7.5 miles, via Kerridge, White Nancy, Oakenbank, Hedge Row, Gausie Brow, Brink Brow,
Sponds Hill, Park Moor, and Knightslow Wood.
As it's taken me until August to get myself over to Lancashire, allowing My Sister to complete her year's course of teacher training without interruption, it looks like the plans that I'd conceived for this season for walking with her are probably going to come to nought, like finally tackling the Witton Weavers Way, the green route into Manchester, or decamping her whole family for a day in the Wirral Country Park. Especially as I'm travelling without a plan and after a Friday evening of getting food at Grub in Manchester (a deeply hipster-ish establishment in the shadow of the former Mayfield station) and hitting the local brews once back in Egerton, getting an early start onto any path seems unlikely, but My Sister has a plan to let Dr G and the girls have an outing to Lyme Park, while we hit the edge of the Cheshire hills, not the part of the county that I had planned for my first visit to it, but a very satisfactory substitute nonetheless. So for the first time in a while we set out for a trek into the deeply unknown, as all I know is that we will be somewhere to the south of Stockport down the A6 and that we'll be in the rough and wrinkled part of the county that you always forget to acknowledge when tripping across the Cheshire Plain, and just to add to the mystery we'll be going without a map, as My Sis trusts the OS app on her phone to get us to our destination through terrain that is mostly alien to her too. Thus we start from Bollington, one of those Cheshire town that's much smarter than you might expect, the last bastion of Northern expensiveness before the hills take over on the eastern edge of the county, and we are dropped off at the top of the terrace on Princess Street as we get a bit lost trying to find the carpark on the site of the former goods yard by the side of the Middlewood Way the former MS&LR-NSR joint railway between Marple and Macclesfield. We get going at 11.05am, hopeful at getting this trip down in three hours so the rest of the family doesn't get bored in our absence, getting underway properly once we've hit Grimshaw Lane in the shadow of Adelphi Mill and risen to pass under the Macclesfield canal as it takes the Cheshire Canal Ring off to the south of the county, soon landing ourselves in the suburban quarter of the town as the day looks to bring more warmth that wasn't wholly expected. Letting My Sister and the OS app navigate us, we take a turn among the terraces that must have once lived for the silk and quarrying industries, and are now surely beyond the price range of anyone desiring such a cottage, following Jackson Lane past the Hollin Hall hotel complex and into the village-let of Kerridge, all looking pleasantly Sandstone-y clustered around the Bulls Head inn, with the turn onto Redway Lane revealing the wooded and sharply rising north end of Kerridge Hill, our first target for the day, looming ahead of us.
As it's taken me until August to get myself over to Lancashire, allowing My Sister to complete her year's course of teacher training without interruption, it looks like the plans that I'd conceived for this season for walking with her are probably going to come to nought, like finally tackling the Witton Weavers Way, the green route into Manchester, or decamping her whole family for a day in the Wirral Country Park. Especially as I'm travelling without a plan and after a Friday evening of getting food at Grub in Manchester (a deeply hipster-ish establishment in the shadow of the former Mayfield station) and hitting the local brews once back in Egerton, getting an early start onto any path seems unlikely, but My Sister has a plan to let Dr G and the girls have an outing to Lyme Park, while we hit the edge of the Cheshire hills, not the part of the county that I had planned for my first visit to it, but a very satisfactory substitute nonetheless. So for the first time in a while we set out for a trek into the deeply unknown, as all I know is that we will be somewhere to the south of Stockport down the A6 and that we'll be in the rough and wrinkled part of the county that you always forget to acknowledge when tripping across the Cheshire Plain, and just to add to the mystery we'll be going without a map, as My Sis trusts the OS app on her phone to get us to our destination through terrain that is mostly alien to her too. Thus we start from Bollington, one of those Cheshire town that's much smarter than you might expect, the last bastion of Northern expensiveness before the hills take over on the eastern edge of the county, and we are dropped off at the top of the terrace on Princess Street as we get a bit lost trying to find the carpark on the site of the former goods yard by the side of the Middlewood Way the former MS&LR-NSR joint railway between Marple and Macclesfield. We get going at 11.05am, hopeful at getting this trip down in three hours so the rest of the family doesn't get bored in our absence, getting underway properly once we've hit Grimshaw Lane in the shadow of Adelphi Mill and risen to pass under the Macclesfield canal as it takes the Cheshire Canal Ring off to the south of the county, soon landing ourselves in the suburban quarter of the town as the day looks to bring more warmth that wasn't wholly expected. Letting My Sister and the OS app navigate us, we take a turn among the terraces that must have once lived for the silk and quarrying industries, and are now surely beyond the price range of anyone desiring such a cottage, following Jackson Lane past the Hollin Hall hotel complex and into the village-let of Kerridge, all looking pleasantly Sandstone-y clustered around the Bulls Head inn, with the turn onto Redway Lane revealing the wooded and sharply rising north end of Kerridge Hill, our first target for the day, looming ahead of us.
