Читать книгу Walking on the West Pennine Moors. 30 walks around moorland Lancashire онлайн

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Now continue along Belmont Road for some distance until you reach a very obvious and large stile on the right, giving onto a boggy path that can be seen curving up and across the northern face of Winter Hill. Follow this path upwards, and finally you arrive at the hotchpotch of ironmongery on the summit. A surfaced service road is soon reached, and you should take this, as it now heads down across Smithills Moor.

WINTER HILL

Among the many radar communication masts on Winter Hill, one stands way above the others, reaching 300m (1000ft) into the sky. This towering transmitter is host to antennae that send analogue and digital terrestrial television and radio into millions of homes in the northwest of England.

Close by, the top of Winter Hill was the scene of an air accident on 27 February 1958, when, coping with heavy fog and snow, a flight from Douglas in the Isle of Man to Manchester crashed into the top of the hill. Only seven of the 42 on board survived. This was not the only air disaster on Winter Hill; there have been several. A two-seater aircraft crashed here in the 1920s. During the Second World War an American aircraft crashed on 7 August 1942, and in the following year, on 12 November 1943, the crew of a Wellington Bomber were killed when it crashed on Hurst Hill, on Anglezarke Moor (see Walk 9). In the following month, on 24 December 1943, an Airspeed Oxford crashed on the hill. Other crashes have included several Spitfires, Hurricanes and a Gloster Meteor, which crashed in 1953.