When I got up to run in the morning, someone had kicked the wing mirror off my car in the night. I’d heard a commotion – laughing and running, plus a bang – outside at about 10.00pm and decided against going to work out the source. My reasoning was that seeing something infuriating would get me into an argument or a fight – or just plain make me angry for a few hours (even though whatever it was couldn’t be prevented and had already happened) and and would ruin my sleep. And sleep was exactly what I was glad I’d had, driving to Tony’s in thick mist, at 7.30am in November, without a left hand wing mirror.
We’d planned to run in the Staffordshire part of the Peak District, a route known locally as The Dragon’s Back. The route changes according to who you talk to, but on this occasion I’d planned to go from Longnor to Hollinsclough, to Hollins Hill, to Chrome Hill, to Parkhouse and then finally to High Wheeldon before circling back to Longnor. Its about an hour’s drive away, through the Derbyshire and the South Yorkshire portions of the Peak District, both of which are beautiful to look at. Unfortunately mist and fog are laid across everything like a layer of interference and it’s hard to see any distance at all.
We got out of the car at Longnor and headed into the grey, the ground in front of us the only thing we can really see. There’s no view beyond that at all and the mist makes everything claustrophobic. There are tiny, hard-to-catch echoes that gather around the ears and a soft reverb on water and water drops.
The countryside furniture and features that we passed were half-consumed by the fog and the mist. Sections of trees hang down from above, unconnected to the ground, wet drystone walls stretch for 15 feet ahead and no more; birds flicker silently in and out of the murk, dark and unaffected by the water and the cold. Running in these conditions is like being in a bubble in a sea of cloud.
I got us lost quite quickly by trusting my instinct and my memories and by not having middle-distance sight to refer to. Most of the area around Chrome Hill and Parkhouse Hill – the Staffordshire Dragon’s Back – is visually striking and very memorable but in the fog that quality is gone. I took us over some fields full of deep mud, churned up by local cattle and full of rain from the last few days of downpours and winter weather. There’s a brittle beauty to everything above the mud but the tough and slippery underfoot conditions and the lack of long or middle-distance sight create a sense of confinement. We pass some horses in coats and carry on toward what I think is the direction we should be going in.
A road or track that takes us directly to Hollinsclough is what I was expecting to find. Its a road that is so straight that it feels like a madman made it and because I can picture it in my mind, I think that its impossible to miss. I did indeed miss it; the road never materialising from the fog and we end up going several miles out of our way before we’d even reached the first of the hills.
Eventually, from way out and high up, we arrived in Hollinsclough, having fallen, slipped and run over farmer’s fields filled with water and mire. The route from the centre of the town takes us round the outer edge of Hollins Hill, through an ankle-deep quagmire that leads to the seat of the valley and the tumbling River Dove. The mud around there was slippery and sticky and impossible to run on and the slow ascent up toward the farm that sits at the bottom of Hollins Hill was tough. I love that kind of running though; long upward pulls over difficult ground that terminate in high places and make the soul sing and the knees scream.
Visibility was still 10 or 15 feet, but we scrambled up to the top of Hollins Hill anyway. Its almost vertical and the ground was wet and slippery so we used our hands, which got black from the mud and slick from the moisture in the air. Halfway to the top and encased in fog, the wind began to howl. By the time we got to the top of the hill the wind is roaring at us from deep down in a valley that we can’t see. How could we be encased in fog and battered by winds at the same time? It was too loud to talk so we turned and slipped and slid down the steep sides and headed toward a path that I was sure would take us to Chrome Hill.
That’s exactly what the path did and somehow the mist cleared and we got a view for perhaps half a mile around us. Up until now, the only colour had been in tiny splashes on the path in front of us, against an all-encompassing pale grey backdrop: green and brown on a section of wall, pale grass and red berries and sometimes purple heather and dead brown bracken. Now that space had opened up, we could see some blotches of blue sky, sweeping black rocks and brown hillsides reaching up to where the mist starts to hide things again.
Seeing into the middle distance again was like a breath of fresh air that I didn’t know I needed. I could see where I was going and I could see the land. Memory and senses combine to turn the landscape into a thing that can be used. Plans could be made again.
As the fog closed in again, we came to the foot of what we thought might be Chrome Hill. It turned out not to be. Its a preliminary hill and one that we just needed to get around. Passing it took us along a beautiful valley side, which we could actually see down into and even see the start of Chrome Hill itself.
An old reef knoll from the depths of time, Chrome Hill has the aspect of a mountain, but the size and heft of a hill. A sort of Bonsai Alp, its sides are steep and the limestone that threads through it is beautiful, worn and smooth. We clambered up it in the wind and the vapour, trying not to slip on the limestone outcrops and rocks and looking only where our black hands and mud-covered feet were going. The higher we got the stranger it felt. Beneath us, to the sides and above us there’s a sea of fog that hides everything beyond a stone’s throw. Within that distance, there are disembodied rock buttresses, worn winding paths and steep, dangerous-looking sides that slip away below us into the grey.
Its hard to put into words just how tough the running around there is, or can be. It seems quite even in many instances and it even looks quite flat when you can see the valley floor. However, the mud can make running around there a power-sapping grind. And when you get to the hills, you often find that they’re steeper than you anticipated. Personally, my instinct is to piston up steep inclines to get them over and done with, but the inclines around The Dragon’s Back simply don’t reward a runner who does that. The mud works every muscle from the hips downward and the hills work every muscle. My finger nails are still black now, as I type this.
And so, the overall tiredness gets to both of us. Originally we’d planned to run Hollins Hill, Chrome Hill, Parkhouse Hill and then into Earl Sterndale and up and across High Wheeldon, but by the end of Chrome Hill and Hollins Hill we were both finished. For some reason – perhaps just plain old survival instinct – tiredness tends to come into a person when they feel enclosed rather than when they feel like they’re out in the open. Falling over makes a runner tired too and that was happening more and more often to us so on the flat ground beneath Parkhouse Hill – its tall sides vanishing in seconds – we headed into the wall of mist that we thought would get us home.