DISCOVER Your next favourite place
Meet five more sensational locations that would love to become Your Next Favourite Place…
HOW IS THIS NOT ON A MAP?
It’s baffling that the Trinnacle isn’t marked on the OS map – but that just makes it all the more exciting to find.
HOW CAN ANY 7½ mile walk that contains one of the most impressive rock formations in the country, a scramble, a waterfall, an impressive edge AND an ice cream van can fail to be most people’s favourite? It beats us. Granted, Dove Stone Reservoir isn’t exactly unheard of, but if you park at the Binn Green car park you can slip away from any crowds and walk past Yeoman Hey and Greenfield reservoirs to head up Greenfield Brook to Birchen Clough.
During dry weather and times of year it’s a terrific scrambly walk up the streambed and waterfall which, with care, provides the finest way for an adventurous walker to gain the moor’s great plateau. A Kinder-like edge walk ensues, leading east and south and offering great spectacle and space. Chief among sights – the Trinnacle, inexplicably omitted from OS maps (search grid reference SE037048 to locate it) but aptly-named and truly amazing. If you’ve a head for heights climbing on top is deceptively doable – but you don’t need to do it to appreciate its awesome situation – out-thrust in all that space with Greenfield Reservoir its distant blue foil.
The walk south along the edge is one of named rocks and views to your right across the gulf cut into Saddleworth Moor which accommodates the reservoirs and to your left its great domed, deserted top. It’s a quite splendid way to work up that special kind of combined hunger and thirst that can only really be slaked by a Trinnacleaping Mr Whippy in the handily located Dove Stone car park, a sticky-fingered kilometre from the start.
THE RHINOGYDD
Climb the Roman Steps and meet Eryri’s rough and ready rapscallions…
ALTHOUGH MANY THOUSANDS flock to Snowdonia (Eryri) National Park each year, the vast majority limit their hillwalking goals to just a handful of ranges. The Rhinog mountains are NOT one of those ranges. Recognisable as a series of knobbly lumps on the seaward side of the A470 north of Dolgellau, their relatively diminutive stature and fearsome reputation combine to keep the masses away.
Terrain-wise, the range is as close as Wales gets to the Scottish Highlands, being regarded as steep, rocky, unforgiving, boggy and pathless. But this infamy isn't entirely fair. For starters, there are paths along many of the main routes that help you avoid the hairiest bits. In fact, yo
