Did you know there are three mountains in the Peak District?

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this National Park was just a collection of peaty moorland, especially if you were gazing north from the summit of Mam Tor or The Great Ridge. None of it looks particularly ‘mountainous’.

According to the Government, any terrain over 600 meters is, by default, mountainous. And if you look at an Ordnance Survey map of the Kinder Plateau for example, you will see that almost all of it is at or above this altitude.

A popular challenge for hikers in the Peak District is to go mountain ‘peak bagging’, which means to summit Kinder Scout, Bleaklow and Higher Shelf Stones. The last one does not have a trig point marking it’s summit but it is marked on the map as over 600 meters.

To save hours of searching through OS maps, John and Anne Nuttall published two guidebooks called ‘The Mountains of England and Wales’ – and thus the idea of completing ‘The Nuttall’s was born. I have copies of these guidebooks and there is a small section for the Peak District, with suggested routes.

I made a plan with one of the routes, and set out yesterday to summit the remaining Nuttall’s of the Dark Peak.

The first half went very well, apart from one massively boggy section on the way up to Bleaklow. I wouldn’t like to hike down it, put it that way!

The second half of the route was a crazy path through yet more boot stealing bogs and ground that looks solid but definitely isn’t. Reduced to a crawl of a pace (1km an hour) I managed to survive and made my way to a third summit (not a Nuttall) with pleasing views across to Manchester.