Youlgrave to Baslow

13 September 2010 - Youlgrave to Baslow

Distance - 12.3 miles
Weather - Overcast and showery
We stayed at - The Devonshire Arms Hotel, Nether End, Baslow, Derbyshire, DE45 1SR Cost - £69.95

Today's walk should have only been around 7.8 miles, but in true spirit of the APW, we walked another 4.5 miles around Chatsworth!

We left Youlgrave via a series of lanes, the crossed the pretty River Lathkill by the ominously named Raper Lodge. We crossed using what looked like an old packhorse bridge, where the river formed a trout pond. It was a lovely spot. We then climbed up through some woodland to find ourselves on Haddon Fields. The map showed that there had been loads of activity up here - tumuli, mines and an old medieval village called Conksbury. The ground was certainly full of lumps and bumps, but it wasn't long before we were looking down on Haddon Hall, a beautiful building whose most famous owner was William Peverel, the illegitimate son of William the Conqueror.

After carefully crossing the busy A6, we entered Haddon Park and spent some time on some wet, fiddly footpaths overgrown with nettles, before we escaped to Manners Wood. This wood was really tranquil and the footpath led us across the lovely Carlton Pastures. It wasn't too long before we left New Piece Wood and found ourselves looking down at Chatsworth House. We could have used the Derwent Valley Heritage Way to walk through the Chatsworth estate, but Alistair and I had walked that way before and were keen to use a different footpath that went through the village of Edensor.

Edensor is another of those villages that got demolished and rebuilt, this time when Chatsworth Park was landscaped. Each pretty house is different, except the woodwork on all of them is painted Chatsworth Blue. As you can see, I was spurred on by the prospect of a cream tea, but sadly the tearooms were shut!

Good news was that when we reached Chatsworth, not only were their tearooms open, but there was also a sculpture exhibition on in the grounds. As we had our waterproofs, the ever present showers did nothing to curb our enthusiasm and we hunted down every last exhibit! At one stage we were joined by an extremely tame pheasant, who wandered around with us, eventually fixing us with a beady glare, when he realised we didn't have any food to feed him with. On the way from Chatsworth to Nether End and our hotel, there were further art installations, including willow woven around dry stone walls.

Our hotel was really lovely, it had just been refurbished and the low price was an introductory offer to tempt people to book and see how good it was.

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