Dark Peak Road Names: Passes, Causeways and Moorland Lanes
The roads over the Dark Peak have names that sound like warnings: the Snake, the Cat and Fiddle, the Winnats, the Woodhead. The lanes on the moors above Sheffield sound stranger still: Sidling Hollow, Wet Shaw Lane, Owler Gate, Blindside Lane. Some are named after pubs, one after a duke’s coat of arms, some after the wind, and the little lanes mostly after the ground they cross, in words the dialect was still using when Victorian collectors wrote them down. This is a guide to where the names came from, from the big trans-Pennine passes to the back lanes of Bradfield.
The Snake Pass
The A57 between Sheffield and Glossop is not named for its bends, though it has plenty, along with blind summits and a poor accident record. The name comes from a pub. The road opened as a toll road on 23 August 1821, laid out by the Sheffield surveyor William Fairbank and built by John Macadam, and an inn on it took as its sign the serpent on the arms of William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire. The road took its name from the Snake Inn. The inn later became the Snake Pass Inn and closed in October 2019. The road summit, where the Pennine Way crosses it, is at 1,680 feet (510 m), and the pass is often shut by snow in winter and, lately, by landslips after storms.
On the Sheffield side the same turnpike runs as the Manchester Road through Hollow Meadows, which was part of the chase of Rivelin until the late 16th century, and was still used now and then by the Duke of Norfolk for deer hunting after that. The meadows took the name “Auley Meadows” from the Hawley family of Fulwood, and by 1637 they were sheep pasture.
The Woodhead
The A628 over Woodhead, from the end of the M67 east of Manchester across into the borough of Barnsley, began as a salt road, carrying salt from the Cheshire mines to the Yorkshire towns, which is why the crossing at the county boundary is Salter’s Brook. The western section to Saltersbrook was begun in 1732, the road east towards Doncaster opened in 1740, and it was rebuilt as a turnpike in 1844.
Under it run the Woodhead railway tunnels. The first, three miles and thirteen yards long, was finished in 1845, and building it killed 30 people, maimed 200 and injured 450 more. A cholera outbreak among the workforce killed 28 in 1849, and a second tunnel was finished in 1852. A third tunnel opened in 1954, and the last train went through in 1981.
The Cat and Fiddle
The A537 from Buxton to Macclesfield, across the western edge of the Peak, takes its name from the Cat and Fiddle Inn at its summit, 1,690 feet (520 m) up. It is often called the most dangerous road in the United Kingdom: over seven and a half miles of it there were 44 serious or fatal crashes between 2007 and 2011, and the speed limit from Macclesfield to the inn has been cut from 60 to 50.
Winnats Pass
The steep gorge west of Castleton is the “wind gates”, for the wind that funnels through it. It was cut through reef limestone some 340 million years old, by meltwater at the end of the last ice age, and was once wrongly thought to be a collapsed cave. Since the main A625 road under Mam Tor was closed for good by landslips in 1979, the Winnats has taken much of the traffic into the valley. It has a murder in it. In 1758 an eloping couple, Alan and Clara, on their way to be married at Peak Forest Chapel, were robbed and killed by miners in the pass, and their bodies were hidden down a mine shaft, where they were found ten years later.
The Long Causeway and Mortimer Road
Before the turnpikes, the main road west out of Sheffield was a packhorse track: the Long Causeway, or Long Causey, seven miles and more than 1,100 feet of climbing from the town to Stanedge Pole above Hathersage, on the boundary of the Sheffield and Hathersage manors. A pole has stood there since at least 1550. The Causeway was long marked on maps as a Roman road, an idea first put forward in 1879 and now thought to be mistaken: it is medieval or later, paved in places with a double line of stone slabs, and it was replaced by a new road by 1771.
That was the turnpike age, and not every turnpike worked. In 1771 Hans Winthrop Mortimer, Lord of Bamford and a former MP, got an Act of Parliament to make the bridleway from Penistone to Bamford fit for wheeled traffic, as a toll road. As far as the thin records show, it failed to attract the traffic. The Act was renewed in 1792 but not in 1813, and the trust seems to have gone bankrupt. Mortimer Road survives as a string of moorland lanes, running past the Strines Inn at the head of Bradfield Dale, and past the old farms and lodges in the guide to the historic houses of the Sheffield moors.
Strines is itself a road word of a kind. Joseph Hunter called the place “Strinds”, a crossing over one of the little brooks that join to make the Loxley, and compared it to the Strid at Bolton Abbey: both were crossed on stepping stones. Sidney Oldall Addy, in his 1888 glossary of the Sheffield dialect, pointed to the Old Norse strengr, which can mean a narrow channel of water.
Bars and gates
Two words turn up again and again. A bar on the road was a toll gate, as at Barnsdale Bar on the Great North Road and Owler Bar on the road from Sheffield to Chatsworth. A gate usually isn’t a gate at all. It is Old Norse for a road, and Sheffield is full of them: Waingate in the city centre, and Hallamgate and Horsley Gate in the country around it. “The gate is the high road,” as Hunter’s glossary put it.
So Owler Gate, at Onesacre, is the road by the alders. Owler is the Sheffield word for an alder, and Addy found it all over the district: Owler Bar, Owler Carr Wood, “the Owler carr” in Bradfield. Owlerton, in the place-names guide, is the same tree.
The Bradfield lanes
The back lanes of Bradfield, the big moorland parish west of Sheffield, have names that read like a description of the ground, and most of them can be decoded from Addy.
Sidling Hollow, near Dungworth, probably carries an old field name. A deed of 1614 mentions “two closes in Dungworth called Nether Siddling”, and the Ordnance Survey had a “Sidling Bush” there in Addy’s time. To sidle in Sheffield was to go sideways, and the old dictionary writer Halliwell gives sideling as “the slope of a hill”.
Wet Shaw Lane, at Ughill, is the wet wood: shaw is the Old English sceaga, a thicket or a fringe of woodland, and Ughill is “yew hill”. Addy knew Wet Shaw as a piece of moorland near Ughill, and adds that “the black clay from which crucibles are made is procured here”: the clay for the pots the city melted its crucible steel in.
Lumb Lane, at Onesacre, probably takes its name from a dialect word for a narrow valley with a stream in it. Addy spells it lum, and found it at Norton and on a “woody hollow called the Lumb” near Wardsend, and as limb at Dore, where Limb Lane and the Limb Brook run down a narrow valley. The Limb Brook was part of the old border between Mercia and Northumbria.
Kirk Edge is the church edge, from the Old Norse for a church, and on it, 340 metres up between Worrall and High Bradfield, stands a building that earned the name late. The 15th Duke of Norfolk gave 18 acres there for an orphanage, built in 1871 and closed in 1887. In 1911 it reopened as a Carmelite monastery, the Monastery of the Holy Spirit, and the nuns kept it for more than a century, until it closed in October 2024. The buildings are now Grade II listed.
Two of the lanes keep their secrets. Rod Side runs from Hollow Meadows, on the Manchester Road, towards Load Brook, and Blindside Lane is up near Low Bradfield. Neither name is explained in Addy, Hunter or anything else on the record that we could find. If you know where either comes from, we would like to hear it.
From the Dark Peak roads to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, has the same roads under different names. In Book One of The Hellsborough Chronicles, Van Hallam, fleeing a swamp for the cover of Bleaklow on a mentiloth, passes up Venomtooth pass (the venomtooth is the Dark Peak’s adder, and it hunts) and instead crosses the Featherbed Moss to pick up “the Woodhead — the other main artery that would eventually take us through the Netherlands and the Wisewood”. The Winnats is the gully the Strinxin warriors use on their way to the swamp, and the Strinxin are the xin of Strines. And according to Pip’s Curated Guide, the Long Causeway was laid down by the wasp empire of the stingers, a trade route between the first settlements at Sheffield and Hathersage. The ground under all of it is in the Dark Peak geography guide, and Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world. For the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: the Snake Pass from Wikipedia; Hollow Meadows and the Sheffield–Glossop turnpike from Wikipedia; the Woodhead road from Wikipedia and the tunnels from Wikipedia; the Cat and Fiddle from Wikipedia; Winnats Pass and Alan and Clara from Wikipedia; the Long Causeway and Stanedge Pole from Wikipedia and the Derbyshire Historic Environment Record; Mortimer Road from Wikipedia and the Derbyshire Historic Environment Record; bar as a toll gate from Wikipedia; gate, shaw and kirk from Wikipedia’s list of generic forms in British place names; Strines, gate, owler, Siddling, Wet Shaw, Ughill and lum from Sidney Oldall Addy’s Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888); Kirk Edge from Wikipedia and the Victorian Society; the lanes’ locations from OpenStreetMap.
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