Cratcliffe, Elton and Winster
Cratcliffe feels like an ancient place. Its got a sense of obscurity, even when its busy and the crag the area is named after is hard to see unless you’re staring directly at it. There’s a hermit’s cave cut into the rock there somehow and there are stone circles in places that you wouldn’t expect. Next to the crag, hidden by the roll of the land is Robin Hood’s Stride, a boulder pile made of shapes that stay in your memory, even though you can’t quite recall what it looks like later. There are odd, pointed rocky outcrops all over the area, many of them surrounded by pine trees with branches and needles that bunch and flow into much stranger shapes.
As a place to run, its deceptive. To the eye, the landscape rolls and looks pretty. For the feet, legs and tendons the ground swells, dips and likes to fling you out into villages and dales. The lower areas are sodden full of mud and the higher areas full of cattle and harder to reach than you think they will be. There are paths and trods everywhere.
The villages are picturesque and often on the top of hills. We began running from Cratcliffe Tor and Robin Hood’s Stride, following a lane towards Elton, which I initially thought was Winster. The slope up into the village was a long one, composed of steep meadows full of buttercups and long grass. We could see other towns and villages from the edges of Elton, but couldn’t identify what they were.
Winster arrived after traversing similar countryside. We ran in past some huge trees, one of them dark purple and tall as a church and there was a Green Man above one of the doors in the village.
On the far side side, there was a hard-to-find trail that tipped us down into a dale and across quiet, bumpy fields with buzzards circling overhead. There was dark woodland to our left. Distances were obscured by the land, so we made a guess at the correct direction and followed a trod into the moody trees.
It was even harder to see any distance inside the tree line but the trails and paths were clear and straight forward to follow. Everything sent us uphill and at one point we broke free of the trees and took a winding path that sent us past an odd old piece of architecture that looked like it might be from a train station. Sat in the middle of woodland and without its original context, its hard to guess at what it was built for.
The paths take us uphill through some sections that are mainly made of pine trees and the atmosphere starts to feel contained and the light of the summer gets further away and less. There are some great downhill sections and the ground gets muddier and wetter. An upward swing of the path takes us away from the deep puddles, dark water streams and pine carpets and pushes us up and out – breathing hard – onto airy tops that are really only halfway up. Yellow grass and stubby bushes sprout and wave against a bright summer sky and we hit a trail made from stone and concrete.
The hill is the same, but it feels like summer again in the open air. There are cattle in the waterlogged fields and an even another runner. We’re heading up towards the Nine Ladies stone circle on Stanton Moor as she’s heading down, looking in much better shape than we are. We run through a camp site and the landscape starts to feature heather and small rocky outcrops.
By the time we reach the top of Stanton Moor, there are more people around. Its beautiful up here but we don’t stay long and head off toward the tangle of rhododendrons, birch trees and grass that enclose the stone circle. There are people around so we don’t stop for long (I’ve run through here quite often before and if you want to look at the pencil art I did of the Nine Ladies, you can find that here) and make for Stanton-in-the-Peak in the north-west.
More big hills and confusion eventually push us back onto the side of the Moor that we’ve just run up and we head downhill toward Birchover and through some rocky, rolling grassland with cattle and huge purple rhododendron tangles (I find that rhododendrons stick in the mind that rocky outcrops do – you can see some artwork I made after looking at that plant for too long here).
Before long, we’re at the bottom, near to the Druid’s Inn and running along our final stretch of road.