Locations: Mam Tor or Shivering Mountain, Derbyshire

Mam Tor is a prominent hill in the Derbyshire Peak District, part of the ridge forming the southern rim of the Edale valley (see earlier post on Edale).

Map link: Mam Tor

Mam Tor is a distinctive dome-shaped hill, standing 517 metres (over 1600 feet) above sea level and about 350 metres (about 1000 feet) above the valley floor, and with an impressively steep south-eastern face (marked with crag symbols on the map, and visible on the right of the picture below).



Mam Tor from the south

Mam Tor is also known locally as ‘Shivering Mountain’, because of the frequent landslips on its unstable south-eastern face. A huge landslide occurred on this slope several thousand years ago, forming the steep scarp just below the summit.



Mam Tor from the east, showing the steep upper part of the south-eastern face

Lower down the slope, the debris from this ancient landslide hasn’t stabilised yet. Several attempts have been made to build a Sheffield to Manchester through-road across the lower slope, and the hill has shrugged off every one of them. In 1979 the highway authority gave up and closed the road permanently. You can see the hairpin line of the road in the photo below, running below the steep section of the face.



Mam Tor from the east, showing the line of the defunct A625 road

The British Geological Survey has a brief description of the landslip and some impressive photographs (click on the links to Figures 2-5) of the wrecked A625 road.

The summit of Mam Tor forms a nearly flat plateau, and was the location of what must have been an impressively-sited early Iron Age hill fort. A double line of ramparts encircled the top of the hill (marked as earthworks on the map linked above), still clearly visible today.



Hill fort ramparts on Mam Tor, visible as two near-horizontal parallel lines near the top

‘Mam’ is of course instantly recognisable as a variant of ‘Mum’, Mom’, ‘Mama’, all forms of early infant sounds used to signify ‘mother’. In Scottish Gaelic place names ‘Mam’ also appears as a place name element referring to rounded hills (e.g. the west Highland mountain range called the Mamores); it is sometimes translated as ‘breast-shaped hill’, which has obvious connections with the ‘mother’ meaning.

‘Tor’ means a rocky peak, a steep hill, a prominent rock or a pile of rocks. ‘Tor’ occurs commonly in place names in the south-west of England (Glastonbury Tor being a famous example), predominantly in Devon and Cornwall, and in the Derbyshire Peak District. According to the Oxford English Dictionary it appears in Old English in a charter from 847 and may be one of the few borrowings from Brittonic (ancestor of modern Welsh) into Old English. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it is cognate with modern Welsh ‘twr’, Old Welsh ‘twrr’, meaning ‘heap, pile’, and with Gaelic ‘torr’, meaning a steep or conical hill or a mound. I wonder if it is also related to the Latin ‘turris’, origin of ‘tower’.

So the name ‘Mam Tor’ means something like ‘Hill of the Mother’ (if you take the ‘Mam’ element to mean ‘mother’), or ‘rounded hill’ (if you take the ‘Mam’ element to refer to the shape of the hill), or a bit of both. If the name meant ‘mother’, it is possible to speculate that it may indicate some cultural significance. Possibly the hill was regarded as a central place for the people living in the surrounding areas, perhaps considered to be the ‘mother’ of their lands or fortunes. It may have had connections with a female supernatural force (a sort of ‘Mother Nature’?) or a female deity (a ‘mother goddess’). Kathleen Herbert imagined a Mother Goddess cult centred on the Mam Tor area in the mid-seventh century, in her novel Ghost in the Sunlight. The Iron Age hill fort is consistent with the hill having been regarded as an important place in prehistory.

By the time of Paths of Exile, set in the early seventh century, the Iron Age hill fort on Mam Tor would have long since gone out of use. However, the ramparts may well still have been recognisable, and the hill may still have had some local significance. Although I have not gone as far as Kathleen Herbert’s interpretation of it as a major pagan cult centre, it features in Paths of Exile as the traditional site of a feast held to mark the onset of winter.

Both elements of the name Mam Tor have cognates in Celtic languages*. There are several more ‘Tor’ place names in the Derbyshire Peak District; I can think of Higger Tor near Hathersage, Upper Tor and Nether Tor on Kinder Scout, Dovestone Tor, Back Tor and White Tor on Derwent Edge, and Back Tor on the ridge east of Mam Tor, and that’s not an exhaustive list. The occurrence of ‘Tor’ place names is one of the reasons why I imagined the language spoken in the area in the early seventh century to have been a Brittonic language (an ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton).

*Celtic languages are generally divided into two groups; Q-Celtic (Scottish and Irish Gaelic) and P-Celtic (Welsh, Cornish, Breton).

Locations: Edale, Derbyshire

On the far side another blind valley bit into the hills, and beyond it the fitful moon gleamed on a line of dark cliffs crowned by rocky teeth.
“That’s Kyndyr!” Lilla exclaimed. “Luned says there’s no way over it!”
Severa laughed, as clear and buoyant as the skylark’s song. “There is if you’re with me! That valley is Combe’s hafod, and I spent seven summers retrieving stray sheep from Kyndyr.”
[…]
“… a lung-bursting climb up an ever-steepening rocky valley that pierced the hillside like a sword slash…”

--Paths of Exile, chapter 14


“another blind valley bit into the hills”
View over the Edale valley from the south


Larger version of same photograph

This photograph was taken from the middle of the ridge that forms the southern rim of the Edale valley, and you can see how the uplands form a ring around the head of the valley, enclosing it. You can also see this from the contours in the topographical map link. There’s a road into Edale at the mouth of the valley in the east, but the only way out of the head of the valley is over the hills.



“a line of dark cliffs...”
Close-up of one of the gritstone edges overlooking Edale



“...crowned by rocky teeth”
Close-up view of one of the tors



“...retrieving stray sheep from Kyndyr”
Lamb perched on a ledge halfway up a tor on Kinder Scout, bleating piteously for someone to come and help it down.
(Yes, it did get down safely. After ten minutes or so the mother ewe arrived, they bleated back and forth a few times, and then the mother showed the lamb how to jump across to another ledge and then down to safety, probably the way it got up there in the first place).



“an ever-steepening rocky valley”
The upper part of Grindsbrook Clough. ‘Clough’ is used in Northern England for a steep or narrow upland valley. This is the route taken by the fugitive party in Paths of Exile as they climb out of Edale and onto Kinder Scout.


‘Combe’ in Paths of Exile is modern Hope (see map link at end of post). Hope is derived from Old English ‘hop’, meaning a small enclosed valley, particularly one that overhangs the main valley. In the early seventh century as imagined in Paths of Exile, the language spoken in upland Derbyshire is Brittonic (an ancestor of modern Welsh and Breton). So I translated the Old English ‘hop’ into its approximate Brittonic equivalent, ‘combe’ (spelled ‘coomb’ in Cumbria), also meaning a small upland valley.

‘Kyndyr’ is Kinder Scout. See earlier posts for pictures of the Kinder Scout plateau and some of its gritstone tors.

‘Combe’s hafod’ in Paths of Exile is modern Edale (see map link), the valley immediately south of Kinder Scout and separated from the Hope valley by the long upland ridge of Mam Tor and Lose Hill. Several of the hamlets in Edale have the name ‘Booth’, a Norse word meaning temporary shelter (related to modern Scottish ‘bothy’). I have imagined that Edale in the seventh century was used by the inhabitants of Hope for summer grazing in the valley and on the slopes of the surrounding hills. ‘Hafod’ is a Welsh term meaning something like ‘summer farm’, roughly equivalent to the Norwegian ‘saeter’ or Scottish shieling.


Map links
Scroll around to see how Hope and Edale relate to each other
Hope
Edale

Locations: Derbyshire’s gritstone tors

Gritstone tors on Kinder Scout


Gritstone is the characteristic rock of the ‘Dark Peak’ landscape, extending in an arc around the west, north and east of the Derbyshire Peak District. As its name implies, it’s a hard coarse-grained sandstone formed from grit laid down on the bed of a vast river delta around 300 million years ago (long before the dinosaurs, to put the timescale into context). Gritstone is hard, abrasive and very strong. Its sharp-edged crystals make it ideal for grinding grain, hence its alternative name of Millstone Grit, and its strength makes it a sturdy building stone.

In the landscape, gritstone forms high windswept moorlands of heather and blanket bog, vertical cliffs called Edges, and strangely sculptured rock outcrops called tors. The tors are among the most atmospheric features of the gritstone moorlands of the Dark Peak, carved by wind, rain and frost into weird shapes.

Part of Paths of Exile is set in the Dark Peak in the Upper Derwent Valley (see map link at the bottom of the post), where the gritstone tors on the high moorlands make for a distinctive landscape.

[…]
All along the eastern horizon, an irregular row of boulders and tors marked the edge of a slightly higher plateau. The rock was dark grey in colour and curiously rounded, like stacked cushions or piled cakes of bread. At close quarters it was coarse-grained and abrasive, full of large rounded pebbles and occasional tiny flecks that caught the light and sparkled in the sun. […] A short distance away to the south, a gritstone tor reared its stepped profile against the bright sky.
[…]

--Paths of Exile, chapter 11



“...like stacked cushions or piled cakes of bread”
If you look at the topographical map in the link below, you’ll see that one of the tors on Derwent Edge is called ‘The Cakes of Bread’.



“...reared its stepped profile against the sky”



“...coarse-grained and abrasive...”
Close-up of gritstone. You can see the pebbles embedded in the rock; presumably they were washed down the rivers that formed that long-ago delta and deposited along with the sand and grit. The pebbles vary between rocks in different locations. These are quite small, a centimetre (half an inch) or so across, but some of the tors elsewhere on the moors contain pebbles the size of a walnut, and where they have weathered out the tors are riddled with round cavities like a Swiss cheese.


Gritstone tors can weather into fantastic shapes, resembling a natural sculpture park – or, for a (fictional) group of exhausted fugitives familiar with tales of man-eating monsters who “walk nightlong / The misty moorland”, something altogether more intimidating:


Who says trolls are mythical?

Gritstone tors like this one were part of the inspiration for including beliefs in trolls in Paths of Exile. For a discussion on troll-like creatures in Old English myths, see my earlier post on Eotens.


Map link
Upper Derwent Valley. The reservoirs were not there in 605 AD!

Locations: Kinder Scout, Derbyshire

All the specific locations in Paths of Exile are real places. The photographs in this post show some of the locations for this scene, set on Kinder Scout on the plateau crossing between the head of Grindsbrook Clough on the southern edge and Kinder Downfall on the western edge.

See the map links at the bottom of the post for topographical maps and satellite images.

First light found them in a bleak wilderness of peat. More precisely, at the bottom of a twisting channel where an icy stream had carved its way through the peat to the underlying gritstone. The whole plateau top was riven with these channels, like the cracks in a giant cowpat, and they were deep enough that even a tall man could not see over the sides.
[...]
In the distance ahead, the half-light showed two giant grey shapes standing guard on either side of the channel. Ashhere supposed they were trolls, or ancient standing stones of malevolent power, but he was too tired to care. He plodded on, and with diminishing distance and growing light the two shapes resolved into a pair of gritstone tors. Beyond these sentinels the channel made a wide bend to the left and the stream gathered volume to become an infant river running in a sandy bed. A little further on, and it threaded through a jumble of gritstone boulders and plunged over a rocky fall to vanish in a dark hollow scooped out of the plateau side.

Ashhere stared at it, uncomprehending. His first thought was that they had wandered around in a circle and come to the ravine they had climbed up in the night, but he did not remember a waterfall. And slowly he realised that the sun was rising behind him, and the blue-shadowed plains rolling away to a distant horizon were in the west.

“You have crossed Kyndyr,” said Severa’s voice, behind him.

--Paths of Exile, chapter 15




"The whole plateau top was riven with these channels..."

The Kinder Scout plateau is a more or less flat slab of gritstone overlain by a thick layer of peat. Water trickling over the surface eventually cuts channels in the peat, known locally as groughs. If you click on the 1:25,000 scale map link, you'll see the groughs shown as a network of fine blue lines covering the plateau. This is what they look like in real life.






"...deep enough that even a tall man could not see over the sides."

The man in the photograph is six feet two inches tall. To see out of the groughs you have to scramble up the near-vertical peat walls. In dry conditions, like this, the peat is liable to disintegrate under you in a cloud of choking dust, and in wet conditions (i.e. normal), it has the consistency of thick porridge.











"...the half-light showed two giant grey shapes standing guard on either side of the channel. Ashhere supposed they were trolls, or ancient standing stones of malevolent power, but he was too tired to care. He plodded on, and with diminishing distance and growing light the two shapes resolved into a pair of gritstone tors."

Kinder Gates (see the 1:25,000 map link for the location). On a beautiful day in early summer, when this photograph was taken, Kinder Gates is quite clearly a pair of gritstone tors. Looming out of half-light and mist, especially at dawn on a November morning, is quite a different matter.



"...an infant river running in a sandy bed."

The Kinder River was very low when I took this, as it was the driest summer for decades, but you get the idea.


















"....threaded through a jumble of gritstone boulders and plunged over a rocky fall to vanish in a dark hollow scooped out of the plateau side"

This is Kinder Downfall. In the very dry conditions when the photo was taken the fall was reduced to a bare trickle, though you can see the boulder field and the ravine. There's a good photo of Kinder Downfall in spate here, which will give you an idea of what it would have looked like to Ashhere.










"....the blue-shadowed plains rolling away to a distant horizon were in the west."

At the time of Ashhere's (fictional) visit in early November 605, the plains west of Kinder would obviously not have been occupied by Greater Manchester!







Map links
Topographical map available online at 1:50,000 scale and the more detailed 1:25,000 scale
Satellite image on Google Maps. You can scroll around and zoom in and out.