A bright morning with sunshine breaking from behind dissipating cloud promised a good day on the moor. We came round the shoulder from Shooter's Nab to look again into the lovely Wessenden valley. The annual highlight of its blooming rhododendron banks was fading, but there was still enough royal purple and mauve on the far shore of Blakeley reservoir to contrast with the grassy pastures, hemmed in by neglected, tumbled walls. A handful of Swaledales were busy grazing just below us, close to the abandoned conduit that once conducted water all the way down the east side of this valley and round to Blackmoorfoot reservoir above Slaithwaite.
Later we dropped to the towpath of the Huddersfield canal and walked along it, through Marsden, to the north portal of the recently reopened Standedge tunnel (at 5,415 yards the longest waterway tunnel in Britain). The canal heads towards the south-west through its dismal bore, straight under Pule Hill, where, later in the day, we rested atop the breezy crag and heard the call of the curlew drifting over from the crest of Standedge, where the Pennine Way picks its way towards the north.
The west-facing crag on Pule Hill was "discovered" by the Marsden-based George Bower in the early 1920s, but few climbing routes were developed here until the so-called "Chew Valley Cragsmen" arrived in the 40s and 50s. Here we were, on that recent sunny afternoon, looking down the vertical face near the severe 40ft route called Flying Buttress because of its arched buttress. Just behind this is the infamous cave called the "Trog 'Ole" where those pioneering climbers of half a century ago spent "many a pleasant night".
The top of Pule Hill may be little more than 1,400ft, but it gives grand views towards the north-east, right down the Colne valley to Slaithwaite and on to the brown stone fringes of Huddersfield. Across the broad mouth of Wessenden, the gritstone of Shooter's Nab frowned in the shadow, but there were smiling cumulus cloudlets floating above Meltham moor.
Wessenden, though, is really about water. Its dale's bottom embraces four reservoirs which originally supplied much of the pure, moorland run-off to the new textile mills in Marsden and beyond. Today those mills are largely silent but the Wessenden dams continue to provide Colne valley folk with their essential clean supplies.
