Highs and lows in the Peak District
At the beginning of 2020 I went to the Peak District. It seems an odd choice to be writing about this now, 12 months after the fact. Retrospectively of course, what seemed like a quaint, but unremarkable mini-break at the time has become emblematic of a style of travel currently completely out of reach: casual and requiring little-forward planning, while also not likely to kill anyone’s grandparent.
My boyfriend and I arrived in Monyash, Derbyshire on the 2 January, brains still slightly fried from enthusiastically welcoming the New Year just 48 hours earlier. He’d done all the driving; on the way up we ate stodgy KFC and stewed in our own juices. When we pulled up at our Airbnb, the sky above was inky black, specked with bright stars, and the air was crystal clear. It smelled like a fresh start, like the adult way to welcome a year in which I would suddenly transition from being in my early twenties to being halfway to leaving them behind altogether.
We were in the Peak District to walk. This was hardly revolutionary; 13 million people flock to the area every year to do the very same. But it felt nice to be so uninspired; peaceful even. Everything about our trip was quiet, self-contained and insular. I was starting to relax into the world we were in the process of building, to become comfortable with the notion that it wouldn’t all fall away as soon as we bickered or stopped always wearing our best selves. By now I had admitted I was in love with him and said as much, several months prior. All I wanted, after the family-focused rush of Christmas and the high of New Year, was to play once more at being grown-ups, going on a grown-up hiking holiday, in my grown-up relationship, with my grown-up love.
The Peak District is romantic in every sense of the word; all dramatic cliff edges, abandoned millstones and stately homes that are supposed to be the inspiration for Mr Rochester’s iconic manor. We picked our walks at random, for arbitrary reasons; on day one we scaled Stanage Edge, an incredible gritstone encampment that offers views for miles across the moors. Reading the description didn’t sway me to Stanage though; realising one of my favourite scenes from 2005’s Joe Wright adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (the best version) had been shot there, did. Although it had drizzled noncommittally on our way up to the top, when we finally reached the peak, the sun dramatically broke through the clouds. It looked like being bathed in the light of heaven; under that sky it was understandable why the Victorians took faith so seriously.
On the way back down, we stumbled over what was reputed to be the grave of Robin Hood’s right hand man, Little John and found a lone door, clearly all that remained of a former walled garden, standing in front of a stream crossing. Everything felt horribly magical.
In the evenings we ate out; the Airbnb we’d booked cost us £38 each for the entire trip and while it was perfect for a base, it had no cooking equipment bar a microwave and was almost comically chilly for long stretches of time (we also discovered the slats of the bed were loose at a delicate moment but that’s a story for another time). Eating out meant pubs and, on one occasion, a delicious spread at a well-reviewed local curry house in Hathersage, a fixture in the region. Despite being from the countryside myself, it is always a strange twang to realise other brown people live there too. But diversity has increased in rural areas over the past 20 years since I grew up in a tiny Marches cottage and besides, Sheffield was only a 20 minute journey from the area we were staying in.
Our Airbnb host was a friendly South Asian man who was earning extra cash on top of the off licence he ran in a nearby city by renting out his converted extension. His dream, he told us, was to pack in the offie and run a camping site from his home, full time. I’ve thought about him often this year; whether the pandemic has sped up his plans or put paid to them altogether.
For our last full day, we decided on an itinerary of contrasts: first we’d descend into the earth’s belly by heading to a famous cave network, the Blue John Cavern, and then we’d immediately hike the large slope next to it: Mam Tor aka “mother hill”.
The Blue John Cavern had been recommended to me by my own mother, who’d grown up in Derbyshire, maintaining an air of local knowledge, even though she hadn’t lived in the area for over half a century now. “Buxton’s a shithole,” she’d sniffed when I mentioned potentially staying there (I can confirm Buxton is actually a sweet little Victorian hangover of a town, rather than a shithole. Plus the Greggs there sells vegan sausage rolls). The Blue John Cavern had her seal of approval however and for variety, I’d persuaded my boyfriend we should try it out.
The network of caves was a local gem, with a basic website in slightly too-small a font to boot and I loved everything about it. The caves, the website said, were “suggested by some” to be the “finest that can be seen by the general public in Western Europe,” which was an extremely endearing collection of qualifications. We were sold anyway and enjoyed the hour long tour, which was stuffed with local trivia, and Blue John stone itself — a rare and beautiful mineral.
In the caves, I was struck again by the feeling that had dogged me across the Peak District; the entire area was steeped in an 18th century history that felt within reach, not like London where the layers of historical sediment stack up so quickly that what has gone before is buried and becomes artifact before it’s even out of living memory. Here, the past felt present. Perhaps it was all the millstones lying about or how I couldn’t get 4G in the Airbnb. But I liked it far more than the day to day of the city that was now my home, which is the feeling all good holidays are supposed to instil in you.
After that, we took on Mam Tor. It was difficult; the wind was so fierce that several times I feared I would be immortalised on a viral aggregate news site, having been blown to Macclesfield in a freak accident. In spite of this, we struggled to the top, then essentially slid the entire way back down again due to the combination of going off-piste and wandering right into the most mud-heavy route off the hill.
Back at the car we caught our breath and shared cups of piping hot minestrone soup while giggling, having made the groundbreaking discovery that chiller bottles can also double up as a thermos. I remember thinking then how lucky I was to be so happy, to be able to laugh about precisely nothing in such a beautiful place.
There have been points in the 12 months where it felt very hard to laugh at all; points where I didn’t know if I would do so again, in beautiful places, with this man. But here we are in December, emotionally battered and bruised but laughing again. Last Sunday we went on a walk to local woods, the paths slick with mud. Afternoon sun streamed through the trees and I was reminded of how the rays lit up the rocks on Stanage Edge. And I caught myself planning our next hiking trip.
