EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

There's almost nothing to EDALE except for a couple of pubs, a scattering of local B&Bs and a train station, and it's this isolation which is immediately appealing. Walkers arrive in droves throughout the year to set off on the 250-mile Pennine Way across England's backbone to Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border; its starting-point is signposted from outside the Old Nag's Head at the head of the village.

An excellent circular walk (9 miles; 5hr) uses the first part of the Pennine Way, leading up onto the bleak gritstone, table-top of Kinder Scout (2088ft), below which the village cowers. The route cuts west from the Nag's Head along a packhorse route once used by Cheshire's salt exporters. From the campsite and camping barn at Upper Booth Farm (tel 01433/670250), you climb the Jacob's Ladder path continuing half a mile west to the carved medieval Edale Cross . Backtracking a couple of hundred yards, the Pennine Way branches north along the broken plateau edge to Kinder Downfall , Derbyshire's highest cascade. This was the site of the Kinder Scout Trespass of 1932, when dozens of protesters walked onto unused but private land, five subsequently receiving prison sentences. It was the turning-point in the fight for public access to open moorland, leading, three years later, to the formation of the Ramblers' Association. At Kinder Downfall turn east then southeast across the often boggy peat towards the wind-sculpted Wool Pack rocks, then across to the eastern rim, where a path to the south along Grindslow Knoll and down into Edale avoids Grindsbrook Clough, the highly eroded route of the original Pennine Way.