Kinder Wonderland

My wife offered to go to Bakewell Farmers market with the kids - where they saw their regular stalls: Cocoadance - very good chocolate, Paradise Farm and New House Farm - two small hillfarms as a cooperative and good smoked and dried meats, New Close Farm- general butchers, and Hope valley Ice cream - in my opinion, one of the better farm ice cream makers, and I do try a lot, as well as several other stalls.

As we needed to go to Chinley beforehand, my walk in was reduced by about a mile, so I started just above Chapel Milton at 9:30, and wlaked up past The Wash and up to Shireoaks Farm (071 832 Dark Peak map).

Looking down on this, was a classic Pennine hill-farm winter scene:

From this I walked along the path to the Pennine Bridleway, which I crossed, going up on the access land immediately to the North.

I saw possibly the last mushroom of the year struggling through the snow, just where I lost sight of the bridleway:

I kept going uphill, until I reached the track from South Head to Brown Knoll, then took this to Kinder Low. The conditions were perfect, as it was sunny and the peat had frozen, but I needed windproofs, as the wind was strong enough to make walking difficult on occasion.

The Vale of Edale from Edale Rocks

At Kinder Low, I played my usual game of seeing if I could hit Kinder Gates by dead reckoning on the Holme Moss transmitter and Kinder's northern trig point (without using my compass).

The going was harder than I remembered, despite the ice, as the dams have begun to change the look of the plateau:

Just before Kinder Gates, there are a couple of incongruous trees - spruces? Anyway it made for a festive scene today:

And the river kinder was frozen hard at Kinder gates, so I managed to take this photo from the middle of the upstream side, and keep dry feet (in trainers)

The remaining photos didn't come out too well, but it was a glorious walk to Fairbrook Naze, then right to Seal Edge, then back to Kinder Low, and back to Chinley via South Head and Beet Lane, passing Beet Farm, which has some splendidly Nonconformist bible quotations on its lintels just before New House Farm - one of the suppliers at the farmers market.

I got back home at three, after five and a half glorious hours on the biggest of my local hills.

Strange that the tree has apparently been cropped in the middle, wouldn't anything that could get the middle take from below too?

Sounds like a good day out whatever the tree's problem was.