It is one of the laws of Homo vehiculus, the wheel-dependent subspecies of our kind, that if you find a roadless patch in Britain you can have the place to yourself. Almost. We were happy to share the whole day on Bleaklow – a name that speaks volumes by itself – with five others. And two of them were at some other, undetermined gritstone edge, on a far horizon.
Our hearts, however, were for the Barrow Stones, the monolith group below Bleaklow Hill and surely the most beautiful in an area not short of such monuments. They’re about an hour’s slow grind across the moors that were traditionally shooting terrain. Despite the map indicating shooters’ butts and a cabin, we heard the distant sounds of a single red grouse during the entire visit, suggesting that both the bird and its followers could fade away in a near future.
The area’s other famous inhabitant is labrador tea, a northern rhododendron shrub with white flowers that occurs nowhere else in Derbyshire. What I love most is the speculative story of how it arrived about 75 years ago – in the gut of some hardy Arctic, seed-eating beast, like a snow bunting.
The main attraction for us is the wildlife visible in the stones themselves. Worn smooth by millennia of exposure at almost 2,000 feet, these rocks have acquired a fantastical array of organic shapes. Every visit produces new discoveries. In fact, the very same stone can possess multiple identities depending on angle, or your own inner whim.
My haul this time included a sperm whale, an enormous toad, a conclave of Tolkien’s ents and an extinct South American mammal – half warthog, half rhinoceros – called a toxodon. I always go see a favourite – a conference of beings who are a blend of Easter Island gods and those open-mouthed figures in Picasso’s Guernica. This trip’s find was a rock reminding me of the three-metre-tall flightless creature with meat-cleaving beak in the family Phorusrhacidae, whose common name is “terror bird”. It lived in Patagonia about 60m years ago, which, incidentally, is just one‑fifth the age of the Barrow Stones themselves. Sometimes you feel that truly all life is hidden here.
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