Mam Tor

Mam Tor gets called the Shivering Mountain, and the first time someone told me that in a pub in Castleton I assumed it was just a nice bit of local color. Then I actually walked it and understood — the whole eastern face is made of unstable shale and gritstone that’s been slipping downhill for thousands of years, visibly, in slow motion, and it’s still moving now. You can see the layers of collapsed tarmac lower down where the old A625 used to run through the valley; the council rebuilt that road something like eighteen times before finally giving up in 1979 and rerouting traffic around it for good. Walking past the cracked, tilted chunks of asphalt still lying there is a strange thing, like the mountain politely told the road it wasn’t welcome anymore.

The climb itself is short but properly steep in places, a stone-flagged path that zigzags up from the Mam Nick car park or, if you’re coming from Castleton like we did, a longer approach past Blue John Cavern. It’s one of the more popular walks in the Peak District, so don’t expect solitude on a clear Saturday, but the crowd thins out fast once you’re past the initial climb. At the top there’s an Iron Age hillfort, or what’s left of the earthworks, and a trig point where basically everyone stops to eat a sandwich with their back against the wind.

What sold me on Mam Tor over some of the other Peak District walks was the ridge that continues from the summit — a proper spine of a path running along to Hollins Cross and beyond, with the Hope and Edale valleys dropping away on either side. Green patchwork fields, drystone walls cutting everything into neat little parcels, the Hope cement works chimney puffing away in the distance as an odd industrial punctuation mark to all that green. It’s genuinely one of the best short ridge walks I’ve done anywhere, and I say that having done a fair few since moving to Mexico and chasing volcanoes for fun.

We went in early autumn, low cloud clinging to the valley floor while the ridge itself sat in clear sun, which I’m told is a fairly common trick of the local weather here. Lia had never seen a temperature inversion like that and kept stopping to take photos of the cloud sitting below us like a lake. We didn’t say much on the way down. Some walks don’t need commentary.

When to go: Go on a weekday morning if you can, and check the forecast for clear ridge visibility — early autumn gave us a rare temperature inversion, but any season works if the wind isn’t too fierce.