The Geography of the Dark Peak
The Dark Peak is the high, wet, northern half of the Peak District: the moors and edges that sit between Sheffield and Manchester and wrap around the greener limestone country to the south. Natural England puts it at about 86,600 hectares, nearly all of it moorland plateau with hardly anyone living on it. It is where Kinder Scout and Bleaklow are, where the gritstone edges run in long broken lines above the Derwent, and where a hill near Castleton has been sliding downhill for four thousand years. This is a guide to the land itself: the rock, the high moors, the edges and the oddly shaped stones on them, a fort nobody can date, a shivering mountain and the lead mine under it. The legends that grew up on the same ground have a guide of their own, and so does where the name came from.
The rock: why it’s dark
The name comes from the stone. Under the whole Peak District lies limestone, and in the south it reaches the surface as the pale, dry-walled country of the White Peak. In the north, west and east it is capped by Millstone Grit, a coarse, angular sandstone, with softer shale beneath it, so the gritstone forms an upside-down horseshoe around the limestone. The grit was laid down in the Carboniferous, about 315 million years ago according to the British Geological Survey, as sand dropped by big rivers flowing from the north into deltas at their mouths. Grit doesn’t drain the way limestone does. On top of the shale the ground stays sodden through the winter, the hollows fill with sphagnum and black peat, and the plant life comes down to heather, bilberry and crowberry. That’s the dark.
The stone also named an industry. Millstone Grit was cut for millstones and grindstones, mostly for watermills and cornmills, and a millstone is now the emblem of the Peak District National Park, which was designated on 17 April 1951 as the first national park in the UK. Big ones stand as boundary markers on some of the main roads into the park.
Kinder Scout
Kinder is the roof of the Peak: a peat plateau 636 metres up, the highest ground in the Peak District, in Derbyshire and in the whole of the East Midlands. The top isn’t where most people think it is. Kinder Low, at the south-west corner, stands 633 metres, but the true summit is an unmarked spot in the peat about 900 metres to the north-east, three metres higher. (“Low” is old dialect for a hilltop, which doesn’t help.) The name is old and murky. Kinder first appears in the Domesday survey of 1086 as Chendre, probably from a language older than English, while “Scout” is from the Norse skúte, a high overhanging rock, after the gritstone cliffs on its western rim.
Up on top, the plateau is peat, worn down in places by the boots of the people crossing it, and the National Trust and the park authority have spent years repairing it. On the western side is Kinder Downfall, a thirty-metre fall and the tallest waterfall in the Peak. In a strong westerly the wind blows the water back up on itself, and the plume of spray can be seen from miles away. Mermaid’s Pool sits below it, and its mermaid is in the folklore guide.
Kinder is also where the right to walk on these moors was fought for. On 24 April 1932, walkers led by Benny Rothman of the British Workers’ Sports Federation set off from Bowden Bridge quarry near Hayfield and went up William Clough onto the plateau, meeting a second group at Ashop Head. Estimates of how many there were run from about 100 (The Times) to over 3,000 (Ewan MacColl); the usual figure is the Manchester Guardian’s 400. Six were arrested and tried at Derby Assizes that July. One was acquitted and the other five were jailed for between two and six months, and the outrage at those sentences fed into the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 and, eventually, the right to roam in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000. Historians still argue about how much the trespass itself changed.
Bleaklow
North of Kinder is Bleaklow, the second-highest ground in Derbyshire. Bleaklow Head reaches 633 metres, and the Pennine Way goes over it. Its peat is cut by groughs, channels that water has worn down through the bog. On 3 November 1948 a US Air Force RB-29A Superfortress flew into Higher Shelf Stones, a little to the south of Bleaklow Head, and all thirteen crew were killed. The wreckage is still scattered across the moor, with a memorial put up in 1988.
The gritstone edges
Along the eastern side of the Peak the gritstone ends in escarpments, long low cliffs facing west over the Derwent valley, which locals simply call edges. Climbers have been writing guides to them since John Laycock’s Some Gritstone Climbs in 1913, though Stanage wasn’t in it: in those days access was too tightly restricted.
Stanage is the big one. It runs for three miles from the Cowper Stone in the south to Stanage End in the north, and its highest point, High Neb, is 458 metres up, though the cliff itself is never more than about 25 metres high. Its northern stretch is the boundary between Derbyshire’s High Peak and Sheffield. Below it on the slope lie millstones that were cut from the edge and never carried away. The old track called the Long Causeway crosses the moor behind it on its way from Templeborough to Brough-on-Noe, and was once taken for a Roman road. The climbing history is long: Joe Brown’s first ascent of Right Unconquerable in 1949 was a milestone for British rock climbing, and Ron Fawcett’s 5,000-metre Girdle Traverse in 1992 is the longest recorded rock route in the UK. Since 2005 it has also been where Keira Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet stands looking out at the horizon in Pride & Prejudice.
Derwent Edge and the Salt Cellar
Further north, Derwent Edge runs above Ladybower Reservoir, and here the grit has been worn into tors, free-standing stacks of rock carved out by wind, rain and frost. Several of them have names, and the names are about what you would guess from looking at them. The Salt Cellar is the best known: a lump of gritstone balanced on a thin stem, like a wine glass, right on the lip of the edge, and it does look a lot like a salt cellar. The Wheel Stones, about 25 feet high, are also called the Coach and Horses, because from the A57 to the south they look like a carriage driving along the skyline. The Cakes of Bread are about 15 feet high. Dovestone Tor is the biggest outcrop on the edge, with around fifty climbing routes on it, and Back Tor, at 538 metres, is the highest point, marked with an Ordnance Survey pillar.
Carl Wark and Higger Tor
On Hathersage Moor, about three kilometres east of Hathersage and eleven from Sheffield city centre, a gritstone promontory about 230 metres long sits under the bigger lump of Higger Tor, which rises to 434 metres just to its north. The promontory is Carl Wark, and somebody once turned it into a fort. On the east and north-east, natural cliffs up to ten metres high did the work. To the south they built a wall of boulders, and across the open western end they raised a rampart 40 metres long, 8 metres thick at the base and 3 metres high: a turf bank faced with gritstone blocks, with a narrow curved entrance through the southern wall. It encloses 0.7 hectares.
What nobody agrees on is when. It has been called Celtic (1785), Iron Age (1861), a Roman-era defence, and a temporary refuge. The only dig, a small one by F. G. Simpson in 1950, led Cecily Piggott to date the rampart to the 5th or 6th century AD, after the Romans left, by comparing it with ramparts in Scotland. Many still suggest an Iron Age origin, somewhere in the 8th to 5th centuries BC; others argue for a date around AD 500, and some for use as far back as the Neolithic. Wikipedia’s summary calls the rampart “unlike any other [structure] found in Northern England.” Carl Wark was Derbyshire until 1933, when this stretch of moor went to Sheffield, so it is now in South Yorkshire. It is a scheduled monument.
Mam Tor, the Shivering Mountain
Above Castleton, Mam Tor rises to 517 metres. It joins Rushup Edge to the Great Ridge, and together they divide the Hope Valley from Edale. Its name means “mother hill”, because of the crowd of small hummocks at its foot, and those hummocks are bits of the hill itself. Mam Tor’s lower layers are unstable shale, the shale gives way, and the east face keeps coming down. That is why it is also called the Shivering Mountain. The big rotational landslip began roughly four thousand years ago and has not stopped. It still moves by up to a quarter of a metre a year, more after a wet winter. The turnpike road the Sheffield & Chapel-en-le-Frith Turnpike Company built across it in 1819, later the A625, needed major repairs in 1912, 1933, 1946, 1952 and 1966. In 1979 the Mam Tor section was given up, and traffic was sent round through the Winnats Pass instead (the stories behind the roads are in the Dark Peak road names guide). The abandoned road is still there, showing layer on layer of gravel and tarmac from all the attempts to keep up with the ground sinking under it.
People lived on top of it anyway. The summit is ringed by a Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age hillfort, with radiocarbon dates suggesting occupation from around 1200 BC, and more than a hundred small platforms were cut into the slope for timber huts. There are two Bronze Age burial mounds as well. At the hill’s base are two of Castleton’s four show caves, Blue John Cavern and Treak Cliff Cavern. Lead, Blue John, fluorspar and other minerals were once mined there.
Odin Mine
Under Mam Tor runs the Odin Mine, a disused lead mine near Castleton that now belongs to the National Trust. Its workings go about 1,500 metres into the Edale shales beneath the hill. The guidebooks say the Romans worked it, and then the Saxons and the Danes, and that the Danes named it for their god. There is no historical evidence for any of that, though Trevor D. Ford wrote that it was probably worked in Roman times, in the Dark Ages and by the Normans. Before the 19th century the name was usually spelled “Oden”. The first time it turns up in a record is 1280, when a poacher was tried near it.
The mine was worked steadily through the 18th century, producing between 100 and 800 tonnes of ore a year. In April 1706 a rich vein was struck, and forty-one men and eight women were working it. Lead mining stopped in 1869, and some fluorspar and barite were taken out of the old Mam Engine Shaft in 1908 and 1909. Its spoil also went into the road across Mam Tor’s face, the one the hill later broke. The mine’s best-known relic is still there: a gritstone crushing wheel, 1.75 metres across, built in 1823 for £40.
From the Dark Peak to The Dark Peak
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, borrowed the name and the ground. Its Dark Peak is the wilderness past the Wisewood boundary: the same moors and edges, with the murk lying in the groughs and denizens roaming them that were there long before any people. In The Hellsborough Chronicles Book One, Pip Rippon skips a hivemind advert selling it as a leisure ground and doesn’t buy a word of it. Pip suspects that if you hiked up Kinder Scout or ran along Stanage Edge you wouldn’t see a single xin or dyapnid, because they’ll have been kept out behind fences, and stepping off the track would be taking your life into your hands. Later in the book Van Hallam, on the run, flies a mentiloth from the swamp to the cover of Bleaklow. In Foked, the free solo RPG set in the same world, one worked example of a hex is a shale gulch below Kinder Scout, with a morivarid column passing through and a cave sixty feet up the wall. Book One has its own page on the books shelf, the rest of the creatures are in the Bestiary of the Dark Peak, and the S6 field guide does for Hillsborough and the Loxley valley what this one does for the moors. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the Dark Peak’s extent, rock and vegetation from Wikipedia; the age and origin of the Millstone Grit from the British Geological Survey, and its uses and the millstone emblem from Wikipedia; the national park’s designation from Wikipedia; Kinder Scout, Kinder Low and the Downfall from Wikipedia; the trespass from Wikipedia; Bleaklow, its groughs and the 1948 crash from Wikipedia; Stanage from Wikipedia; Derwent Edge and its tors from Wikipedia and GPS Routes; Carl Wark and Higger Tor from Wikipedia; Mam Tor from Wikipedia, and its road from Wikipedia’s A625 entry; the Odin Mine from Wikipedia.
Books
