Hartington // Farming the Peak District – Part 2: Milking cows
Join me on a walk through rolling White Peak farmland, through pastoral scenes of milking parlours, cheeseboards and lush green fields… plus a decapitation
Striding out of Hartington village, I leave behind the famous cheese shop, the cafes, pubs and farm shops, up the hill past the Youth Hostel in Hartington’s old manor house. Hartington is a prosperous, smart village with much better transport links and much more going on than most other villages the same size nearby. Part two in my mini-series exploring the history and culture of farming in the Peak District is all about cows, and that prosperity in Hartington has long been yoked to their cattle.
As I took this walk, it was the autumn eqinox. The day perfectly captured that moment of transition between summer and autumn, as the two seasons came together, teetering in a delicate balance. The sky was a pristine blue, draping a quiet warmth across the bright pasture either side of the country road, and the pollinators still buzzing on the field margins. The dry, sculptural remains of Cow Parsley umbellifers spiked the verge, their foliage a distant memory. Below them, clumps of Yarrow still held some white flowers beside older, brown heads. A pair of crows cawed as they landed in the field beside me and I heard cows lowing as I passed a barn on the roadside.
I didn’t see any livestock though, until the far end of the road. In a brief pocket of high summer, I walked into the strong scent of freshly cut grass. It’s so redolent of BBQs and beef burgers, but on this occasion, way out in a patch between villages, it was food for the cows, not from them.
It’s been a tricky year for haymaking in the Peak District, with a dry May and June leading to poor hay yields in July. Here, a few fields were being cut again now and left to dry in the last of the warm weather, for a bit of extra hay if possible, or maybe haylage. I’ve seen farmers doing this all round the White Peak to get more laid down for winter.
In the rocky pasture of a small hillock just beyond, the cows who would eat this fodder looked down on the preparation. I couldn’t be sure at a distance what breed they were. Aberdeen Angus maybe.
In days past they’d be more likely to be an old, local type of cow, as the Peak District has its own native breed. Blue Albion cows were originally known as a ‘Bakewell Blues’. They are thought to have originally been bred from Welsh Black cattle, crossed with White Dairy Shorthorns, which yielded some lightly patterned white cows, some few that were black with white marks, but many that are a striking blue roan colour, speckled with a darker blue.
The old lane I left Hartington on ended at Heathcote Mere, a natural pool of water, full of bulrushes, pondweed and wildlife. It’s a rare sight in this limestone landscape, because it isn’t fed by a brook or a river. It’s a pond standing alone. Mallards and Moorhens paddled on the surface, insects buzzed above and I was amazed to still see four House Martens swooping overhead.
The Mere stands on a junction of old country lanes, as its rarity made it a regular stop on many farmer’s journeys. As drovers brought their herds from the surrounding villages, to be sold at the market at Newhaven, they would stop here to water the livestock. Because it’s a rare communal resource, it was designated common land and from at least 1745 there were fines for polluting the water or damaging the walls around it.
While cows must only visit rarely now, their legacy is preserved in the wildflowers on the grass around it, as Milkmaids and Cowslips flower through the year in the meadow around the pond.
Leaving the road, a path from the side of the Mere cuts across a patchwork of fields and arrives round the back of a barn into the tiny village of Heathcote. This is one of the farming communities that would have made use of the Mere.
The Peak District is still a livestock farming area, investing a lot more land in animals and their feed than in crops for human consumption. The path through the fields was spattered with cowpats, drying and decaying. Large barns close to the village still house significant herds.
Farming has become more specialised though. In the past, farms in villages like this would have been more mixed. In ‘Seasons to Taste’, an oral history book about farming in the Peak District that inspired this series, there’s an example of a farm on the hills above Chesterfield, run by Richard Gill. When he was young it still had no electricity, and in the mid-60s when he finishes college, they were still a traditional mixed farm: “We were growing a few potatoes. Kept about ten pigs and twenty cows and some hens which were my mum’s money. Turkeys for Christmas, a few geese and it all went to make a balanced farm.”
Our local cows were useful on a mixed farm. Blue Albion are a dual-purpose breed. They milk well and produce good beef. They could be used in different ways.
There is a classic folk story set on a mixed farm. It’s the legend surrounding a real, yet unusual building found just South of Wirksworth in Mugginton, on the fringes of the Peak District, built in 1723.
Back then farms may have been quite different, but some things never change… one of those was that the Derbyshire bloke who ran this farm, Francis Brown, liked a drink. He was notorious for it in all the inns near his farm. That, and his stubbornness. Once he’d had a drink, you could get in an argument with him and never have it end. No matter what you said, you’d find no break in the beer or his resolve.
One wild, stormy night, farmer Brown got it into his head that he needed to ride to Derby. He was at home, already very well lubricated, and it was dark and tumultuous outside. His wife tried to dissuade him, but he was having none of it. He would be riding to Derby tonight, no matter what, he cried, even if he had to ‘halter the Devil himself to get there’. He grabbed the saddle and halter for his horse and went outside, into the night..
He managed to find his horse and fumbled around, trying to put on the riding gear. Something wasn’t right though. In the dark and the howling wind, he just couldn’t get the halter onto the horses head, as he’d done a thousand times before. As he struggled with it, he groped around, and that’s when he realised something else amiss. His horse had grown horns. Great big, pointed, curving horns, like Satan himself has!
Shocked, he let out a terrified yell and ran back to his farmhouse in fright. He’d sworn by the Devil’s name, and in doing so he must have summoned him to the farm. He was so full of remorse that on that night, he vowed never to drink again and live a righteous life instead. Rather than beer, he now spent his money building a small chapel on the side of his farmhouse. It’s technically called Intake Chapel, but it’s still known locally as Halter Devil Chapel.
That night was a profound shock for Francis Brown. Perhaps others might have thought it an extreme reaction though, if they’d been there, sober, to see the events themselves. The demonic horned horse he tried to ride was, of course, a cow…
Even in the days of mixed farms, some people favoured one activity. Some farmers would make more milk than others, and would sell it locally on a milk round.
A farmer from Glossop, Pauline Jackson, describes moving into the area with her dad when she was young and him starting to sell his milk. “As a five year old we went to a little place called Birch Vale, nice little dairy farm, 42 acres, milked about 30 cows… it was green top milk then, straight from the cow, not pasteurised. My Dad never delivered a pint of pasteurised milk, funnily enough, and he did a milk round for 58 years”.
Pauline’s father made a living selling the milk from a small herd of cows, on under 50 acres. That would be tiny by modern standards. In my previous walk we explored the historical factors that drove the intensification of farming in the last 100 years. That pursuit of productivity has affected all kinds of farming and cattle are no different. Talking about this on the farm I help at, I’m told you can’t make a living off less than 100 cows, over 300 acres in Derbyshire now, and even that is getting difficult.
As farms intensified, it was best not to split your attention in so many ways, as you had on a small, mixed farm. Even cattle isn’t a single specialism. As this type of farming divided into two fields (I couldn’t resist the pun!), dairy or beef, all-rounder breeds like Bakewell Blues have become less popular.
Invest in a mechanised milking parlour and you’ll get more value from it if you have more cows to put through it. Change your cows from an all-rounder to a dairy specialist, like a Holstein Freisen from Europe, and when you get it into the milking parlour, you’ll get much more milk. Those cows though can’t be kept outside in winter though. They need longer inside, eating stored food, and here we arrive back at the change from hay to silage, covered in my last walk.
As marketisation arrived, with greater competition, the prices changed too. Supermarkets have put the money they pay for milk down and down. So again, you have to produce more and more milk to stay in the game. This has driven the price down so hard, it’s making it almost impossible for farmers to manage.
This price pressure has been felt across farming. Another Derbyshire farmer quoted in the book ‘Seasons to Taste’ quantified the impact this has had. He used a different agricultural product, but it’s illuminating:
“I was at meeting recently and they were saying that the price of wheat in 1840 would, per ton, employ a farm man then for 140 days. Today it’ll pay for two days. The values and prices have changed, and it’s the same with farm wages, and milk...”
It’s interesting to note that the Industrial Revolution began in Derbyshire in about 1850, a decade after this statistic, bringing a whole new era that changed the way people worked and earnt a living here. The tides of politics, history and economics have churned up this area of farming too, with huge impacts on the farmers and the land they manage.
It’s important to remember though, these changes don’t have to be permanent. In ‘The Land that Made Us’, another brilliant oral history of farming in the Peak District, a land manager for several tenant farms put it like this:
“The trouble is that most farmers are under such financial pressure to increase stock numbers and maximise output that this puts immense pressure on the soils and the surrounding ecosystems. If only they could be guaranteed a good income for the meat and milk they produce, many farmers would perhaps reduce stock numbers and settle for a less stressful life.”
In the fields between Heathcote and the next village, Biggin, buzzards soared overhead in the warm air, while cows lay on the grass soaking up the warmth. Mushrooms had started to spring up in clumps, on land long used as pasture. Mycellium thrive below ground, undisturbed and well fertilised.
Heathcote and Biggin are those kinds of villages where farming is still at the centre of the community. I mean that quite literally, as barns, fields and farmyards run right up to the small village centre. In the case of Biggin, I came onto the main street by the beautiful Biggin Hall hotel, and the far side of the road was fields and a farmyard, screened by a row of grand lime and ash trees.
When farms all around had cows at a small scale, people had to be experts in using milk. Farming folk across the country got into their kitchens and found a lot of ways of using the excess. Two such ways are described by the Peak District author Alison Uttley, in her book of the recipes they used to make on her farm in Cromford (‘Recipes from an Old Farmhouse’, published in 1966).
Junket – “We used junkets very often, and we never tired of them. Creamy milk fresh and warm from the Jersey cow was brought into the house for junkets. It was poured in a glass dish and a little sugar added and a drop of vanilla essence. Then a large teaspoonful of rennet to a pint of milk was stirred in and the milk left to set. A little nutmeg was grated over the surface as soon as the junket was ready.”
Possets – “In the winter we often had possets. We had possets at Christmas, and New Year, possets when we were ill and possets when we were starved (which is to say that we were frozen stiff from the weather, and not that we were hungry)… Men had possets, stronger, with rum or brandy, to revive them… Milk was curdled with ale to make a Christmas posset. Spices were added, cloves and cinnamon, and a grate of nutmeg and brown sugar. The posset was mulled on the hot stove, in a pewter tankard, and poured into smaller mugs of pewter when it was ready. The ale curdled the milk and made a froth like ‘lamb’s wool’…”
Milk and dairy were a core part of diets, but there’s one important way people everywhere have found to use milk that I haven’t yet covered. The one that is most closely associated with Hartington.
“Around here I’ve read it was called “white meat” because if you had a cow and ate it as meat, that was a one-way trip, but if you milked it you could keep making cheese which has the same nutritional value but you get more of it over the life of the animal. So it was called white meat and it was the crop.”
This quote is from Alan Salt, an expert in Derbyshire cheese making and its history, as well as a former manager of Hartington’s famous creamery.
Cheese is a fantastic way to turn milk into something storable. Something that keeps for much longer.
What I find fascinating about cheese, is that there are really only three ingredients. Milk, rennet and bacteria. A fourth if you include adding salt near the end of most recipes, to stop some of the bacterial processes. Traditionally, you didn’t even add in a specific bacterial culture from a packet, grown for making that kind of cheese, like a typical ingredient. It was the bacteria that naturally lived where you were, that came from the cows and the surroundings and was kept and cultivated in your vats and equipment. Similarly, the milk was different depending on the place, because of the types of animals and fodder that could grow in that area, and the knock-on effects that has for the make-up of the milk produced.
Through different combinations of those three ingredients, and small differences in the process, such as when you heat and cool it, we get this incredible variety, from soft gooey brie to rock hard parmesan.
The whey that is a waste product from making cheese is also useful. While it’s also made into sports nutrition products now, traditionally farmers would take the protein-rich whey to feed to pigs. In this process, even your waste can be turned into bacon and stored up to be used later.
It isn’t just bacteria and milk that tied each cheese to a specific place. It was how the people lived and what they needed to do with it. Taking examples like the brie and parmesan I mentioned earlier, to show you the extremes, softer cheeses tend to be traditionally made in lush, hospitable farming communities, where people live alongside their livestock all year round. The living is fairly easy, so towns aren’t far away. Places to sell cheese are quite accessible.
You make a nice soft cheese, it’s ready in a few days, and it might only last a week or two longer. That works for a business, because you can get it to people, sell it on, and they can take it home with time to eat it.
Now imagine some of the livestock farmers who live around European mountain ranges. Parmesan, for example, comes from around the Appennino Tosco-Emiliano National Park in Italy, a beautiful mountainous area. Farmers in such places take their animals into the high places in summer, far away from towns. The livestock roam, eating the fresh mountain pasture. When they’re milked farmers make cheese, but they might not be in highly populated areas to sell it for months. They needed to transport the cheese to those places too, down rough mountain roads and old, worn tracks. They created hard cheeses, to survive the journey. They could use the high mountain air and wind to dry it, removing a lot of the moisture, so it keeps for much longer. You can bring it down off the mountains and live off it over the colder months in the lowlands, or sell it in town for an income.
So much of who we are, as communities of people, is wrapped up in the food we’ve created. Food is a creative, practical, natural expression of a people, their lives, their needs and their relationship with the land they live on.
Food is culture.
We have two heritage types of cheese that are traditionally made in this part of the Peak District. Stilton, including the blue kind, and Derby, commonly eaten as Sage Derby.
We’re not in the mountains by any means. In the midlands, there are towns and villages all around us. But Alan Salt, the cheesemaking expert I quoted earlier, said that back in 1875 when the Duke of Devonshire helped establish the creamery in Hartington, “You’ve got to remember… Hartington was a little bit isolated. You couldn’t just put milk on a lorry and send it down to London or Manchester.”
We are somewhere in between that accessible soft-cheese land, and the remote hard cheese terrain. For that reason, both our local cheeses are ‘semi-hard’. They fall in the middle of the spectrum. Our farmers needed cheeses that could be made each day, that then lasted months if they couldn’t get somewhere to sell it, but that could be eaten sooner, fairly young, if needed.
Derby is usually only aged for a few months. Stilton is similar, though it can be kept and matured longer. Despite its name, it didn’t originate in the town of Stilton in Cambridgeshire. Rather, being in between the Midlands, East Anglia and the markets of London, Stilton was a place where cheeses from the farming regions of England came together to be traded and sold, especially to merchants from the South East.
The origins of the stilton recipe and process are disputed, but by 1724 Daniel Defoe wrote in his ‘A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain’ that, “We pass’d Stilton, a town famous for cheese, which is call’d our English Parmesan, and is brought to table with the mites or maggots round it, so thick, that they bring a spoon with them for you to eat the mites with, as you do the cheese.”
Soon after this some consistent characteristics were clear, with a cheese made in large cylinders to drain under its own weight, turned and rubbed each day, encouraging a dimpled golden crust to form, and spiked with metal needles to encourage a mould to grow and change the flavour inside it.
So Stilton wasn’t from Stilton, it was a product of the Midlands. In 1996 came a ‘protected designation of origin’ that said that any cheese sold under the name Stilton had to meet certain requirements and come from a specific place (just like Champagne). One requirement is that it is made in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire or Leicestershire.
It’s an old, international joke that English food is bland and boring. At very least that it’s limited.
I was teaching a lovely Indian woman how to milk goats recently and while we worked, she asked me what English dishes she should try while staying here. She said she’d had fish and chips already, and was planning to try a Sunday roast… but was there anything else?
Cheese was my emphatic answer. I think our traditional cheeses are the crown jewels of English national cuisine. The sparkling constellation of beautiful, artisan cheeses, with so much variety and potency, in flavour, texture, look and heritage. Each one is an expression of a place and a people, as well as an individual craftsperson. They combine history and modern industry in unique ways. They are a national treasure trove.
I left Biggin, passing through another tiny, rural village called Dalehead, and picking up a bridleway into open countryside. The path descends into Biggin Dale gently, as if the land is making a graceful bow and the hillsides rise as you walk. The incline is easy, yet out of nowhere, the hills tower over you at the foot of the valley.
It was steeper to escape the dale on the other side, up a short, scratchy mud and scree path to re-discover the bridleway. It began to thread its way between old stone barns, pale limestone walls and herds of grazing cows, back towards Hartington. The stonework was so old in the buildings and field walls that they’re mottled with competing mosses and lichens.
Even more prestigious than Stilton, this part of the world holds an important place in the history of cheesemaking. In 1869, the first ever cheese factory was opened in the village of Longford, near Derby, in a collaboration between 13 farmers and a local landowner.
Only six years later, the Duke of Devonshire founded the first creamery in Hartington, to help his tenant farmers to use the milk they produced. Humans had already been making cheese for about 7000 years, individually and by hand. Before these factories though, cheese was made in dairies on individual farms, with as many cheeses as there were farmers making it. For the first time, small factory processes brought milk from a group of farms and herds together, standardising their milk into a common product, recognisable and consistent, to be sold far and wide.
As the bridleway transformed into a country road, the view opened up. The hills behind Ecton became visible a few miles off, rugged and steep.
Ecton was another place a creamery opened, as this new production idea spread. There were small dairies throughout Derbyshire, in villages like Eggington, Madeley and Rowsley, as well as across more of the Peak District, into Staffordshire villages like Hopedale and towns like Uttoxeter. Across the country too, these creameries were everywhere.
A revolution in cheesemaking had taken off, making possible the national, artisan cheese movement we still have, all made possible by facilities like the ones in Longford and Hartington.
Growth began to ebb as transport changed and the farms became more accessible. It became a simpler job to load your milk churns onto a train and get it taken to feed the demand in the growing towns and cities, like Manchester, Sheffield and Nottingham, at the edges of the Peak District.
As quickly as they’d spread, the smaller dairies began to close. Though our cheese industry has continued on. Hartington’s creamery might be the only one left in the area that can trace a direct line in its heritage, back to those first Derbyshire factories that changed cheese-making forever.
Like the means of production, different types of cheese have spread around the country and been eaten in the Peak District. While I love a good Sage Derby most of all, we have soft and hard cheeses here too.
John N Merrill includes a story in ‘Derbyshire Folklore’ about a man in Tideswell who got hold of a whole wheel of a very tough variety:
“Living in Tideswell in the nineteenth century was an amusing character called ‘Owd Whacky’ One day he had the chance of buying a very old cheese. Without any hesitation he purchased it. When he returned home with the cheese he found he could not cut or break off a single piece, for it was so old and rock hard. He was so determined to cut it open that eventually he decided to climb the church tower and throw it to the ground, where he hoped it would smash into pieces.
While he was climbing to the top, an elderly couple were sitting in their house near the church and were busy praying for food. Owd Whacky threw the cheese from the top, and instead of breaking on impact with the ground the cheese simply bounced from a gravestone, rolled across the road and leapt into the house of the elderly couple. The man turned to his wife and said full of emotion… ‘Look… the lord, he’s sent us a cheese from heaven’”
There are, incidentally, a bit of a traditional of tales about men from Tideswell doing stupid things. Some other examples from John N Merill’s book are:
A Tideswell man who was painting his wheelbarrow, and when it came to do the underside, he lay down on the ground underneath it and painted looking up at it instead of turning it over. Then when it was finished, he picked it up and carried it home on his back, instead of wheeling it.
A group of men from Tidsa heard a cuckoo calling near their field. They wanted to block it in, so they built a drystone wall all the way round the bottom of the tree.
A Tideswell farm labourer who was told to put the horses out to graze. He got the horses like he always did, fitting them up with a halter and reins to lead them out to the field… and made sure he added the nosebag.
The most influential of these stories is from an old mummers’ play, still performed now and then, about a couple of Tidsa farmers. Out walking one day, they came across a cow with its head stuck in a gate. The cow couldn’t pull its head out, so one of the Tideswell men went to get a saw, which he used… to cut the cows head off!
Now the cow was freed from the gate, they realised their mistake. The friend asked why on earth he didn’t use the saw to cut the gate?! They scrambled to find a doctor, fast.
Thank heavens, all was made well, when the medical man sewed the head back on to the cow and it came back to life. A miracle. And now it also didn’t have its head stuck.
It’s a happy ending, but this image of people from Tideswell as a bit thick has endured. Because of this story, people from the village are still sometimes known as ‘Saw Y’eds’.
The tower of St Giles Church was the first part of Hartington to come into view again, as the lane dropped towards the village. Next, the neat churchyard appeared. I dropped off the last section of the lane down a footpath with near, carved posts in the stile. Now a pattern of ordered gardens and the duckpond in the centre of the village also came in sight.
The original creamery no longer stands just outside the village centre. It was demolished, after the business was sold in 2009, but the heritage was kept alive when a group of employees continued the production and recipes in a new facility nearby, still within the parish of Hartington. The business has continued, with only minor interruptions, since 1875, and the cheese shop established at one end of the original creamery is still there too, in the centre of the village, just beyond the pond.
Dairy is ingrained in the fabric of this village still, just as farming is an enduring part of the landscape and a part of life in this area.
When the winds of history, politics and market economics transform so much of farming, they can sweep that aside. We need to hold on to our food culture and heritage. We do also need progress and technology. Farming and food must advance, just as culture evolves and the people of the Peak District are different to 100 or 200 years ago. Yet that doesn’t have to be at the expense of our unique culture and heritage. We can bring that with us too.
The pubs in the village centre are named for the Devonshire family, of Chatsworth, who founded the original creamery. The other pub is named for local writer Charles Cotton, who lived most of his life nearby, in the 17th Century.
His poem ‘The Evening Quatrains’ is a great place to finish this walk, reflecting on the symbolism of the objects and tasks of rural life here, at the close of the day. When agriculture is so engrained in our way of life, the simple routines become rituals, through repetition over days, months and years.
The Day’s grown old, the fainting Sun
Has but a little way to run,
…
A very little little flock
Shades thrice the ground that it would stock;...
These being brought into the fold,
And by the thrifty master told, [counted]
He thinks his wages are well paid,
Since none are either lost or stray’d.
Now lowing herds are each-where heard,
Chains rattle in the villian’s [farmer’s] yard,
…
The bees are hiv’d, and hum their charm,
Whilst every house does seem a swarm.
The cock now to the roost is press’d:
For he must call up all the rest;
The sow’s fast-pegg’d within the sty,
To still her squeaking progeny.
Each one has had his supping mess [meal],
The cheese is put into the press,
The pans and bowls are scalded all,
Rear’d up against the milk-house wall.
And now on benches all are sat
In the cool air to sit and chat,
Till Phoebus, dipping in the West,
Shall lead the World the way to rest.
References
All the interview quotes in this post came from two fantastic oral history books about farming in the Peak District:
‘Seasons to Taste, Field to table, past to present: A story of food in the Peak District’ (2008), published by the Farming Life Centre in Buxton, Derbyshire, edited by David Fine.
‘The Land That Made Us: The Peak District farmer’s story’ (2019), edited by Christine Gregory and Sheila Hine, published by Vertibrate Publishing, in partnership with the Farming Life Centre and the Peak District National Park Authority.
The photos are courtesy of Ellie Smith - @wildheartedellie on Instagram - except the photo of the Blue Albion cows, courtesy of the Albion Cattle Society.
Walk instructions
You can find a map and download gps information to follow here.
Length: 5 miles
Duration: 2-2.5 hours
Starting point: Hartington village centre
Accessibility: Some tricky stiles throughout the route including one that is a frustrating climb as it is missing a stone, but in general the walk is not steep or long and should be accessible to regular walkers.
Instructions
Beginning in the centre of the village, walk along past the Devonshire Arms, then the Tea Room/Post Office on your right, and the Village Stores on your left. Shortly after this, find a road called ‘Hall Bank’ on the right, and turn on to it, following it uphill past Hartington Hall, a youth hostel.
Continue along this quiet country road, leaving the village behind and passing between fields, for a mile, until it arrives at Heathcote Mere.
Turn right, to pass in front of the pond, then take the lane beside it, signposted for Heathcote. Roughly level with the back of the mere though, take the footpath marked by a finger post on the right. This will take you through a field (on slightly tricky, double stiles) then diagonally across and slightly uphill through a second field, to a stile in the far-left corner. Climb this stile and go through a small gate, then follow the direction of the finger post through this field, to another (slightly frustrating) stile where the top step is unfortunately missing. The path beyond this emerges beside a barn, and the path turns left round the end of the barn. Then take the farm driveway on the right, as it bends round and comes out onto the road that runs through the small village of Heathcote.
Arriving at this quiet road, turn right. Continue ahead as the road soon turns into a green lane and the houses end. As the lane turns left, a footpath continues straight ahead. It goes almost straight across the first field, then diagonally left across a second. Through a gate, it continues down the line of the field edge, keeping the drystone wall on your right, then round the edge of another field, to come into the grounds of Biggin Hall. Continue through a metal gate, then keep ahead, until you emerge on another quiet country road in Biggin.
Turn left through Biggin, then take the next right by the church and opposite a bus shelter, onto another lane that runs, arrow straight, back out of the village. When the road eventually turns 90 degrees right, follow it, but 20-30 metres later, take the footpath through a stone stile on your left. After you’ve passed through the stile, take the path to the right (ignoring the trod straight ahead) which cuts across the corner of the field, into another field. Keep on this path until it passes round a building, into Dalehead, on another quiet lane.
Turn left along this lane, slightly downhill, then after 100 yards take the bridleway on the right. It begins through a gate, then between the crumbled remains of two old stone walls. Follow this bridleway as it descends into Biggin Dale.
At a signpost pointing in a few directions, carry straight on, following the sign for Hartington. Through a gate, the path comes into the main stretch of the dale. Turn right, going slightly up hill along the valley bottom. After roughly 200 yards, a path splits off on the left to climb up the side of the dale, through a smaller offshoot of the valley. Go up this short hill, finding a gate at the top, where the bridleway continues straight ahead, much more clearly and levelly.
Follow this bridleway. After a while, it turns into another quiet country lane, but keeping going, straight ahead. After just over a mile, St Giles Church in Hartington will come in to view straight ahead. The lane begins to descend towards Hartington village, but look for a small path on the left, through a stile with carved stones. Follow this path down to its end, joining another path at a ‘T’. Turn right, through another stile and out between buildings on to the bottom of Hall Bank. Turn left downhill, then left at the bottom of the lane, retracing your steps to the village centre.
Thoroughly enjoyable read. I wasn’t aware of the Albion cow