Thorpe Cloud and the Dovedale Stepping Stones

Thorpe Cloud is an isolated limestone reef knoll, 287m high, standing at the southern end of Dovedale where the valley narrows to a wooded ravine on the Derbyshire and Staffordshire border. The National Trust has owned Dovedale since 1934, the same year Sir Robert McDougall gave it the neighbouring Ilam estate; further parcels of the valley followed until 1938, and the whole of Dovedale was declared a National Nature Reserve in 2006. Dovedale now draws around a million visitors a year.

From the National Trust car park at Thorpe, a riverside path follows the Dove past the wooded ravine to the stepping stones, first laid across the river around 1890 for Victorian tourists and re-laid by the Trust in 2010 with mortared limestone slabs on all but one stone. Thorpe Cloud rises directly from the car park side of the crossing; the climb to its summit is the steep, rocky section of the walk, giving a view back down the length of the gorge toward Milldale, whose packhorse bridge, Viator’s Bridge, is named from The Compleat Angler, in which Izaak Walton, writing as Viator, describes crossing it.

At 2.8km and 171m of ascent, this is a short outing rather than a hill day, but the final climb is steep and rocky enough to rule out pushchairs and unsteady walkers, and the stepping stones themselves are unusable when the Dove is in spate. It suits a family wanting one summit view from a short walk. For a level alternative that stays beside the same river without any climbing, Wolfscote Dale runs upstream from Hartington.