Pez-O-Vision's photostream  

Another trip over the Snake Pass, this time heading right over the top and then back home via Hope Valley to the South.

The Snake Pass is a 21 km (13 mile) stretch of the A57 road between Ladybower Reservoir and the town of Glossop, climbing to a height of 512 m (1680 ft) where it intersects the Pennine Way walking route.

The Pennines themselves have been called "The Backbone of England" and stretch from the Southern Derbyshire all the way to the Scottish border. They encompass three National Parks - the Peak District, the Yorkshire Dales and Northumberland National Park, with the Lake District and the North York Moors just to the West and East respectively.

Once mighty mountains formed by the slow, inexorable movement of the Earth's plates the Pennines have been worn down over millions of years by wind, rain and grinding glaciers, leaving a landscape mixing rounded valleys with vertiginous slopes cut with gulleys and runnels, lush grass and heather broken by the sharp broken bones of millstone grit or limestone scraped bare, areas of dense woodland on the lower slopes to bent-backed, wind-tortured solitary trees clutching witch-fingered at the winds higher up, to the bare bleak Brontean uplands.

I can think of few places i'd rather live.