hiking

September 2, 2026

Day 1 – Walking home: Alderman’s Hill to the Flat

Alderman’s Hill, Harsthead Pike, Park Bridge, Daisy Nook, Clayton Vale, Ashton Canal: 15.5 Miles

The view to Alderman’s Hill from my flat captured from Alderman’s Hill

READER: If you don’t know the significance of this image to this story, best check out the intro to this walk here!

Getting this image, or something like it, has been a primary goal of the walk. It’s a view of my flat, from Alderman’s Hill, on what’s probably one of the last days the sightline it traces exists. Now that it’s captured and my feet are screaming, it’s tempting to leave it at that.

It’s been a great first day, but I’ve already got blister issues and that’s not a great thing to have with four big walking days left to come. But I’m going to do what I can to minimise their effect and get on with walking to Wales tomorrow.

It was hard to take in, from Alderman’s HIll’s top, that the grey bulges on the horizon which I knew were the Clywidian Range, was where I was now setting off walking to.

I was walking through various familiar stomping grounds today. The high ground above Greenfield has paid host to me 2 or 3 times a year since 2014, when I started walking again in earnest after a lengthy break since childhood. It was good to drink it all in again today from Alderman’s Hill in the breezy sunshine, though I was very fixated on finding my flat in the sea of Manchester buildings and trying to get to grips with recording footage on an action camera. I’m going to try to put together a video or series of videos about this trip, but I’m already finding the repeated stopping to film things and the fiddling with settings, lenses and such very distracting. The extra cognitive clutter led to a couple of fairly huge misnavigations, including ten minutes parading the wrong way up Greenfield’s main road before grumpily trotting back. I’m hoping the filming process becomes a bit more habitual.

Greenfield and Alderman’s HIll Views

Mossley, Hartshead Pike and Daisy Nook had played huge roles in my late-teens to mid-twenties when I lived in Oldham, and this next stretch of the journey was thick with the gunk of old memories. I had company on my way out of Greenfield. Firstly, a guy walking a woodland path coincided with my route off towards Mossley for a while; he was off to watch the Latics away later that evening. Quite a talker. Then as I was rising up through Mossley, an older but roaringly fit couple were taking a very long route over the high fields to get their paper. We chatted for a mile or so about our hiking adventures before I veered off for the last stretch up to Hartshead Pike.

Mossley

There were a couple of breezy showers on the hilltops on the way to the Pike. I got my waterproof jacket on, filmed a bit of very uninteresting footage of me acknowledging the fact that it was raining, and then set off again, leaving various bits of filming paraphenalia on the path behind me. Scurrying back and finding it on the ground – including my little bluetooth microphone – I was beginning to feel very inept with regards to the whole content creation shebang.

Hartshead Pike: Views of, from and back up to

I finally made it to Hartshead Pike. It had taken longer than I’d expected and I was worried about the Medlock-side, woodland walking I’d be doing later. I’d prefer not to do much of that after dusk. Looking back over the fields at Alderman’s Hill and Alphin Pike helped fend off a sense of not having made much progress – they seemed a satisfyingly long way off. I took in the very familiar views of Manchester and Oldham and the hazy distances beyond, and tried to tap into the layers of memories of being here back in my ‘youth’.

One that stood out was the time I’d ridden a small-frame Vespa scooter up here with a pal riding pillion. We had to carry the scooter over a stile to get it up to the monument.

I could still see Hartshead Pike from my flat until a couple of months ago, when the new building at Mayfield reached its 7th (I think 7th) floor. Such a great landmark – a defining part of the skyline for the interlapping parts of Oldham, Tameside and Saddleworth. It used to have a sweetshop in it in the 1930s – long before anybody real had a car. Enough people would have been making their way up here on foot to keep the shop ticking over, probably tramming it in for a break from the industrial soot and murk of Oldham, Ashton and Manchester.

Coming down from the Pike, after crossing Lees New Road, I was briefly incensed by the obstruction of the public footpath I needed to take, by a small construction site. I anticipated a lengthy and miserable detour, but then discovered an alternative path had been put in place, beginning a few yards along the roadside. It was a pretty nice new path too, and my public outrage became fully quieted on its luxurious gravel.

I descended through woodland to Park Bridge. There’s a heritage centre in an old ironworks here that I don’t remember ever visiting, despite living close to here for a few years and taking walks up this way plenty of times. Today, being later than expected getting here, I’m going to miss it again even though it’s about 100 yards away, peeping at me through a brace of trees.

I passed underneath Ashton Road, on which I lived until 2001 – about half a mile from here – and entered into Daisy Nook, another place heavily trodden by late-90s/early-millenium me. One of my exploits in these years had been to join a camp protesting against the construction of the M60 through here – it being a nature reserve. It was the era of 90s anti-road building activism in the UK – Swampy on Have I Got News For You and all that. I went down with a pal but we didn’t end up staying that long – maybe a night or two. I think my major contribution was playing the guitar solo to Comfortably Numb at a campsite jam session. I was skirting very close to hippiedom at this time, before I was set on a differerent road by Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü and co., a couple of years later. Still, crossing the bridge over the M60, it was evident what a great rip the infrastructure had made through the now-irreprably-diminished Nook.

The route pulled away from the Medlock for a stretch and the landscape opened up in the fields beyond Littlemoss. It felt surpisingly spacious here despite the proximity of the surrounding roads, housing estates and industrial estates.

Drawn back into the woodland by the Medlock, I was moving along paths which were very overgrown and seemed rarely used. At one point as the wooded bank on the south side of the Medlock got more dense I reached an impassible mire and had to follow hunches to extract myself from the mud, undergrowth and gloom. I got moving in the right direction again, though was still on very seldom-used seeming paths. One of these ran narrowly past a row of suburban back gardens; I felt like I would startle any resident who spotted me battling the overgrowth and squeezing uncomfortably through.

After this it was like I’d been given a bit of a suburban reprive, with the route skirting the edges of Droylsden, giving me the relative security of some pavement time.

Medlock Views from Nook to Vale

Though dusk was very much underway when I got there, Clayton Vale wasn’t quite as gloomy or lonely as I’d thought it might be. I was realising I’d not planned my hydration well at all for this leg of the journey, because at various points along the way the Medlock was looking delicious.

Phillips Park was being well used by people out catching the last scraps of a late summer evening. One of them, a young teenage lad on a bike stopped to chat having been struck by the size of my pack. He seemed impressed that I was going to Wales and suggested I definitely look into filming the trip for TikTok. I had considered this, but it would have required getting even more shit together in the very frantic and flimsy planning period I’d had for this. He was such a great, positive young lad though, really cheered me up.

Grave in Philips Park guarded by a Crow

I got a little disoriented on the way out of the park, but found my way across Alan Turing Way at Bradford, and from there found the canal which took me through to Ancoats, past the odd angler and past plenty of concertgoers heading in the opposite direction to the Coop Arena.

The Etihad from the Ashton Canal

I made it home regretting various poor choices, largely involving feet and hydration. Tomorrow it will be raining fairly heavily most of the day, but this is the kind of hike where an umbrella doesn’t seem daft to carry. I think it’s all about the feet now – hopefully I can patch up the blisters and make it to Rixton without too much pain.

August 21, 2016

Day 7 – Wayoh Reservoir to Winter Hill.

Wayoh Reservoir, Turton Heights, Longworth Moor, Belmont, Winter Hill. 8 Miles.

I have a problem with the idea of a ‘challenge’, when it comes to outdoorsy persuits like this. This whole horizon walk thing has certainly had aspects to it that are challenging and there have been plenty of times where I’ve felt challenged – but this isn’t ‘a challenge’. I think the idea of a doing a challenge can align suspiciously well with the neoliberal – ‘give it 110%’ shakedown we’re living grit-toothed through. Challenge is an aspect of what this is but only an aspect – there’s adventure, risk, uncertainty, fun, problem solving, physical effort, mental struggle and beauty – lots and lots of beauty. To privilege or emphasise challenge above these other facets of an outdoorsy undertaking can bring an overly instrumental, work-like mentality into what should be a time/place for play. I’m quite happy to think of this walk as ‘playing out’.

As for a purpose – there doesn’t have to be one beyond the playing with the landscape that drawing a line along it and then walking that line is. I have realised though that this walk does do something that seems kind of purpose-like: it adds a physical dimension to my relationship with the horizon. I’ve grown up, worked and done pretty much everything I’ve done under the gaze of this crescent of hills – in a way they define me. I’m sort of paying tribute to that by walking it – I’m adding a physical element to the looking at and looking back.

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I wearily pack up the tent and head down from the woods to the reservoir. It’s a really beautiful place, but I’m eager to get away. I squeeze past a skip that’s been plonked at the start of a public footpath and then misnavigate into some farm buildings where, unnervingly, there’s what appears to be a fiercely torn open lorry trailer.

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I find the right path eventually, and move through some grotty woods to a lane running between fields. It takes me past another old agricultural building re-purposed for the wealth-creators. As I pass I hear the security intercom sounding and think I must be being addressed – warned off perhaps – but then I realise that, bizarrely, the intercom is loudly playing a phone-in radio show.

I pass through a lovely little hamlet – stone houses jumbled around a curling cobbled lane – that feels occupied, as in taken over. The cars parked, the signs of renovation… I’m not so romantic-minded that I imagine that these buildings were previously the scene of something perfectly idyllic, that was then crushed by a shockwave of cash from the cities. But there is a feeling of spoils being taken.

The Ordnance Survey map (digital) I’m using shows a public footpath running up through the drive of a farm, but as I get to it there’s a very unfriendly sign insisting that there’s no access this way and a CCTV camera on a tall metal stalk reinforces the point. I see there’s another way to the path further up the road and head up there seething a little. I think of paths as kind of sacred and there’s nothing that gives me more of a hit of civic pride than a well maintained and signposted public footpath. Maybe there was agreement about this one and the OS just hasn’t quite caught up; maybe there was some ceremony of deconsecration – maybe it isn’t just contempt.

I find my way around to where I would’ve got to a bunch quicker and begin the trudge up to Turton Heights. It’s been threatening to rain all morning and now it starts – and it’s really going for it. I’m making my way up a signposted route through a field, but if the signs ever followed anything like a discernible path then it’s long overgrown. There are shoulder high rushes in enormous clumps and they quickly saturate my clothes as I squeeze through and stumble over them. I get to the top of the moor and it’s just chucking it down. I’m soaked and my shoes are audibly squelching as I walk. I realise how lucky I’ve been with the weather – I don’t know what I’d have done if there’d been two consecutive days like this earlier in the week. I don’t think I would’ve been able to handle it.

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I’m starting to shiver and I decide for the first time to cut out something on my route – I’ll skip Turton Moor and the Hanging Stones. I’ll come and look at them another time. Right now, for the first time in the whole adventure, I’m really not enjoying myself. It cuts two miles off my total, but I’m still happy I’ll have done my 100 miles – the detours from the main route to the campsites and such will have more than made up for the loss. It’s still a hard decision though and I hesitate on it for a good few minutes – but cold and weariness eventually win out, and I cut off the route and head towards Belmont.

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I’m at the foot of Winter Hill now, but I’m not ready to head up just yet – I need to get out of the rain if just for a few minutes. I head into the first pub I see  – the Belmont Bull -which, marvellously, has a sign saying ‘Muddy boots and wet bums welcome’ – I had been worried about exactly those things. I’m welcomed in by the barman, Tom. There’s no better icebreaker than looking like a defeated, sodden and overladen mess and we’re quickly talking about the walk I’ve been doing and how it’s all going to climax with Winter Hill. I complain to Tom about the rain and the rushes and he says something like – ‘Ah, the rushes, yeah. I do like a walk in the rain though’. Instantly I start to feel that I might have been being a bit soft about the rushy terrain of the West Pennine Moors. Tom says he knows a better way up Winter Hill than the one I’d been planning and I’m really happy to hear about it. It doesn’t appear on the OS maps and I never spotted it on Google Earth – but it sounds like it’s going to get me up there in a satisfyingly direct way. I try pouring the water out of my shoes, wringing out my socks and then giving them repeated blowings under the hand-dryer in the gents, but it’s really not making much of a difference. I have a couple of coffees and realise I’m starving so I order lunch. As I’m eating I have a wonderful realisation: I can leave the rucksack here. I’m going to be coming back here anyway – I’ve spoken to Rachel and she’s going to pick me up from here; I’m certainly not getting any Manchester horizon pics from the zoom-camera today; there’s nothing in there I’ll need up on the hill. I ask Tom if that would be cool and he says yes. This is amazing. I recheck the route with Tom and then set off – 33 pounds lighter. I’m practically skipping as I make my way to the outskirts of the village, past a little reservoir known locally as ‘The Blue Lagoon’, across some low wooden bridges over swollen streams and begin the ascent. The path is muddy, crumbly, full of slippy unstable rocks and great patches of bog and largely very steep – but it’s visible. It takes just under an hour for me to get up the first ascent, across the boggy ‘flats’ and then up onto the hill itself. Lord knows how long it would’ve been if I’d still had the weight of the rucksack on me. It’s really wild with wind and rain and the visibility is next to nothing. I can make out the smaller transmitters but not the main spire I’ve taken to be the end of my route. I find the trig point, which is great to see, but I want to find the fucking massive transmitter tower that’s on this hill but which is completely invisible to me now.

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I get out my tablet with my OS map on it, hoping it will hold out in the rain for long enough to show me where to go, and I see that I need to follow a path southeast which then branches southwest and I’ll be there. Splashing directly through massive puddles – why bother going around when you’re already soaked? – I finally make it to the gates of the transmitter’s compound and… I still can’t really see it – there’s a sort of detectable darkening vertical line through the fog. That’s it. I try and do a quick video of myself being there and hurry off downhill.

 

Seeing Manchester from this iconic bit of my horizon, and seeing the whole route that I’d walked to get here – the triumphant last gaze at it all – wasn’t going to happen. Sod it. It’s cold, let’s go. I scurry back down the path, which is by now pretty much a stream, cackling loudly.

Look at what you could’ve won! The final view, as anticipated by Google Earth