As
a Nuttall and a TRAIL 100 mountain, Bleaklow Head had at least a couple of
reasons for me to tick it. As it is just
over an hour’s drive from home and with roadside parking available at the top
of the Snake Pass, leaving only about 400 feet of ascent to the summit, this
was going to be an easy day. Although I
was mostly enclosed by mist, the well-paved path of the Pennine Way wound its
way through the groughs of the peat moorland.
The
bleak landscape offered little promise of seeing any wildlife but I disturbed a
few grouse, battering their way into the air, and watched as a curlew, bigger
than I imagined it would be, cruised silently past and onwards into the mist.
The
mist thickened as I reached a large cairn with an embedded pole marking the
summit; or does it ? The hills database
says that the summit is a “tiny cairn on peat hag” which is “0.75m higher than
top of large cairn”. In the gloom it is
not easy to find the true summit amongst the many hags on the summit plateau.
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| Bleaklow's large cairn |
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| The true summit |
If
you were to ask a child to draw a mountain, I’m sure that the result would be
pointy and nothing like the flat top of Bleaklow. From the summit you have to walk at least a
kilometre in order to descend 250 feet – if you walk just north of west towards
Barrow Stones, you have to walk over 4 kilometres to achieve the same descent
! Although the summit of Bleaklow Head
lies at an altitude of 2077 feet, a reasonable height above the accepted
threshold of 2000 feet, it’s hard for me to accept that it deserves its “mountain”
status and even less that it is one of the 100 “Finest UK Mountains” according
to TRAIL magazine’s list.
The
next landmark of this walk was the Wain Stones which were considerably more
interesting than Bleaklow’s summit.
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| "Give us a kiss !" |
I
took a bearing towards Higher Shelf Stones and soon reached the trig point and
summit rocks, at least two of which lay claim to being the highpoint of the
day’s second Nuttall.
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| Higher Shelf Stones trig point |
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| the stones of Higher Shelf |
A
couple of hundred metres to the east are the remains of a USAF B-29
Superfortress that crashed in 1948. Some
of the engines and undercarriage are clear to see, within a significant debris
field. It is thought that the plane was
descending through low cloud and that the crew never saw the ground before the
impact. A memorial has been erected in
memory of the crew and a large cross made of stones has been shaped into a
nearby peat hag; poignant reminders of those who died far from home.
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| Superfortress memorial |
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| B-29 engine |
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| B-29 undercarriage |
Leaving the tangled wreckage behind, I headed east
across untracked terrain to reach the Pennine Way path by the shortest
route. The cloud had cleared now and I strolled
back to the summit of the Snake at a leisurely pace under the early afternoon
sun.
