The choice of venue was made the previous Wednesday night when Andy knew he wouldn’t be there and when, coincidently, he was carrying out his very newly acquired grandparent duties. So, The Grouse Inn it was.
I don’t know whether it was the hottest evening of the year at about 30⁰C, but it was debilitatingly so, and we six Slow Warts therefore engineered a mostly shady route under trees and, unusually, we started with a descent, to Padley Mill. It was more rocks and boulders instead of our usual heather, bracken and bilberry of the Dark Peak moors, remember we were almost in the White Peak. It took time for us to get our eyes, legs and brains in gear and by the time we’d reached the Mill we were down to five Slow Warts, no John! A quick phone call revealed he had fallen and bashed his knee and would be going back to his car. Without wanting to preach (!), it is, after all, useful to carry a phone.
It has been a rare experience for the Slow Warts to encounter people on our expeditions and indeed it has been a measure of the success of any outing to see no people or at least, more mountain hares than people. Our first encounter of other humans was at the Mill but this was a mild encounter, significantly more was to come. However, and fortunately, there were no other people going up the “Incline” so the status quo was maintained albeit temporarily. We did, however, modify our route to avoid a herd of bullocks in the Lawrence Fields quarries which provided an opportunity to explore its various levels and notably, we even included a bit of Harmerian ground (all of 50 yards).
The end of the path through the Millstone quarry was a decision point, to go down to Mitchell Field Farm and up Callow Bank or visit Mother Cap and return to The Grouse. The choice was not problematic, the thought of sweating up the Bank was, to say the least, not the least bit attractive. So, instead we posed in the heather near Over Owler Tor and Mother Cap to maintain our reputation for being a photographic club with a side interest in fell running.
It was inevitable in this heat and sunshine that our next check point, the Padley “beach”, would be crowded, we weren’t disappointed in that respect but disappointed it was not the wild country we usually explore.
.However, we soon left the crowds on our part descent of the Gorge towards Yarncliffe for a contour in the woods near Longshaw and then on to the Grouse.
It had been thirsty work and the first priority was quenching our thirsts and then on to serious matters such as machine learning and artificial intelligence which Michael attempted to explain to us but, I think we needed some more human intelligence to grasp the finer points, it was the heat, you know. After attempting to reach our intellectual heights, we realised that despite or because of all the unusual difficulties, we’d had a grand nearly two-hour outing, so thanks to all.
Graham
