Kinder Scout via Grindsbrook Clough

From Edale, the path follows the Pennine Way’s original line up Grindsbrook Clough, a rocky ravine that closes in as it climbs, with a scramble over boulders near its head where hands are as useful as feet. The Ramblers’ Retford group calls Grindsbrook Clough steep and rocky, and the climb accounts for most of the walk’s 527 metres of ascent inside the first half.

The plateau is a different kind of difficult: flat but trackless in feel, with peat groughs cutting the ground into channels that force detours, and landmarks like Crowden Tower, the Woolpacks and Noe Stool standing out as gritstone tors on an otherwise featureless horizon. The true high point, at 636 metres, is an unmarked spot on this broad surface rather than a summit in any conventional sense. This was the ground crossed by the ramblers of the 1932 mass trespass, a protest against exclusion from open moorland that fed into the right-to-roam legislation passed in 2000. The National Trust bought the Kinder Scout moorland in 1982 and has held it open since, which is the quiet end of that argument.

Jacob’s Ladder, a stone-paved packhorse route, drops steeply off the plateau edge to Upper Booth, before easy field paths return along the valley to Edale on the closing stretch of the Pennine Way.

Visit Peak District’s route sheet gives the circuit from Edale car park as 12.7km, the Ramblers’ Retford group 12.9km with 527m of ascent, and the National Trust, walking it the other way round from Edale station, four and a half to five and a half hours. Allow a full day. The scrambling near the top of Grindsbrook, the featureless nature of the plateau in poor visibility, and the total ascent put this well beyond a first hillwalk, and it is a serious undertaking in cloud or snow, when the peat hags and grough edges become disorientating. It suits an experienced walker who can navigate on a featureless plateau without a path to follow, and who wants the Pennine Way’s original line rather than its easier modern one. A first hill day, a party without map and compass, or anyone who would rather not scramble is better served elsewhere. For the Edale skyline without the plateau, Mam Tor and the Great Ridge are the nearest alternative, at 239 metres of ascent from the Mam Nick car park against this route’s 527.