Looking down over the quaint stone cottages of Castleton in the Peak District National Park, I’m stood at the headwaters of a trail I’ve run countless times before. The Great Ridge separating the gritstone plateaus of the Dark Peak and the limestone dales to the South rises out of the valley ahead of me, it’s distinctive flagstone pathway trailing for miles to Lose Hill. Behind me sits Mam Tor, a 517m peak set into the Edale Valley and one of the most well trodden paths in Derbyshire. If I turn my head down the fellside towards the Old Mam Tor road, I can make out the faint glow of Nathan cooking up dinner on our camping stove, and our van, Douglas, nestled in the trees. 

My first trip to the Peak District was in the winter of 2015. I camped for the weekend in a beaten up burgundy campervan at the foot of Mam Tor, known to Peak locals as ‘Mother Hill’ for it’s crumbling Eastern flank. Sheltering in the 3 x 5 ft roof tent as a heavy downfall hammered the canvas, I had my first taste of van living in the shadow of the ‘Shivering Mountain’. A long and happy union with the Peak District began that weekend, and four years later, I’m still very much in love.

Nathan and I have been lucky to get to know the vast wilderness of the Peak District in all seasons. We’ve spent hours running in its undulating valleys and many more climbing on it’s famous gritstone edges. It is the winding, shale spine of the Great Ridge though, that has taken on the greatest significance in my mind. Mam Tor has become the fault line separating our life in the hills from our day to day lives in the city of Leeds. We have pulled onto our patch of crumbling tarmac at the end of that broken road in lashing rain, early spring sunshine and late night snowstorms, each time welcomed by another of the valley’s many faces. 

At the heart of our retreats into the Peak District is the hope to shake the weight of a week spent hunched at our desks in the city. As we bump along the tarmac, past the industrial outskirts of Sheffield and into the national park, our van packed with our running shoes and bouldering matts, that weight begins to lift a little. The veneer of urban life peels away as we move towards the rugged hills. The busier landscapes of inner city Leeds are replaced by a slide projection of English countryside; an abundance of country pubs, leaning agricultural buildings, and fields of grazing sheep. By the time we arrive at our camp and dance the customary jig we dance to test the hand break, we have begun to settle into the rhythms and routines of our ‘second life’ in the hills. 

Tonight it is mid-summer. The UK sighs in a week long heatwave and dark clouds build over the valley, restless and brooding. I have made the steep scamper up the hillside to enjoy the last of the evening light. Peering out at the stretching hills, along a ridge formed some 320 million years ago, my face burns and my calves scream, but perspective comes easily.  An endless variety of green extends like a carpet over the valley. Jagged gritstone boulders rise up in clusters between the gorse. Above that vast network of sprawling peaks and heathered moorland, Mam Tor sits as a reverent witness - a prehistoric monolith casting back to a time long before email inboxes and team meetings, when to run through the hills as if chasing wildness itself was natural instinct, and life depended on it. 

As the sun slips towards the horizon and the world takes on the cold hue of twilight, it isn’t so difficult to imagine a time when these hills lay dormant beneath an ancient sea. Were it not for the waning light, the brooding clouds and a growing rumble in my belly, I could have lost myself on that hillside for hours, awed, as I always am by the simple movement of my feet pounding the trail and its power to reconnect me to a sense of calmness and contenment.

Beginning the gentle descent along the scree paths towards Hollins Cross, I pause to reflect on the feeling of running with tired legs and a full heart through the heather towards home. I think of the sprawling national park behind the black outline of conifers to the West, it’s winding valleys with their peat slopes, and of the van sitting somewhere in that tangle of heather and rocks, Nathan waiting patiently for my return. The promise of a bracing jerry can shower and a long sleep. 

Sometimes it sounds daft even to me, to spend the night turning under damp bedding on a patch of crumbling road beneath layers and layers of shifting sedimentary rock.   But when we’re curled up in the van, our mattress tending ever downwards with the tilt of the ground below, there isn’t any place I’d rather be. Each sleepy evening nestled in the van is a gentle reminder to build a life of simplicity, a life of camp dinners, washing our faces in wing mirrors and chasing insects from our bed. If I were to collect these experiences in a cardboard box and stash them away in the dusty attic of my mind, I would one day have shelves and shelves of pure appreciation for the smaller moments spent enjoying the wilds of this beautiful national park. A whole archive of sights, sounds and feelings; rain falling on the van windows, Nathan cutting vegetables in the boot space, the crunch of rowan berries underfoot.

As each trip draws to a close and we rattle back towards Leeds along the tarmac, my mind turns to gratitude. Through the frame of the van window, I have watched mile after mile of the Peak District’s rolling countryside pass by. I have covered vast distances across it’s old sedimentary valleys and dark green woodland in my running shoes and climbed countless boulders across its wind beaten gritstone edges. Each visit has been unique and each takes on a different shape in my memory, but all will be remembered in the sights, smells and sounds of days spent with the wind in our hair and the sun on our faces. 

In spite of the changing seasons and ignorant to the hum of city life, the Great Ridge persists. In the dim light of an early August morning or the drizzle of a November afternoon, this familiar landscape renews and thrives, revealing fresh riches each time we return. I've grown to love this place wholeheartedly, for its furrowed landscape and the space to explore my passions. For the sun dipping below the peaks on a warm spring evening, my feet pounding the limestone pavements of Stanage Edge, a bird arching across a cold blue sky through the windscreen as we hurtle towards Curbar or Burbage to pull ourselves up hunks of gritstone.  I will always be free in this rugged and dreamy playground, with its endless boulders to climb and trails to run. I have found my wild and it exists here, on these trails where I am most myself.