Helen Stephenson's Derbyshire Break Pictures - December, 2005 - Cressbrook Walk

"Monsal View", the cottage we stayed at in Cressbrook, is at the top of the village, but there's more of the village lower down and one afternoon we went for a walk down to the lower part of the village. We were really aiming to go to where we could see the Monsal Head Viaduct, but weren't sure how much further we had to walk and turned back, probably fairly close to the spot where we could have seen the viaduct. Anyway, we had an interesting walk, and by not descending any further, we had less climbing to do to get back to the cottage!

Being very much fair weather hikers, we decided to use the road rather than footpaths on our walk down the village. The village is pretty much in two parts, and the roadside between those two parts looks like this:

There were lots of interesting mossy rocky places to look at on the uphill side of the road.

Once we were most of the way down into the valley, we could look back up and see the cottage where we stayed. It's the left of the three gables in the centre back row. I also thought the trees against the sky (shown on the left) made an interesting picture.

Cressbrook Mill is the major building in the lower part of Cressbrook. It has been restored and turned into apartments. The other major building in Cressbrook is Cressbrook Hall, where the mill owners lived, but we didn't catch a glimpse of that.

Cressbrook is quite a rural village and I enjoyed the green countryside with the River Wye running through it

The field contained black Jacob's Sheep, some of which had two sets of horns. It may only have been the rams - I'm not knowledgeable about Jacob's Sheep.

I'm going to finish off this page near the bottom of Cressbrook which is where we ended our walk and turned around. On the left is the downstream view of the River Wye, while on the right is my attempt to create a waterfall picture out of a rock in the river with water rushing over it.