FROM EDALE CROSS to Brown Knoll is a bare half-mile, albeit a rough and tussocky one, with views that are an ever-widening enticement to proceed. For most young northerners venturing into the outdoors for the first time, this is one of the great points of access – a gateway to a life-changing journey. Brown Knoll is an outlier from the great moorland plateau of Kinder Scout, which can be glimpsed from the ends of most of those crowded streets of Manchester, which seep and sprawl out to the west onto the Cheshire Plain.
You’d not call it pretty country, but for hill-goers
