Rochdale Way Day 1

Shaw to Heywood

Distance: 18 miles on route, 22 miles total

Cloudy, occasional sun, occasional drizzle

Skylarks, geese, giant sheep, deer's bum, egret, siskin

We joined the Rochdale Way in Dunwood Park above Jubilee Bends and zigzagged up through the trees to the exit at the top of the hill towards Whitfield Farm. It has been wet the last couple of days and the ground was waterlogged, the track was churned up by vehicles and the mud was quite slippy. Up o the top of the hill with the sheep things were easier going. We have walked various bits of the Rochdale Way over the years, but never the whole thing. The one section that always stuck with me was a very, very boggy section of the path between two dry-stone walls on the moors. We came down off the hill here. It wasn't that bad. Either my tolerance of bog has changed, or perhaps I was just wearing the wrong shoes that day. 

The route goes along the length of Thornham Lane but doesn't visit Tandle Hill, we thought about making a detour but today's route was long enough as it is. A bit along the canal and we were at Hopwood Hall (college and university centre, according to the sign) where there were quite a lot of students running around. Hopwood Hall has had a varied history, from alleged visits from Guy Fawkes to more recently (and plausibly) Black Sabbath.

After a loop around the hall's woodland nature reserve we walked through Middleton town centre down to Alkrington Woods, passing the chemical works and Alkrington Hall which is now private residences, and up a lane around the back of a housing estate that was quite busy and had no pavements. We passed some big fences of a driving range and crossed a massive empty car park which is used for car boot sales and markets. At the park community hub (which was closed) we had a sit down for tea and snacks.

We walked around the school and left the pavement at Birch into farmland, around Top'o'th'Hill towards Siddal Farm. It was here that things started to get difficult. We negotiated a tied up gate, accompanied by some very friendly cows, and used a gap at the side of another gate which had been shored up with a piece of broken stile to get into the next field. At the place where the stile should have been was a deep hole in the ground with running water down it. We left the field over a rickety (but at least present) stile into a farmyard while being barked at by large dogs. There was more confusion and climbing across the next few fields, where the stiles are missing, the gates padlocked and fences 'repaired' with barbed wire and twigs. We made it out alive, at a half decent stile with visible waymarker signs on it.

The next section took us into a golf course, where the Rochdale Way arrow pointed us up a path that was completely overgrown with brambles. Determined not to be put off, we headed up it, emerging at the 3rd Tee where the footpath abruptly stopped. There was a waymarker post in the middle of a bog/flood/river just down from the tee, which was a bog too far, so we skirted around the edge of the rough hoping that no one shouted at us, and rejoined the footpath on the other side. The footpath then went straight up the fairway and round the back of the driving range before going up the lane to the main road. We walked up to the bus stop, ignoring the amused looks from other walkers at the state of our mud splattered legs.