Start The Little Mill Inn, Hollinsmoor Road, Rowarth, High Peak SK22 1EB (Tel: 01663 747678)
(S/E) From the front door of The Little Mill Inn pub, turn left. Just beyond the car park, turn right along a concrete drive past two houses. After about 50m, turn right at a footpath sign and cross the brook via a footbridge over a small weir. Bear left up the bank beyond, then swing right up the left-hand side of the field, with a small stream on your left, looking out for a footbridge after about 150m.
(1) Cross the bridge and bear right, up the hill, towards Long Lee Farm. The path passes to the left of the farm, which includes four listed buildings. At the top of the hill, beyond the farm, cross a wall stile in the top right-hand corner of the field, then turn right to another stile in the next corner. Once over this stile, turn left, away from the farm, and follow the wall on your left.
After 150m, at a Peak and Northern Footpath Society signpost, cross the stile over the wall on your left. Bear right, but do not follow the obvious track along the wall, now on your right; instead, the path gradually descends the hillside obliquely to a stile and another PNFS sign in the far wall. Beyond this stile, cross a tussocky field to a broken wall then drop left to cross a boggy stream. Follow a vague path beyond, crossing another boggy patch, then bear right to the top corner of the field, where a hand-gate leads to the meeting of six ways.
(2) Turn left through another gate and take the walled driveway opposite, which leads downhill and skirts to the left of Blackshaw Farm. Follow the metalled drive downhill to a junction, where you bear right to cross a stream and continue past Brookhouses up to the A624.
(3) Turn left and follow the vergeless main road with care for 450m. Leave the main road at Carr Meadow, turning right through a gate. Cross the footbridge over the stream on your right and climb the bridleway through heather beyond. The track follows a wall on the right, then strikes out across the open moor to a ford in a shallow valley.
After a boardwalk over a boggy area you reach a junction of paths below the white-painted shooting cabin.
(4) Follow the path opposite, signposted “Edale via Jacob’s Ladder”. Keep straight on at a sign marked “Bridleway”; this corner-cutting path descends gradually to join a footpath running below, then continues along the contour above a wall, later replaced with a fence.
(5) At the end of the fence, bear right down a rocky, eroded slope to the footbridge above a small weir at the bottom of William Clough. Cross the footbridge and turn right, fording a side-stream and climbing gradually to a hand-gate. Continue above some trees and then descend past more to a gate into rough pasture. Follow the path along the bottom of the pasture, fording another small stream, to a stile.
(6) Bear left of the walled woodland or cross the stile; either way you will end up at a footbridge over the stream at the bottom. Cross the bridge and follow the path beyond, which curves up the opposite bank.
(7) As you approach a conifer plantation, take a vague path that cuts the corner to the left; continue, with the conifers on your right, to a gate in the wall on the right by a National Trust path sign. Go through the gate and descend the slope past broken walls to a gate in the fence at the bottom, and ford the stream to a second gate.
(8) Bear right and follow a track above a walled conifer plantation for half a mile, before leaving the wood to follow the track down to the road above Farlands.
(9) Turn left and walk between a couple of houses. Just before the bridge at the bottom, turn left up the drive to Booth Farm and follow the track through the farmyard. Continue along this track, bending left then right at one point, for half a mile to Hill Houses.
(10) At Hill Houses turn right, between a long farmhouse on your right and a barn conversion on your left, onto a walled path that descends steeply to cross Bowden Bridge, a packhorse bridge. Bear left along the stream to meet the road.
(11) At Bowden Bridge car park, turn left over the river again and then right, into the campsite. Follow the service road and then continue past the reception building with the river on your right. This path eventually joins Valley Road, which you follow for a further ½ mile to Hayfield village.
(12) Turn right and right again and walk down past the George pub and the village shop to the church. Turn left before the bridge and walk past the church to the crossing over the A624 bypass.
(13) Walk past the bus station and onto the Sett Valley Trail. Follow the Trail for one mile, passing a former railwayman’s house, until you reach a crossing path at the end of Birch Vale Reservoir.
(14) Turn right here off the Trail, and follow the footpath down the slope and across the low dam, then cross the River Sett below a weir. Climb the bank beyond a stile, and walk up to the far right-hand corner of the field. A narrow (and sometimes muddy) section of fenced path leads to a stile over the wall into a farm drive.
(15) Turn left and follow the driveway past some hen houses. Follow the drive round a sharp right-hand bend (ignoring the walled bridleway straight ahead) and up to Sitch Lane.
(16) Turn left and follow the public road to the brow of the hill. Turn right onto a byway which passes through Wethercotes Farm and continues beyond. About 250m beyond the farm, ignore the byway on the left which leads down to Aspenshaw Hall, instead carry on straight.
(17) At the next junction, after a further half-mile, take the left-hand fork and follow a rocky byway as it bears left and descends the hill.
(18) After a farm, join the metalled road at the bottom and follow it ahead back to The Little Mill Inn. (S/E)
