Ten Great Peak District Walks – Dovedale and Thorpe Cloud

Personal experiences

When my youngest son was five we decided that it was time for him to walk his first 10 mile walk. It was the school summer holidays and I was waiting for a free day that would be sunny enough to allow us to achieve this aim. As a wet rainy week drew to its close I thought sod it: the kids need a good thrashing round the countryside. It was a miserable wet day and I poured the kids out of the car fully clad in their waterproofs. Inside about 10 minutes (let alone ten miles), Harry my youngest was flagging, so I needed something to keep him going. I resorted to an old trick where I plagiarise someone else’s story and retell it with my three children as the main protagonists.  (In this case it was a vague version of Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo). For four (long) hours I kept the story going, though we did break for lunch in the group-shelter along the way. They loved the story and the miles flew by. Eventually we got to Dovedale itself, and the kids were immediately drawn to its beautiful clear waters and just jumped in. It didn’t matter that they got wet: they were already pretty soaked through anyway. And, for a large part of the final couple of miles they splashed all the way back to our car.