Chrome Hill Circular Walk (24th Mar 2019)

Spring 2019 is officially here, and we intend to make the most of the weekends. DiscoDeb has just completed and passed her Low-Land Leader course, and we are now looking to do the Mountain-Leader course over the next five years. This is of course more demanding than the last one and we will have to accomplish some quite extreme walks / climbs!! Hence, this walk up along and over Chrome Hill, which; I might add; was my brothers’ idea. So, you can understand the trepidation of taking on one of his walks, after his last suggestion, which was the walk over Flash and the BULL encounter!

We set off along the Buxton Road (A53) and took a right by the Winking Man pub, headed straight through Longnor until we dipped down into Crowdecote where we took a sharp left along to East Sterndale. We parked up on the left as we entered the village and donned our walking gear.

It was a beautiful spring morning, but it had a biting cold wind and we were all dithering for a while. We walked past the Quiet Woman pub which was like something out of American Werewolf, and I’m sure I heard ‘Don’t stray from the path…’ haha.

We took a left off the road through a gate and headed across a field to the fantastic view of the ‘Dragon’s Back’ (Chrome Hill). Chrome Hill looks like the back of a sleeping dinosaur or dragon and is quite magnificent. It looks very glacial and quite daunting. You don’t really appreciate just how steep and high the walk is going to be from this view.

I think the photographs I took do it more justice than my typing, but suffice to say, we walked up, over and along the top of the beast. It was incredibly windy, and I mean WINDY, like a wind tunnel! There were parts of it where you had to scramble down the side of it (You could take an easier route, but it would still be taxing).

I class this walk as medium to high but the reward of the views and the feeling of doing something quite strenuous is very rewarding.

Enjoy the route, stats and photos below.


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