Carsington Water

Another of Paul Chandler's walks, this time a circuit of Carsington Water.  It was quite a fresh morning and supposed to be overcast, but the sun was actually shining as we set off from Sheep Wash car park, heading towards the main visitor's centre (where I had a wee break and we cracked out the bananas) and the dam.

Looking back towards the visitor's centre, through the sailing club

The southern end of the reservoir

We stopped at the building on the east coast that has all the stuff made of wood in it - sounds normal I know, but everything's made of rough cut wood, it's really cool!  I'd been there before when we were on a  Bird Race, but most of the others hadn't.

I was beginning to wonder if we were going to have a lunch break when we stopped at a couple of benches in a field near Sitch Farm.  From there, we continued away from the water's edge through woodland to a fork in the track.  Paul had turned uphill up the right-hand branch, away from the water, but there was a general revolt and the rest of us took the low road - he gave in to pressure in the end!!

We crossed the B5035 and followed the road into Carsington.  I don't think I've ever gone through the village from that direction before and there are some really nice cottages,

one of which had a very unusual lintel under the window.


A little further along the road, we came to the entrance to Hopton Hall - apparently the snowdrops are well worth a visit in February - but the wall that runs along the road is really quite spectacular.  It's known as the "crinkle crankle" wall and Niki and I speculated that the curves were to trap the sun's warmth to grow particularly delicate fruit trees.  Having done a bit of research on the derbyshireuk.net website, the wall was actually for 'forcing' fruit trees to flower and produce fruit early, so we weren't too far off.

The "crinkle crankle" wall