road into the village is the steepest I’ve ever walked upon in the UK: a whopping 40% decline. That’s the maximum incline on my treadmill, and I’ve never been able to stick at it for long, and certainly not with any speed. I had to dig my toes into the tarmac to stop myself slipping over as I headed down. Not surprisingly, the local authority has erected ‘road closed’ barriers at its top and bottom: I can’t imagine the fear that would result from being taken along that route by a car satnav. As I tiptoed down, I knew that there was no way on earth that I was going to jog 2 kilometres further to the garage, eat dinner, and then turn back and return the way I’d come, up that 40% hill, and THEN do the remaining 10km up onto and along Stanage Edge, before finding my campsite (which was another 2-3km off the path) and setting up my tent. No Way. So I used my slow downhill pace to photograph a nationalistic scarecrow by the roadside, and to find a nearby campsite. I made my way to Heatherhill Farm Campsite, in Bamford, and phoned the owner once I arrived - who was lovely, found me some space to pitch my tent, and introduced me to my pitch-mate, another woman who was travelling alone (cycling) and had also arrived late and without a booking, and also had a tiny hiker tent. I set up, walked down to the garage and bought a lot of food and a beer, and wandered back to the campsite, where I sat and chatted to the cyclist, and was entirely satisfied with my decision to cut the day’s running short. But I knew I had some planning to do: was I going to try and make up today’s missed miles tomorrow, which was already supposed to be a long 53km day? Did I really want to push that up to 63km? Or was I going to have to rejig the entire week’s plan?
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
Style: Self-Supported. Throughout, I ran alone. I purchased all drinks from shops and cafes, or used my TravelTap filter bottle to drink from streams. I brought 2 dehydrated adventure meals with me, some salt tablets, and some energy gels. The rest of the food I consumed was purchased from shops, cafes or pubs. I stayed mostly in campsites, with a few hotels.