A six-mile Castleton loop: Mam Tor, the Great Ridge and a last pub tea

Park at Castleton Visitor Centre (grid reference SK 151 829; Ordnance Survey Explorer OL1 is the sheet) and this is a loop that will give you most of what the Peak District does well before lunch. Mam Tor, the broken road, the whole Great Ridge, and the slow drop back into the limestone village where an actual fire will be lit if the afternoon cools. Six and a half miles by the time you have added the trig-point detour. About three hours if you walk at a normal pace and do not sit at the top too long.

The broken road, and why Mam Tor is called the shivering mountain

Leave the visitor centre and walk west along the A6187 for 200 yards, then take the signed footpath that climbs through the pastures toward Mam Nick. This brings you onto the A625 at the famous bit: the road that is no longer there. The old pass route collapsed in landslides between 1952 and 1979, was finally abandoned, and the tarmac is now a ribbon of mid-twentieth-century road cambering vertically out of the hillside at angles that make no sense. You can still follow it as a path. The Visit Peak District notes on the broken road are worth a read before you go if you want the engineering context.

Mam Tor is called the shivering mountain because the Edale Shales that make up its east face are weak, poorly cemented layers of mudstone and siltstone that slip, slowly, almost continuously. The whole 517-metre lump is sliding east at perhaps a centimetre a year. The quartz grit sitting on top is the harder cap that keeps the summit intact; take that away and the hill would be considerably lower within a few thousand years. The British Geological Survey has public datasets on the slip rate if you want the figures.

The broken road is the best lesson in why this slide matters. Walk the switchback section slowly. In places the tarmac has moved two metres laterally since it was last resurfaced; you can see the Cat's Eye reflectors still embedded, now pointing at the sky rather than at the traffic they once directed.

Up Mam Tor itself, and the ironworks underfoot

From the broken road the path climbs stone steps — put in by the National Trust in the 2010s to stop the hill being loved to death by boots — to the summit trig at 517 metres. On a clear day the view is one of the Peak's reliable showstoppers: Edale directly below, Kinder Scout's dark bulk to the north, the Derwent reservoirs out east, Lose Hill at the end of the ridge you are about to walk, and the grey sprawl of Manchester as a shimmer forty miles west.

The summit is older than the National Trust's steps imply. The hilltop is ringed by the remains of an Iron Age hillfort, and inside it are two Bronze Age round barrows that pre-date the fort by about 1,500 years. The barrows look like unremarkable hummocks now; the fort shows as a bank-and-ditch encircling the whole summit plateau. Historic England's list entry gives the archaeological detail. You walk over 3,000 years of human effort to reach that view.

The Great Ridge, Hollins Cross and the pass that mattered

From Mam Tor's summit follow the paved path east and down to the col of Hollins Cross at 395 metres. This is a plain stone cairn on a saddle — modest, almost dismissable — but it marks the pass that connected Edale to the Hope Valley for the best part of a thousand years. Edale had no church of its own until 1633; the dead were carried over Hollins Cross on a coffin route to be buried in Castleton. In bad weather the coffin bearers would shelter in the lee of the Mam Tor fort walls. Local folklore has it that you can still see the ghost of a coffin party on the ridge in November mists; local folklore says that of most things.

Past Hollins Cross the ridge narrows and the walking is the best section of the day. Back Tor at 428 metres is the little rocky pyramid that makes the skyline from Hope; the path hooks around to its west and gives you Lose Hill (476 metres) as the final climb of the walk. From Lose Hill summit on a December afternoon you can watch the light fade over the Derwent dams in a way that explains why people have been walking this ridge recreationally since the Victorian railways reached Edale.

Down to the Hope Valley, and the way back

Descend from Lose Hill on the clear path south-east toward Townhead Bridge. The path drops through rough pasture and picks up a farm track that leads to the lane into Hope. If you want to add half a mile and avoid tarmac, take the signed footpath on your right as the track levels and follow the field edges west past Losehill Hall (now a National Trust training centre). This brings you out at Hope Cross, meet the Peakland Way, and on into the lanes north of Castleton.

Alternately — and this is the version we tend to walk — from the col below Lose Hill take the clear path south-west toward Castleton directly, descending through limestone pasture, past the strange grassy mounds that mark an old lead-mining district, and into the village from the north. You will be back at Ye Olde Nag's Head within an hour of leaving the summit. For a route-card of the same loop with elevation profile, the Walking Britain entry for the Great Ridge is accurate and up to date.

Where the walk really ends

Ye Olde Nag's Head sits at the top of Cross Street; the fire is usually lit from early November to late March, the slow-roast beef sandwich comes with a small pot of horseradish that does the walking afterwards, and the back room has a view onto the limestone lane that climbs toward Peveril Castle. If the Nag's is full, the George on Castle Street is the other serious contender; both do a proper Peak District tea.

Peveril Castle itself is worth the small climb from the village if you still have an hour of light. The ruined Norman keep sits above Peak Cavern; the English Heritage page gives opening times and the small admission charge. You get a quite different view of Mam Tor from there than you did from its summit, and a sense of why a Norman lord chose to build on that limestone knuckle.

What a late-November walk feels like

By mid-November the ridge is already quieter than in summer. You might share Mam Tor's summit with three other parties on a clear Saturday; on a Tuesday you will have Hollins Cross and most of the walk to yourself. The light is low all day, which flattens the view east but makes the limestone and gritstone of the Hope Valley glow a buttery colour for the hour before sunset. Bring a flask. The pub tea is the best reward on the walk but the thermos at the top of Lose Hill is the one you remember.