Sunny days have been few and far between in this January of 2026. So when the sky turned blue one Saturday, Toby and I decided we needed to get outside. There wasn't time for a ten-miler, so I shortened the next section of the Portway walk and announced that we would do a loop from Dale Abbey to Stanton-by-Dale.
This is not unknown territory. We have done a few family hikes around here - in fact, more than I remembered. When we got to Stanton, Toby said, "Haven't I been here before?". I said I didn't think so, but then as we moved along the main street a few memories started to surface. Oh yes, we had walked this way before.
And the reason for that is that there are several interesting things to see. We passed the towering east window, all that remains of the abbey at Dale. There were snowdrops blooming outside the odd little semi-detached church (the other half is now a house and was once a pub - an odd pairing!) We slithered down steep steps to look at the hermitage - a sandstone cave which huddles under the wooded hill.
Then we clambered back up some even steeper steps to find the route of the Portway. We crossed a ploughed field and a squelchy field and came out on a road with the fantastic name of Potato Pit Lane. At the corner with No Man's Lane (an equally interesting moniker) the Cowshed Cafe was doing a roaring trade, judging by the number of cars parked along the road.
It wasn't a particularly nice road to walk along. The views were good but the vehicles were frequent. I'd already discounted the idea of walking right to the end, which we technically should have done to complete the Portway route; I'd left it last time at the junction with School Lane. Instead we diverted, with some relief, onto a footpath which led down into Stanton-by-Dale.
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| view from the road |
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| squeezing into Stanton |
A bench outside the church provided a good opportunity to stop for a few minutes. The church of St Michael and All Angels was, sadly, locked that day.
The route back was definitely familiar - we'd taken the same path on the family walk that Toby remembered. There were views across to a factory with heaps of concrete pipes outside, and a stile which felt like a climbing challenge.
After a while we came to a fenced mound guarded by a line of poplars - this was an old spoil heap - and turned left to follow it along to a lumpy field, which used to be a sand quarry. Skirting the humps and dips, we arrived at Furnace Pond. It was small but pretty.
There was one more field to cross. I remembered this one being the worst bog on a very muddy previous walk, so I was a little apprehensive. That time it had been newly sown with wheat, though, whereas today it was covered in grass, which made the soggy ground a lot easier to walk on.
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| still muddy though! |
The OS app said we'd done six miles on the dot, at a speed of 3.6 miles per hour. That wasn't quite accurate - there were a few squiggles on the plot where the GPS had jumped around - but it certainly reflects the fact that I have a hard job to keep up with Toby's pace now. The days of slowing my stride to accommodate little legs are long gone.
Portway: Stanton-by-Dale to Dale Abbey
24 January 2026
6 miles / 9.5 km
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