Highgate

A farm looking over Chinley Head.

You can just start to see down the other side towards Hayfield. Peep-O-Day Farm on the left will get a view both ways.

The top of this road on Chinley Head. The farm ahead, Peep-O-Day Farm, will have a view both south to Chinley and north to Hayfield.

There are views down the valley to Hayfield.

Marked as disused on the OS map, the signs here suggest the quarry is still operational.

A leg of the bridleway which will descend into Coldwell Clough. Mount Famine is seen ahead.

Hayfield is at the bottom of the valley ahead, but the bridleway doesn't go straight to it, instead taking a route off to the right once it gets a little further down this track.

Looking down from the Pennine Bridleway. Chinley Churn is the highest point of the high ground opposite.

Peep-O-Day Farm is profiled against the low wintry sun.

The involvement of P Casey suggests that the quarry is now used for landfill and is no longer being quarried.

Possibly a former miners track. It now assists sheep farming on the slopes up to Chinley Churn.

Looking north towards Lantern Pike. There is good uniformity in the dry stone walling.

It is on the northern end of the Chinley Churn ridge, with a view to Kinder Scout in the background.

It will descend steeply very soon, but you cannot quite see the descent yet.

A tributary of the River Sett, with the Kinder plateau in the background.

Part of a longer descent to Hayfield which goes down via Foxholes Clough.

For reasons entirely down to nosiness, if time permits I usually read the plaques on memorial benches, if that is the correct term for them. Usually they are just slightly jollier epitaphs than would appear on gravestones - which is fine - but occasionally you come across something a bit out of the ordinary, such as this (but for all I know, this appears on his grave too). The words on the plaque are: In remembrance of John Rowland A working class intellectual Listen for the song of his soul Why the working class bit gets mentioned raises questions. Was it because his intellect went unrecognised or unrewarded, due to his status, because he had to go against the grain in order to pursue whatever intellectuals do, or just that he overcome barriers to fulfil his potential I wonder? I also wonder when these kind of benches first became a thing. I then wonder, if a bench is particularly well-made, and therefore lasts a long time, whether the plaque will ever get replaced by another one, dedicated to somebody more recently deceased, at some point. In much the same way that censues are only released to the public a century after they were taken - due to the fact that the people who may have been keeping secrets which would be betrayed by the census information will all be dead by this point - I have always thought that gravestones should be removed 100 years after death. This is because by this point there will be nobody alive with an actual memory of the deceased, and therefore the grave no longer serves it purpose, as a place to mourn and remember the dead. This would then free up space, although it would make visiting cemeteries far less interesting I suppose. It is notable that our working class intellectual's plaque has no date of death mentioned, proving he might well have been very clever indeed. Staying one step ahead and seeing into the future maybe - therefore bypassing the upcoming 100 year rule, sitting pretty for centuries to come.

According to three other contributors to this square, this small copse is known locally as 'Twenty Trees', though one of them notes that there are actually only 19 trees here. Snake Path starts in the village of Hayfield, just South of here, and eventually finishes a few miles to the NorthEast, at a section of the A57 (a road built in the 1820s linking Sheffield and Manchester) that crosses through the Peak District, known as Snake Pass. The path is named after the road, which got its name neither from its winding nature, nor the presence of snakes, but because a snake was included in a coat of arms that appeared on the sign of a pub along the high road. There are a couple of significant hollows immediately in front of the trees. Although old maps offer no clues, there were a number of small quarries once operating in the area so this seems the likeliest cause.