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Nottinghamshire 3Walk Details:
The Walk: |
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Silverhill Colliery is a very unusual county top. In one sense it used to be a county bottom, for as the name implies it used to be a deep coal mine here. It’s now been filled in, and the area landscaped into a new country park. It’s this landscaping that has created a new hill in the centre of the park, which is a metre higher than the traditional “natural” highest points in the county, at Newtonwood Lane and Herrod’s Hill. Nottinghamshire County Council claims Silverhill Colliery as the new high point of the county. Many bagging purists disagree, pointing to the Rules of the Marilyn Baggers, who have come to a consensus that man-made tops only count if they are down as “antiquities” on the Ordnance Survey maps – ie being a thousand years or so old. As for us? We were open to persuasion, with the deciding factor likely to be which of the three contenders was the nicest! We had high hopes for this one, as someone on the web had referred to it as “the best non-mountainous County Top”. It was the top where Jus and Cat were due to catch us up, but we’d not heard from them, so we parked at the already-busy public car park and strode off towards the clear path up the hill, to the north east of the car park. It was an easy and direct ascent to the summit up a wide gravel path. The summit was appropriately marked with a statue of a coal miner, set on a plinth on which were listed all the former mines of Nottinghamshire. There was a 360 degree panorama from the summit, although it was somewhat obscured by the low cloud that had plagued us all day. Unfortunately it looked like the conifers planted all around the summit would also soon obscure the views as well. The whole country park was laid out below us. We had been planning to take a stroll around parts of it, but we could see that it was still a little way off of maturity. It will undoubtedly be a very attractive place to visit once the trees have grown up a bit, but today, and especially under the grey skies, it looked a bit barren. We therefore decided to just return to the car, albeit by a slightly different route to the way we ascended. We passed some innovative picnic tables where the bench part folded up to keep the rain off. We walked alongside a fence that was indented into small bays every few dozen years, presumably at great expense, but for no apparent reason. More strangely, every group of people we passed was walking exactly 7 large and slightly unruly dogs. We thought it would be amusing if a sheep came and rounded them all up! So, after visiting all three potential Nottinghamshire tops, had WheresThePath come to a decision? Well, Silverhill Colliery is undoubtedly the highest of the three, and whilst man-made it’s clearly permanent, and likely to be the highest for many years unless cumulative erosion from visitors lowers the summit. So it’s our favoured candidate. However, like us I’m guessing future baggers will continue to visit all three, especially as they’re so close together. As to being the best non-mountainous top? Well, I can only assume that the write in question had not visited Worcestershire Beacon, Milk Hill, Bardon Hill, Halton Castle, etc. Verdict:
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