High Ash Farm, Wildboarclough, Cheshire, England

Anyone who thinks of the Peak District might not realise that the national park covers part of Cheshire too. The county may be famed for being level but its eastern flank is well crumbled and it's all on Macclesfield's doorstep. It's not unknown for me to begin a day's hillwalking on my doorstep without recourse to mechanised transport or even even same in the same fashion after an outbound bus journey. If my memory serves me correctly, this image was created on one of those excursions, a circuit that took in Tegg's Nose, Macclesfield Forest, the summit of Shutlingsloe before the final leg took me home again via Langley.

In fact, I was en route from Forest Chapel to Cheshire's county top when I stopped to capture this view towards Wildboarclough. Apparently, the name has nothing to do with wild beasts of the forest but rather the occasional tendency for the stream flows at the bottom of the valley to turning into a boring flow, much like the Derwent in Cumbria in November 2009. It last happened in 1989 when there were fatalities and a bridge was swept away. One spring evening, I was out on my bike and the clough was a gentle babbling brook with no trace of the fierceness that can beset it. However, rivers can rise fast when a deluge is dumped on them and that is not only the case in Cumbria but also here: the River Dane rises on Axe Edge and rises very fast too, flooding downstream locations such as the low lying parts of the town of Congleton. These sobering realities are a far cry from the idyll experienced on the day of the photo but that makes it all the easier to appreciate and respect.