Its cold, black and early and I’m glad to be awake but I don’t want to go out. Its early January and frost gleams on everything in the street. The sun isn’t up yet and I need to make the drive to Tony’s and then from there to High Bradfield on the edge of the Peak District.
By the time we get to the village, the platinum glow of the sun is creeping over everything. Cold, we set off into the half-dark and along the path system that winds around the churchyard and out toward the tree-lined ridges to the east. We’re high up where we are, but we need to drop down for a while into a dark, wooded valley where ice lies glittering across a freezing green carpet of grass, mud and stones. The hillsides are a dull red through the trees.
The sun is behind us and rising slowly which makes it easier to navigate across wooded ravines and winding trails with steep drops. There are clouds clinging to the tops of the hills and they look like mountains themselves, but the rest of the sky is cold and clear and the higher you look, the darker and deeper the blue. Long shadows stretch up the hillsides away from us and away into the early morning light.
Its a long, steady haul up onto the moors. A few smooth clouds are beginning to lift away from the hilltops and look like smooth pebbles, UFOs and gunsmoke. From the dark depths of the valley behind us, a long trail stretches ahead into the distance like a golden tongue, sunlit with gold. Ancient walls like crumbling teeth run line the sides and the wind’s cold breath blows ice at our backs. Its roar drowns out the machine-gun chatter of the grouse that flutter into the sky and across the moors, huge and flat like massive tabletops. Paths fork into the North and the easterly wind cuts at everything like a knife.
The water up here is mostly frozen and the ground is tough and hard. The peat bogs still contain mud, but our feet smash through to the black water gathered underneath. Its comparatively flat and we can see for miles, one side into the Peak District and another up toward the North. There’s no one else here.
The moor ahead of us is obscured by a cloud or by mist, its hard to tell. I wonder what the difference is and then give up because we start a steady ascent over broken, stony ground. The mist gathers around us and the views vanish. Its still cold and the water here is still frozen. Some of the puddles reflect what they can of the heavens and others are clouded by tiny bubbles that turn the surface white. Perhaps who or whatever is inside has drawn net curtains to hide the sight of fell-runners toiling vertically up their outside wall.
Judging from the glow that spreads through the mist, the sun will be in our eyes when we leave this cloud.
We chew through slow miles of cold, golden path and trail, its colour and shimmer coming from ice and rock rather than sunshine, and almost miss our left turn into the peat hags. After a brief retracing of steps, we set off into the black mud of the peat bogs, past grouse shooting hides and through miles of ice, water and glaring rays of thin, cold sun. We’ve run a long way though ankle deep mud, getting lost as the path disappears into endless heather, sparkling streams and swathes of private land. Tiny Christmas trees sprout from the earth and appear occasionally in the fog.
The clouds are higher again in the sky as we exit the clouds covering the tops. We find ourselves in the shadow of a looming hill that I don’t know the name of and that the sun can’t quite crest. A single intense speck of the sun sparkles on the top like a star.
The skies are wide and deep and the rusty hillsides are covered by heather, mud and light. There’s some confusion about the route and eventually we set off through the lowlands below the hill, up to our calves in icy water and occasionally smashing through into water up to our knees. The path is indiscernible so we climb to the top of the nameless hill and run haphazardly down through channels between shrubs, breath filling our ears and our rattling eyes locked to the ground.
We hit a road and it breaks the spell slightly. After some brief discussion, we take a route down a quiet lane that brings us to the top of a beautiful area of woodland. From here, we wind down the trails and back into Loxley Valley, crossing bridges, streams and miniature waterfalls springing down the hillsides into the reservoirs at the bottom.
The car is parked on the other side of the valley, so we run down to the sunshine reflecting from surface of cold blue Agden water.