You never realize how much space England has until you go to places like Peak District. For a long time we have been wanting to go up to this beautiful area of outstanding beauty. Finally, we made a plan to first go on a bike ride and then go hiking just like everyone else does in the Peak District.
Our first stop was Manifold trail at Waterhouses (that is the name of the village). By the way, somehow, miraculously we fit all five bikes inside our minivan! Robert had to take out two seats, but they fit!
I did my homework before this weekend—planned out our route of the hike and then accidently found on Tripadvisor someone recommending this easy Manifold trail. The trail is about 10 miles, very easy flat ride. So we got to the beginning of the trail, unpacked our bikes, got our lunches and set of on an adventure. We haven’t even gone 1 km when Katya said, “Something is weird with my bike! Help me, I have something in my tire.” By the time she finished this phrase, her front tire was completely deflated….Wow! Well, that was a great beginning of our bike ride…
Fortunately (!!!), we were right next to a bike rental shop out of all places! So what we did was immediately went to the shop, dropped off the bad bike, got Katya a good rental bike and set of on our adventure once again. Talk about perfect timing.
I wish I had beautiful pictures to share with you, but, seriously, I tried, I am horrible at biking and taking pictures at the same time. Every single one of my pictures was blurry…I took this one-haha.
The ride was beautiful and simple, through the wooded areas with streams and bridges. We stopped at the foot of Thor’s Cave for lunch.
We didn’t see any bears.
Oh, looks like I have one more successful picture of Alex and Thor’s Cave there in the background.
So we rode for about 5.5 miles to a village that was our pit stop (it had a bathroom and a café), where we turned around and headed back. Therefore we did 11 miles of biking total—with very minimal whining from Mark as the trail seemed to keep going and going on the way back.
The second half of our day involved a lot more walking. We drove to Ilam, parked right next to an ice cream truck (yeah, try avoiding buying ice-cream now), bought ice cream (!) in exchange to our kids’ promise not to whine on our hike. Let me tell you, we are pros at this parenting thing now.
The hike was supposed to be about 3 miles long. So I thought, if I can run it in under 30 minutes, we can walk it in, maybe, an hour or an hour and a half. I WAS WRONG.
We started our hike with a very steep climb up a sheep meadow. There were hundreds of sheep all around us.
Most of them just moved away as we walked. Here is a view of the rolling hills right at the start of the hike.
Mark thought they were cute and soft.
And this is the first quarter of the first mile—Mark already was complaining he was too tired, and I thought, “Oh no…this is going to be a torture”.
The fun part is that although there is technically a path that goes through this meadow, there is no actual physical path in the grass here. Just like in other places, you are supposed to assume that you are walking straight (as written instructions say online) until you see another “public path” arrow and follow it then.
We told the kids to just walk wherever they wanted as long as they made it to the tree way up on top of the hill.
Since our printer was not working (and I didn’t think of saving it to my phone), we had to hike with our iPad. At least the instructions helped us not to get lost.
They didn’t help us in avoiding these though…everywhere!
More sheep and rocky fences.
Only once we started walking further up the hill before we realized we were going too far and needed to turn towards the farms. After that, the path was very clear on where we were supposed to go. These kind of gates/fences and yellow arrows are what we usually look for. And this is the case not only when hiking, but also when you are just walking around your neighborhood—the walking path system is pretty incredible in the UK.
We’ve seen many gates before, but have never seen one like that. Haha. It obviously used to be connected to a fence, but now it served no purpose except to show people where the path goes.
And the British love their traditional wooden signs. I was relieved to find the name of Dovedale on one of the arrows—that’s where we were heading.
We started climbing yet another hill and then took a break for a snack.
I love this picture of Mark and Robert.
Amazingly, the kids did not whine one bit at this point.
We entered a very woody area where the path was leading us down to the river.
Resting along the way.
By the time we got to the bottom, we had hit the 4 mile mark…so my estimate was completely off. I think it was around 5 pm when we reached the river.
Walking along the river to Dovedale stepping stones and village, we found a few of these old logs with hundreds of coins imbedded in them. Kids found them fascinating!
Still walking…
Finally, we are almost done. This area is very busy during the day—lots of people hiking around this part of the Peak District. But in the evening it was almost empty, so we got to have the stepping stones all to ourselves.
At this point we were still about a mile from where we parked our car, in a neighboring village. At some point of our walk by the river, we got talking to an older couple who were just walking around this afternoon as well. They were nice enough to offer Robert a ride to that village so he could go get the car while we waited in the closest parking lot in Dovedale. It was so kind of them! Such a small act of service that made a huge difference to our family—a great finish to our fabulous day.
And thus, around 7 pm, we rolled into Ashfield, another neighboring village, got some pizza and kebabs to take away and headed home. Great outdoorsy day! So grateful that we are all healthy and able to do so much as a family now!
Lyana
