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.

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.

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.

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.