AUGUST 2022 · ADVENTURE
Peak District: Grindsbrook Clough & Kinder Scout
Kinder Scout, Dark Peak, England
The route up from Edale follows Grindsbrook Clough — a narrow cleft in the hillside, stream running down through it, path beside the water for as long as the path holds before it gives out onto open moorland. In August the heather is properly purple. Not a marginal purple, not a suggestion — full bloom across both sides of the clough and out across the plateau beyond. You smell it before you see how much of it there is.
The gritstone is what the eye keeps returning to. Weathered boulders the colour of old tea, rounded by whatever forces produced them, sitting in the heather and on the edge of the plateau as if placed deliberately. They're not placed deliberately. They've been sitting there considerably longer than the footpath that winds between them. Some are large enough to shelter behind; the wind on the plateau earns you that.
You smell it before you see how much of it there is.
Kinder Scout — August 2022
On the ascent, the valley opens progressively behind you. The stream below in its rocky cut, then the wooded lower slopes, then the broader Vale of Edale, then — if you pick the right boulder to stop at and turn around — the whole of the Dark Peak laid out to the south. I sat on one of those rocks and ate something, looking at it. Someone else was doing the same thing forty metres away. We didn't speak.
The footpath sign near the plateau edge is bolted to a stone cairn. The cairn is the landmark. The sign is mostly pointing at things you can already see. There's a particular pleasure in a footpath sign that has been rendered somewhat redundant by the scale of the landscape around it — you follow it anyway, then look up and find the ridge.
The heather was still in colour on the way back down.
Rocky stream flows down Grindsbrook Clough toward moorland plateau below
Weathered gritstone boulders on Kinder plateau with valley vista beyond
Rocky outcrop frames valley landscape of the Peak District
Gritstone rocks with purple heather blooming on Kinder plateau
Wooded slope and distant moorland from Grindsbrook Clough path
Purple heather-covered hillside slopes toward Kinder Scout ridgeline
Grindsbrook Clough stream winds through heather and rocky moorland
Wide moorland valley beneath Kinder plateau ridge with gritstone outcrops
Hiker sits on weathered boulder overlooking Peak District moorland landscape
Gritstone boulders and moorland grass with distant Peak District slopes
Public footpath sign on stone cairn with Kinder Scout moorland behind