Long Weekend in the Peak District

I am on a train right now, heading south through the Midlands of England. I have just spent the long weekend with my girlfriend in the Peak District.

We started early on Saturday morning, catching an 8:37am train from London Euston up to Stoke on Trent, where we rented a car and drove off into the Peak District National Park. We went for a bit of a hike in an area called Dovedale, which took us from one quiet village to an even quieter one, along a stream running at the bottom of some steep green hills.

Dovedale

It seems all of the many peaks in the area are lush, green, grassy hills separated by frequent grey rock walls, marking the various paddocks, the majority of which this time of the year are littered with sheep looking after their young lambs.  Horses, ponies, cows and ducks could be found in some of the other fields.

After a good amount of sightseeing all afternoon, we headed to Hartington, a village essentially in the middle of nowhere, to find our accommodation for the weekend. The Hartington Hall YHA is a youth hostel in an old converted and extended manor house.  The main building used to belong to a noble family, and some of the structure dates back to the 1300’s. It became a hostel in the 1930’s and was the first one with electricity and central heating, apparently.  It certainly didn’t seem like many of the youth hostels I’ve stayed in in the past.  It was a grand looking old building of dark grey stone, surrounded by manicured green lawns and gardens full of families playing ball games with their children on encouraging them to play with the farm animals which were outside the barn. The barn itself is where our room was, and couldn’t be much further from the barn that it used to be. Our room was a cosy double en-suite bedroom which was more like a hotel or b’n’b room than an YHA.

On Sunday we got up early again and drove to Alton Towers, England's biggest and most famous theme park. It is full of rollercoasters and other thrill rides and provided for a good old Gold-Coast-style day of fun, just without the sunshine.

I endured and survived:

• THI3TEEN (scary new ride where you unexpectedly drop and go backwards in the pitch dark)
• Air (flying around face-down, then backwards)
• Nemesis
• Duel
• Rita (0 to 100km/h in 2.5 seconds)
• Sonic Spinball
• Oblivion (ridiculously scary vertical drop)

This morning we checked out of our farmhouse home and drove through the green countryside to Bakewell, home of the Bakewell Tart.  A wander around the old town and a stop for breakfast in a busy café, and we were ready to drive on. Now that I am used to it, I really enjoy driving around England.  The roads are narrow and wind around lots of corners and up and down hills, usually surrounded by metre-tall brick walls on either side of the edge of the road, providing for some challenging but fun driving.  We drove around the southern Peak District, took in the scenery and headed back for Stoke, for our slow (but cheap) train back to the South.  We will have two days in London, before we head off to Barbados on Thursday.