I’ve just returned from a lovely weekend camping in the Peak District. Fiona and I stayed at a campsite just outside of Ashbourne in Derbyshire called the Callow Top Holiday Park. It was a nice campsite although it was a little commercial (they had an arcade and you had to pay 20p to use the showers) and was well placed to explore the surrounding regions. We managed to pitch the tent in the dry which is always a bonus. We headed down into Ashbourne to have a look around. It’s pretty small and has an unusually large number of antiques shops. We stopped for a pint in a pub and then went back to the campsite. We ate at the on-site pub which was really homely, both of us having a good steak pie.
On Saturday we drove up to Bakewell (home of the Bakewell tart/pudding) and went on a 6 mile walk up to Chatsworth House and then back again. It took us about 3 hours and by the time we got back to Bakewell we were starving so we gobbled down a massive half-pound burger with fries at a pub – yum! Afterwards, we drove to a quaint little village called Eyam which is famous because it suffered terribly during the plague of 1665 – 1666 and by closing itself off managed to halt the spread of the disease through the Peak District. Well worth a trip if you’re nearby. We ventured back into Ashbourne to see if there was anywhere nice to eat and stumbled across, what turned out to be, a great little brasserie called Bramhall’s. Despite Fi and I wearing our waterproofs (including trousers) for the entire walk earlier in the day and having NOT been rained on, it decided to pour with rain at the one time when we didn’t have them on! We headed back to the tent and showered and put on our tidiest clothes and ate at the aforementioned Bramhall’s. I had tiger prawns with Singapore noodles for starters followed by a delicious fillet steak and Fi had a mushroom tart for starters and scallops for mains. We shared a really good bottle of Australian red from a vineyard called Tiddy Widdy Well – I had never heard of it before but I will be having it again if I get the chance!
Sunday morning came and we packed up the tent and drove to Alton Towers (which was only about 25 minutes away) and spent a few hours at the Waterpark there. We had so much fun. If you get a chance to go, don’t bother waiting in line for the ‘Master Blaster’ ride as the queue is really long and it seems to break down all the time. We drove back to Bristol and got home around 18:30pm and had a nice home-cooked Chinese. As much as I enjoyed my trip away – it’s always nice to get back to a brick house and a solid bed!