Limestone Way

The Limestone Way is a 46-mile walk through the southern part of the English Peak District. In the direction in which we walked the path, it goes from Rocester on the banks of the River Dove to Castleton in the Hope Valley. It is mostly in Derbyshire, though the first section is in Staffordshire and we reached the path by way of a walk along the Staffordshire Way from Cannock Chase, mostly done in June 2021 but completed prior to starting the Limestone Way on 3rd September 2021. Our walking of the Limestone Way and the accompanying holiday marked the occasion of our 40th Wedding Anniversary, and our initial intention had been to travel to the Peak District by public transport and stay in B&Bs along the route. However, we weren't sufficiently confident of the Covid situation to do either of those things, and in any case we'd heard that single night accommodation in suitable locations can be difficult to find. So instead, we'd booked a delightful holiday cottage, Shepherds Retreat and we took two cars with us so as to be able to get to appropriate starting and finishing points. We extended (and in one case slightly altered) two of the legs so as to include the cottage on our route, and on two days we did circular walks from the cottage, both including a section through Dovedale.

The Limestone Way essentially traverses the "White Peak", a limestone plateau dissected by dales, which forms the central and southern part of the Peak District, with the so-called "Dark Peak" to the north, west and east. In terms of geology, the White Peak is basically formed of Carboniferous limestone, laid down in a warm, shallow sea some 330 million years ago. The overlying gritstones and shales have largely been eroded. Limestone is porous, which explains the spectacular dry valleys, gorges and caves for which the area is famous. In between, there is higher-level walking with lovely views. However, the Peak District has been, and in some senses remains, an industrial landscape. There are massive operational quarries and many of the pretty villages such as Bonsall were developed as a result of mining and quarrying industries. Nowadays the Peak District is surrounded by vast conurbations. Despite that, and the fact that we had excellent weather and that in 2021 most people took "staycations", the route didn't seem unduly busy, apart from in tourist hotspots such as Tissington and Castleton and, off the Limestone Way, the parts of Dovedale near the car parks.

I was brought up in Timperley near Altrincham, a town in what was Cheshire when I was young, but is now in the Greater Manchester borough of Trafford. The Peak District was one of the places I visited as a child and more especially as a teenager, when I stayed quite regularly at Glenbrook House in the Hope Valley, which is still owned by the Girl Guides. I also remember youth hostelling trips with friends. From an earlier age I had been driving across the Peak District with my family, as we had various family members in Nottingham and went to visit regularly. I inherited my love of maps and mapreading from my Dad and, from the time we got a car of our own when I was 10, we would enjoy trips out to explore the Cheshire countryside with me mapreading. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Dad used to enjoy finding new "best" ways to Nottingham, which means that a number of routes across the Peak District remain familiar to me. Later, after Dad had died and Richard and I had moved to East Anglia, I drove across the Peak District with the children en route back to Altrincham to see my Mum, and we also went for trips out with her. Even more recently, since our son Michael first moved to Sheffield University, we have spent several weekends and short breaks in the Peak District ; indeed on the current holiday we were planning to see Michael and his wife Heather who still live in Sheffield. The photograph shows Richard with Michael, Heather and Helen on a visit to Chatsworth.

For all that supposed familiarity with the Peak District, we rapidly discovered on our walk and the daily drives between start and end points, that although we, especially me, knew some bits well, there were many delightful areas that I didn't remember at all. It all felt surprisingly new, and all the more exciting for that, and at the end of the holiday we were itching to return to explore some more. It's just as well then that we are currently walking the Midshires Way, which crosses the Peak District, albeit around 100 miles further north than where we're up to at present, on the Northamptonshire/Leicestershire border. The Midshires Way makes use of the High Peak Trail on its traverse of the Peak District and part of the route is also shared with the Pennine Bridleway. We crossed the Midshires Way/High Peak Trail/Pennine Bridleway once and, further north, there were a couple of short sections that were shared with the Pennine Bridleway. It's complicated! The High Peak Trail runs on a disused railway, as does the Monsal Trail, which we also crossed, and the Tissington Trail, which the official route of the Limestone Way crosses and which we made rather more use of because it passes within a few hundred metres of our cottage.

In preparing for our walk, I'd bought the only official guidebook I could find in print, a 28-page leaflet available from the Derbyshire Dales District Council. This gave us a good overview of the route and it certainly served to whet our appetites, but it wasn't a huge amount of practical use, largely because it describes the route from north to south (which is the way most people seem to walk it) whilst we walked from south to north. The guidebook had alerted us to a lovely signpost to look out for (as shown at the top of this page) but these versions of the sign only appeared occasionally; more commonly the signs didn't include the ram's head. That of course isn't what matters; any signpost can help you find the way! The signposting of the Limestone Way was mostly adequate, though better in Derbyshire than Staffordshire. As always, what we really relied on - and enjoyed following - were the Ordnance Survey Maps, in this case OS Explorer Sheets 259 (Derby ), OL24 The Peak District White Peak Area and OL1 The Peak District Dark Peak Area. In case of doubt we checked on the OS Maps on my phone, while Richard tracked our route on his phone.

Our decision to walk the path "in reverse" (from south to north) was taken without a lot of thought, I suppose driven by the fact that we could easily get from the Heart of England Way (already walked) at Cannock Chase to Uttoxeter and Rocester. As readers of these pages will be well aware, I am more than a little obsessed by a wish to link paths together. Uttoxeter has a station and Rocester is just 5 miles north of Uttoxeter, so our original plan of using public transport would have been feasible in more normal times. Had we used public transport, we'd have continued from our end point at Castleton to Edale, which also has a station, as well as being the start of the Pennine Way. Most people seem to walk the Limestone Way from north to south, and then mutter about the fact that the final section is disappointing. We would highly recommend walking the route in the direction we did it, thus ending with the descent to Castleton. Most of all, we'd highly recommend the Limestone Way whichever way you walk it.