(S/E) Exit the Callow Top Holiday Park past Reception and follow the entrance drive round the bend and downhill. Look out on your right for a gateway and leave the drive to enter a field. Keep to the left-hand side of the field until a stile gives access to the Tissington Trail.
(1) Turn right and follow the Trail downhill to cross a stream and then up the other side to reach the Mappleton Lane car park. Leave the Trail before the tunnel and walk out to the road through the car park.
Turn left and walk uphill; by the 30mph sign take a footpath up some stone steps on the right. Go through a wooden gate at the end of a hedged section and walk along the top of a series of fields with views over the valley of the Bentley Brook.
After the hedgeline kinks right then left to a gate, cut the corner to the next gate. Leave the left-hand hedge and descend the slope at an angle to a stile partway down the opposite hedge. Cross a boggy field to a stile beside the Bentley Brook.
(2) Follow the brook downstream for a few hundred yards, ignoring a footbridge about half the way along. Leave the stream when it bends right, and join a path along the top of a floodbank. Just before you reach the River Dove, turn left and walk along the edge of a couple of fields to emerge at the back of a hotel/restaurant on the main road (Mayfield Road).
(3) Walk out to the road and cross over, then turn right to cross Hanging Bridge. At the far side of the bridge turn left and look back to your left to see the medieval bridge concealed under the modern road bridge.
Turn right onto a narrow lane (Old Bank) which you follow uphill past some cottages and up a hollow way beyond. At a road junction keep straight on into Upper Mayfield.
(4) Pass the end of Slack Lane on your left, then turn right at a crossroads into Hollow Lane, to return to the main road (A52). Take a few steps to the right then cross carefully to join a bridleway on the opposite side. This doubles back to the left and down into a shady hollow where it swings right into open fields.
Just before the meagre remnants of a small farm building, turn left across the field to a stile near the projecting corner of a series of hedged fields running down from the wooded slope on your left. Follow the path beyond the stile along the bottom of four fields to a field gate and into the fifth.
(5) Shortly before The Orchards farmhouse, turn right through a gate and follow the driveway (to the left of a brick-built farm) out to the road (Birdsgrove Lane). Turn left and walk along the road, hedged at first, to a cattle grid and into the grounds of Okeover Park.
Follow the unfenced road through parkland for half a mile until you reach the entrance drive to Okeover Hall on your left; turn right here and follow a footpath that cuts the corner to a ladder stile into the road opposite Okeover Mill. Turn right and walk down the road and over the bridge spanning the River Dove.
(6) At a footpath sign, turn right and follow the riverbank downstream. After a stile, leave the river and cross the next field diagonally, aiming to the left of a cream-painted house. On reaching the road again, turn right. Pass a bus stop then, opposite the sports field entrance, turn left (with an ivy-covered sign indicating “Public Footpath to Ashbourne”) and walk in front of the houses to a wicket gate.
(7) Climb the slope beyond, over a stile and on uphill. In the corner of the field go straight on through a gap in the hedge by a footpath sign and continue uphill. At the top of the hill go through a gate and squeeze stile and cross the next field. A fenced path leads past Field 5 and back to the road through the Callow Top Holiday Park site. (S/E)
