The Millennium Walkway

As forecast, the weather today has been lovely. Oh, it was really quite cold when I got off the train in Whaley Bridge at around 08:30 and for the first few miles I was beginning to regret not having brought a thicker waterproof jacket to wear over my fleece.  But by 10:30 the fleece had gone and it was just a short-sleeved t-shirt.  And by then I was regretting not having worn my pair of hiking trousers where I can unzip the bottoms of the legs and convert them into shorts.  It really was that warm.
 
I had done about 75% of today’s walk before, but as separate walks; today I tried to join up the best bits.  In essence it was the Goyt Way (Whaley Bridge to Marple) and then the Etherow-Goyt Valley Way into Stockport – but with some intentional diversions and two unintentional diversions, i.e. I got lost!  The problem is that if I want to read a map I need my glasses, and that’s a nuisance.  So it is easier to find a GPS track for the walk and follow that on your phone –easy – except that many of these tracks only have a grid reference logged every minute or so (if not longer) so a path may appear to go straight ahead, when in fact it backtracks.  I always record my walks with a GPS tracker at 1 second intervals, so I then know exactly where I went wrong by comparing with the map back home, and if I want to do the walk again it is very, very easy.
 
My feet do ache a bit – it’s a lovely walk but it was 17.2 miles.  Once again I chopped off the bit that skirts around Stockport at the end – it would have added another 2 or 3 miles and I knew I’d done enough by then.
 
But the problem – what do I use for today’s blip?  I have been to so many places today that there is too much to choose from.  But I suppose it might be fitting to use a photo of the Millennium Walkway at New Mills.  Before this was built, in the year 2000 surprisingly enough, you had to climb out of the gorge and then drop back down again.  New Mills is an amazing place.  If you drive around it you know you are going over bridges quite a lot, but you see nothing of what lurks below.  There are two gorges (the rivers Sett and the Goyt) and way up above you is New Mills (see extra photo).