The South Pennines is a living landscape whose countryside, history and way of life form a remarkable patchwork for you to explore and take pleasure from, as wherever you walk the past patterns the landscape shaped by local life.

The Pennine moorland is the best hill country in Britain that elongates to broad horizons. The millstone grit rocks direct the contours of the moors and their sense of expanse and magnificence. Untamed as they may appear, these moorland landscapes are man made, as the forests were purged for fuel and grazing. Left to nature, the land would return to forest, and in places it is doing just that.

In comparison to the exposed moorland, rich wooded havens endure on remote slopes, particularly the Pennine Cloughs – steep narrow valleys cutting through the moorland plateau.

The South Pennines remains sheep farming country, as can be seen from the walled patchwork of intake fields where hill farmers during the 18^th and 19^th centuries built mile upon mile of drystone walls surrounding parcels of land from the moor. Being distinctly green in comparison to the amber of the heights, these pastures are the product of 200 years of exhausting exertion, as farmers applied lime and fertilisers to mollify the acidic soils.

As untamed as it may appear, this landscape is not uninhabited, but one shaped by indigenous activities. Examples of this can be seen in the traditional stone barns that dot the landscape, crafted in local stone and built to make use of pasture far from the farm.

It was here in the South Pennines that marked the turning point recognised as the Industrial Revolution, as hill folk progressed from farming to an industrial way of life.

For centuries, local wool, and ingenuity conceived the industry for which the South Pennines are celebrated: textiles. Termed the domestic system, this was a family business, with children combing the wool, women spinning and the men handloom weaving. On passing through the hills in the 1720’s, the historian Daniel Defoe acknowledged "these people all full of business". Several of these weavers cottages remain today in picturesque corners of the region.

It is within these hills that a rambler is offered walking at its best.