Take A Step Back

Ascend Old Pale Hill in Delamere and enjoy some great views and some unexpectedly stirring prose, writes HOWARD BRADBURY

- Howard Bradbury

INFORMATION plaques are always so dull, aren’t they? Ah, but not this plaque affixed to a slab of stone atop Old Pale Hill in Delamere Forest. It’s balm for the soul, reaching back through eons to this landscape’s creation, and back down through millennia of human endeavour, all captured in richly evocative language.

‘About 220 million years ago, right on this spot, sand drifted on the wind and danced in streams,’ says the plaque. ‘Red marl was deposited from rising tides and, after the earth’s crust split and rose up, Old Pale, the highest point of the sandstone ridge, was formed. Later ice blocks broke from retreating glaciers and melted into shining meres that shimmer and sparkle before you.’

This is stirring stuff, especially when you can read it, look down over the Cheshire plain, and then around you, into the far distance, to see the mountains of Snowdonia, the hills of the Clwydian Range and the Pennines.

‘First came bog myrtle, birch and pine,’ the plaque continues, telling of hunter-gatherers who settled this hill, leaving axes and bones behind. Then came a hill fort in the Iron Age, then the Roman occupation, when the legions used Old Pale for a signalling station. The Romans built a road from Chester to Manchester to carry salt and soldiers, the ruts gouged by their chariots still discernible in the sandstone bedrock in Delamere.