The Weird and Wonderful Woolpacks
'The Wool Packs' is the name on the Ordance Survey map for a troop of gritstone tors on the southern edge of Kinder Scout in the Derbyshire Peak District. Seen from a distance, you can understand how their smooth, rounded forms might have suggested sacks of wool in times when shepherding dominated the local economy. But a closer exploration reveals a maze of extraordinary natural sculptures, wrought by the elements over millenia to resemble human, animal or abstract forms, giving rise to the area's other, more humorous names of 'The Mushroom Garden' and 'Whipsnade' (that's a zoo, for all you non-UK residents!).
As a walker round these moors, you may know of these stones, because the rough but well trodden path that skirts the Kinder plateau passes right through the Wool Packs, to the left of the area shown above, on the way from Crowden Tower to Pym Chair. You may be intrigued by the towering monoliths on either side of the path as you pass through but you would be well rewarded by pausing here for a while if the weather permits. Take time to wander slowly through this magical maze; develop your feel for shape and texture; see with a Stone-Age eye; a sculptors perception of form. In fact, the sculptor Henry Moore came here seeking inspiration and photographed these stones himself. He once commented that 'there are universal shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off '.
The Wool Packs are fashioned from the rocks of the Kinder plateau; hard bedded Namurian sandstones called Millstone Grit, laid down 300 million years ago in the Carboniferous era by a vast river delta, disgorging its sand and quartz, eroded from ancient mountain chains, over hundreds of square miles of what is now Wales and Northern England. The Kinder grits were from the delta mouth, where fast flowing rivers dropped their heavier particles which consolidated to form a hard, coarse stone, rough to the touch and containing large crystals of milky white quartz.
The rough surface of the weathered Kinder Grits -
As the great river brought succeeding coarse and fine material down to the delta over the ages, it formed layers of what became harder and softer rock. A consequence of this is that the Grit weathers unevenly along its planes and joints as you can see in many of the sculptures in the Wool Packs, like this enigmatic Easter Island figure.
The hard, horizontal strata of Millstone Grits on the level Kinder plateau are impervious to water, making the plateau poorly drained. The surface of the moor is covered with a blanket of peat many feet thick, laid down during the warm, wet Boreal period after the last ice-age (climate change comes and goes), which supports an upland heath flora of heather and bilberry with some coarse grasses. The peat is dissected by deep drainage channels called groughs, up to three metres deep, separated by vegetation capped crests called haggs, so that what appears, from a distance, to be a flat landscape can make for very strenuous walking, over wave upon wave of soggy peat.
This monumental pair of sculptures stand in a sedge filled pool of water.
Wind and rain, ice and baking sun play their part in shaping these rocks but it is probable that ice-ages played their part too as did the slow etching of acid water leaching slowly through the peat and chemically weathering the rocks below. The peat is receding now (and has been since obsevations began), due to factors such as pollution, trampling, climate change and just the fact that the peat is not being replaced and the Wool Packs seem to be emerging, fully formed, from their shrinking blanket of peat. So were they weathered beneath the peat or were they very much like this before the peat blanket built up around them after the last ice-age? Whatever the case, slow but powerful forces have worked on these rocks to produce an astonishing range of sculptural forms.
TextureSky and shadow
The Moat Stone
The Moat Stone stands in a matte-black pool of dried peat. When I was young, it reliably sat in a shallow moat of water, like some public work of art in a city square but it has silted up in recent years and is usually dry, even after prolonged heavy rain. Perhaps the National Trust should reinstate the moat, or should nature be left to run its course and form a covering of grasses, leaving future generations to puzzle at the name?
Not surprisingly, Stone Age man hunted here, as witnessed by the arrowheads and stone tools that have been found around Kinder, but strangely there is no evidence of any settlement. Our paleolithic ancestors, who possessed a spiritual awareness of stone and landscape, would have been awed by the symbolism of the Wool Packs and the 'otherworldliness' of Kinder. It's possible they thought it too sacred a place to live.
It remains a very special place today. Inside a radius of sixty miles of Kinder live something like a quarter of the population of the UK and yet you can come up here at dawn and be alone for hours with just a few grouse and mountain hares for company and little to disturb the silence but the bubbling call of the curlew and soughing of wind amongst the stones.
The 'butt end' of the Wool Packs gives way to an apparently flat moorscape, in reality gouged by deep drainage channels or 'groughs'.
The exotic horizon of the Wool Packs overlooks the distant Pennine Way snaking down into Edale from Hog's Back.
As you might have realised by now, the Wool Packs is one of my favourite places. The area is accessible from Edale, between Sheffield and Manchester and there is a rail service between those cities that stops at Edale station, so you could opt to leave only green footprints! It's a 400 m climb to the Kinder plateau. The easiest, though longest, way is to follow the Pennine Way, Britain's first long distance national trail, diverting past Noe Stool and Pym Chair from below Hog's Back once you're out of the valley. Grindsbrook and Crowden Brook are spectacular alternatives or avoid the river valleys altogether and ascend via Grindslow Knoll.
