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
Getting this image, or something like it, has been a primary goal of the walk. 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.
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. 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 using 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 and such very distracting, to the point where I made a couple of fairly huge misnavigations. I’m hoping it becomes a bit more habitual.
Mossley, Hartshead Pike and Daisy Nook had played huge roles in in my late teens and early twenties when I lived in Oldham, and when rising through Mossley for lunch at the Pike and descending through Park Bridge to traverse the Nook, the atmosphere was thick with the gunk of old, old memories.
I’d once ridden a small frame Vespa scooter up to Hartshead Pike with a pal sharing the seat with me. We had to carry the scooter over a stile to get it up there.
It was gratifying to make it through from Oldham to Manchester city centre almost entirely via ‘countryside’. Much of the route stuck close to the river Medlock and often the landscape felt spacious enough to forget the proximity of the surrounding roads, housing estates and industrial estates. A fair few times I was directed along paths which seemed rarely used and one point as the woodland 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 and get moving in the right direction again.
Other than that it was easy enough to get to Bradford, and from there find 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.
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.
