The walk of Sunday 15th of August, 2021

It had been so long since I had the pleasure of walking with Sue and Karl that I dropped them a Whatsapp message last week to see if they were planning a walk in the Lake district this weekend. As they are due to be camping in the Lakes imminently they had decided upon a local walk around the West Pennines and I jumped at the chance to join them from a new starting location at Belmont.

We set off at roughly 9:40 from a street I’d never heard of: Naylor’s Terrace, and headed West along an increasingly damper path until with some surprise (on my side) we arrived at Rivington Road adjacent to Will Narr. From here we turned due north up and over the wide ridge which makes up the Spitlers Edge – Redmond’s Edge crossing of Anglezarke Moor ultimately arriving at the top of Great Hill a couple of minutes shy of 11:00. I was mightily impressed with our speed thus far and did enjoy my lunch of a Coop chicken and Bacon Caesar Wrap, which was doing its best to fall apart. The summit was busy today, the rain was so far keeping off but at what time we thought an entire Ramblers Group had arrived as walker after walker appeared out of increasingly thicker (but not yet dense) mist from the west.

Lunch consumed we set off down Great Hill towards Pimms / Piccadilly (damned strange names they have around these parts!) in a sort of North-Easterly direction. The A675 racetrack safely crossed we then set off through the verdant woodland to the ruins of Hollinshead Hall but as this was occupied went on to “the bench on the hill” at or near to Conyries Plantation ( 53.670382, -2.504231 ). I had my Coop fruit bowl: nasty grapes and apple slices but they served their purpose well in giving me some trace carbs to burn off and prevent me from getting all grumpy  towards the end of the walk – it’s a thing! It’s no secret that I really like this route but was not looking forward to hitting Longworth Moor as the terrain was already fairly wet and this would not improve at Longworth Moor. Fortunately we turned off ahead of the impending Somme and made our way past both of the “Pasture” houses – Higher and Lower, to skirt around the southern edge of Belmont reservoir. At this point the rain finally broke and we were treated to lovely disappearing views of the reservoir as the mist devoured them, it sounds horrid but in fact was a lovely spectacle to see and I didn’t care how wet my head became.

Within minutes we were back on the “High Street” part of the A675 at Belmont and after that safely back at my car where I bade Sue and Karl farewell with the promise of we will meet up for another walk shortly, I hope so because I had a bloody good time!

Here’s the route in all its glory from Plotaroute:

And here are the stats:
The walk of Sunday 15th of August, 2021

And here are some photos of the day:

Oops! Forgot to mention the song of the walk: “Anne Marie featuring. Niall Horan – Our Song.”