How Manchester became Britain’s newest hiking hotspot

Where can you explore unspoiled, unpeopled moorlands, a ravine that evokes Utah’s cowboy country, and one of the UK’s highest bodies of water?

That the answer is Manchester will be no surprise to natives – especially if they hail from the eastern side of the great city. For it is here that the Lancashire plain shoots upward like a keen-winged kestrel to challenge the Pennine-hogging counties of Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

A new 200-mile circular footpath, the GM Ringway, aims at opening up this landscape to the uninitiated, along with the rest of the diverse terrains and trackways that lie around the edges of Greater Manchester.

I confess: my expectations, on catching the train to walk Section 8 (Broadbottom to Greenfield) of the GM Ringway, were not soaringly high.

On paper – or rather, on the website – it looked quite promising. Almost 12 miles long and with 551 metres (1,807 feet) of ascent – the highest of the 20 stages, and deemed “challenging” – it hinted at a decent day out. But on drives I’d generally found Saddleworth Moor – through which I would be hiking – bleak and forbidding, an impression not helped by its notorious associations with the Moors murders.

But I was enlightened and uplifted almost as soon as the walk began. Broadbottom, though only a couple of miles from Hattersley in Hyde and the M67, is a pleasant little village, with gritstone cottages and rural views. When I had passed through Manchester that morning, the city had felt cold and unfriendly. But here, with the sun up, warming the grasslands, and clear blue skies, the conditions were ideal for hiking.

Though only 13 miles from Deansgate in central Manchester, I had a foot in the northwestern corner of the Peak District National Park. Once I had made the first short climb out to open country, there were huge views. To the southwest was the squiggle of road going over Snake Pass. A little way above that was the Longdendale Valley, a deep, curved cut in the Pennines through which run a chain of six reservoirs and the Woodhead Pass.

The GM Ringway – created by rambler and Manchester resident Andrew Read, who says the project started as a hobby about 15 years ago – has been designed with urban residents in mind. Manchester, even in its post-industrial state, is still a notoriously polluted city and its central areas are short of green spaces. The walks on the GM Ringway link to train, bus and tram services. They take in milltowns, nature reserves, canals, posh Cheshire towns and the kinds of Dark Peak uplands I was heading for: exposed moorlands, marshes, peat bogs and millstone grit sandstone escarpments.

I thought of my walk as an oblique homage to the Mancunian ramblers who campaigned for access on the Kinder Scout Trespass in 1932. Ewan McColl, who was at the protest, composed ‘The Manchester Rambler’ to honour his fellow pastoral pedestrians. I was also in classic Northern television and film country: The League of Gentlemen and Last of the Summer Wine on my right, Yanks and Coronation Street on my left. The posh houses looked just the sort soap stars would retire to and, indeed, Tony Booth had lived in Broadbottom (and Elsie Tanner had married there).

I walked through farms and fields, up an ancient coach road off the heaving A57, along sheep tracks and well-used local footpaths. I got lost a couple of times – the GM Ringway waymarks were generally well spread out but a few places were unsigned. One mis-step took me up to the Derbyshire county border sign at Glossop. I saw a hawk a-hunting, a skipping jay, a dozen skittish black grouse, panicked pheasants, lots of tits and finches. There were also the big, noisy birds descending into Manchester Airport – once known as Ringway, of course. It’s good to see the name reappropriated by a carbon-cutting, health-giving project.

On the wide-open moors, I turned round to get my bearings and remind myself where I was. On one high spot, Manchester’s ever-expanding cluster of towers came into view, the silver blocks of Manc-hattan peeping above the tobacco-brown winter heather. Along the Manchester-Derbyshire border, Ogden Brook ran down the bottom of a deep, steep-sided valley. Into the clough plunged frothing waterfalls, well fed by recent rains.

A yomp over flattish moor followed, with the “path” degenerating into a pond-filled line of black peat through dead vegetation. Approaching Chew Reservoir – at 1,600 feet, the highest man-made body of water in the land when completed in 1912 – I stopped to have tea and butties and enjoy the views, and the peace. I met only a dozen people over four hours.

The final two miles cut through a boulder field and the most dramatic rock formations yet – the canyon of the Chew Valley, over which looms a jagged ridge known as the Indian’s Head and two opposing summits known as Alphin Pike and Alderman Hill – two giants who fell out over a beautiful water nymph. At the bottom is a magical patch of woodland where the bare trees had tentacular branches and the stone walls were covered in bright green moss. The sun turned the north facing slopes a burnished bronze colour. The jagged clifftops and surreal forms, in spooky shadow, made me think of Monument Valley.

Greenfield station was a couple of miles from the reservoir and lay up its own steep little slope. My calves, by this stage, were stiff, my gait wooden. The walk had definitely been “challenging”. But rewarding and eye-opening too.

Three other great Manchester walks

Salford Quays Circular: Urban amble

Andrew Read and his team have devised a set of taster walks for those not ready to take on 10-12 miles of open country. This 4.8-mile step-free walk explores the Salford Quays waterfront, one of the North West’s best-known urban redevelopment zones. Architectural statements of the modern kind abound, including the striking Imperial War Museum North, designed by US architect Daniel Libeskind, The Lowry and the Blue Peter Garden. 

Amid the new builds you’ll find the waterside paths along the Manchester Ship Canal and the basins of Salford Quays, and the Grade I-listed Ordsall Hall, a 15th-century manor house surrounded by Elizabethan gardens

Wigan to Leigh: Canals and Flashes

Though a little over ten miles, this stage connects Wigan and Leigh along very flat terrain, including sections of canal towpath on a branch of the Leeds and Liverpool, and taking in the famous Wigan Pier and several mills, the Three sisters country park and England’s newest National Nature Reserve: the ‘Flashes of Wigan and Leigh’. Flashes are lakes formed by mining subsidence, and attract a lot of water fowl.

Bromley Cross to Blackrod: Winter Hill ascent

At 13.4 miles, this is the longest of the 20 walks suggested on the GM Ringway website, which describes it as “the climax of the whole GM Ringway as it includes an ascent of Winter Hill”. Other towns may bridle at Bolton’s being the best walk, but there are some great stops along the way – including the pretty village of Barrow Bridge, Wilderswood’s “semi-ancient” woodland, the little-known Tiger’s Clough waterfall and, to cap it all, the top of one of the North West’s most iconic hills, with its towering TV antenna.