Tag: Mam Tor

Mam Tor

Mam Tor

Mam Tor from the Castle Inn, 1.30 p.m., 20°C, 69°F: You can see how Mam Tor got it’s name; it sits there like a mother hen looking down over the Hope Valley. The line running along the righthand side of the summit plateau is the line of the ramparts and the silted up ditch of an Iron Age hill fort.

The exposure of alternating layers of shale and sandstone cuts across the southeast corner of the hill fort. The scar is the result of a series of landslips. The piles of debris at the foot of the hill are still unstable and this resulted in the closure in 1979 of the road that ran across them: the A625 from Sheffield to Chapel-en-le-Frith.

Riverside Birds

birds
Young coal tit and robin and an adult male siskin (lower left).

11 a.m.: There are a lot of young coal, great and especially blue tits visiting the feeders at the Riverside Café, Hathersage, this morning. They look washed out, as if the colour saturation had been reduced in Photoshop. They’re not such sharp dressers as the adults, lacking some of the more emphatic markings like the breast stripe of the male great tit.

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Mist over Mam Tor

meadow crane's-bill

Coffee break at the Riverlife Cafe, Bamford.
Coffee break at the Riverlife Cafe, Bamford.

Losehill has its head in the clouds as we walk along Hollowford Road, the old route between Castleton and Edale. The verges are lush of meadow crane’s-bill, yellow vetchling and meadowsweet.

A male bullfinch investigates a blackthorn by an old field barn then joins his mate as they make their way along the tall hedgerow.

bullock

Dock leaf
Dock leaf with creeping buttercup.

Calf number 500196 takes a passing interest in us as I photograph him through the fence with Mam Tor in the background.

It still amazes me that we can reach this horseshoe shaped valley in just over an hour’s drive from home. We’re delivering books today, so we’ve come the long way around via Sheffield. On what’s become a regular run for us, I find it impressive that such a busy, and what I’d call vibrant city –  with galleries, theatres, museums and a botanic garden so close to lonely gritstone moors and green limestone dales.

In the Hope Valley we’re right on the border of these two Peak District landscapes, where tropical limestone seas gave way to the river deltas of where the millstone grit was deposited. Between the two, looming behind calf number 500186, we have a great pile of Mam Tor sandstones and Edale Shales. Which are notoriously unstable. Beyond 500196’s hindquarters, you can see that landslip that closed the A625 Sheffield to Stockport road in 1974.

Castleton barn

Silver birch, drawn as we had a late lunch at the Seed Room, Overton.
Silver birch, drawn as we had a late lunch at the Seed Room, Overton.

There’s more lush vegetation by the stream in Castleton including an umbellifer (hogweed?); a garden escape, yellow loosestrife and a clump of reed canary grass, Phalaris arundinacea.

Hope we’ll be back in the Peak District again before too long.

bullock

Mam Tor

3 p.m.; Mam Tor, drawn in my A6 notebook. I’m travelling light this afternoon.

WE’D FINISHED a morning of errands and stopped for a coffee and bagel and it was then that we realised that we had a free afternoon. Ninety minutes and 33 miles later, we arrived at Hope in the Peak District and took the easy walk alongside the river to Castleton.

A Dipper stood ankle-deep in the water by a gravelly island on a bend in the river, pecking amongst the pebbles. The last time I saw a Dipper was 5 weeks ago today when I spotted one flying along just above a river on our return train journey from Wengen, Switzerland.

Sitting with a pot of tea in the back garden at the Castle Inn with Mam Tor, the Shivering Mountain, as a backdrop isn’t quite as spectacular as sitting outside a mountain restaurant at the foot of the north face of the Eiger but it’s equally charming and far more accessible for us. Here Jackdaws replace the Alpine Choughs that came down to the cafe tables at Kleine Schiedegg.

One of the Jackdaws lacks a black cap; a youngster. It begs for food from both parents without success before one picks up a scrap of food from the turf and feeds it.