Over thousands of years the River Dove has carved its way through a massive limestone plateau to form a spectacular V shaped gorge, with Staffordshire on the west bank and Derbyshire on the east. Much of the dale is in the ownership of the National Trust and was declared a National Nature Reserve in the autumn of 2006.
Michael Jordan makes the two and a half mile journey with four people who know the area well; a geologist, historian, a fisherman and an ecologist.
The geologist is Ian Sutton of the University of Nottingham. Around 350 million years ago the whole of what is now the Peak District was covered with a shallow tropical sea which supported many sea creatures including corals. The skeletons of these make up the limestone. At the end of each of the Ice Ages vast quantities of melting water, carrying rock debris, cut through the layers of limestone to produce the deep sided gorge. Erosion also caused the formation of the spectacular limestone pillars seen all the way along the walk, like Dove Castle, The Twelve Apostles, Tissington Spires, Ilam Rock and Pickering Tor. There are fossils in abundance especially on the steps leading up to Lovers Leap. Water erosion formed caves, which were left dry as the river cut an even deeper course.
The caves in Dove Dale were used as shelters as far back as the Bronze Age. According to historian Tom Bates early farmers used caves such as Reynards Cave to bury their dead. By Roman times other caves, like Dove Holes, were used as shelters by shepherds. The name of the limestone promontory, Lovers Leap, is supposed to have originated from the story of a young woman who, on hearing that her young man had been killed in the Napoleonic Wars, climbed to the top of the promontory and threw herself off. Her billowing skirts helped her to safety, which was just as well, since her young man had not been killed and had returned to see her.
Malcolm Cunningham of the has been fishing trout and grayling on the River Dove for many years. The river is a famous ‘trout stream’ and was the inspiration for Izaak Walton’s book ‘The Compleat Angler’. The river banks are teeming with wildlife, with a dipper flitting by as Malcolm and Michael’s constant companion.
Dovedale Ashwood has been designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest as one of the best Carboniferous limestone woodlands in the country. Ben le Bas of takes Michael up the steepest sides of the gorge to show him how the ash trees are growing in the thinnest of soils and although are quite wizened-looking, are probably less than 200 years old.
His walk completed, Michael looks back on a remarkable valley withinÌý Around every corner there is something new to look at and perhaps what is even more fascinating is that although the limestone formations seem to be timeless they are in fact in a continual process of change. In say five hundred or a thousand years time, the view will be different again. What we have now is just a snap shot in time.
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