Glorious Gravel Dark Peak - June 2026

This was a great event although not quite as intended, in that a few of us signed up to the Glorious Gravel Double Peak, a 200km event with around 3500m of climbing, but unfortunately we didn't train enough and on the day decided to do the first half of the event (called the Dark Peak). The route is shown below:

This was still almost 100km and either 1700m of climbing (Komoot estimate) or 1960m (Strava estimate), with about 50% of that off road. My legs and I believe the Strava estimate more than the Komoot one :)

The route was epic, really tough as it was raining hard at times and the course was wet, muddy and slippery in some of the off-road sections. My Insta360 camera battery died very quickly and I only managed to record the downhill on the broken road, which is below:

The route started at Bakewell Showground and quite a lot of people camped overnight due to the 7am start. I rode with Seb and Chris. Without their support it would have been much more difficult to finish. Thanks guys.

There were many challenging hills and fun descents on the route. The most interesting and fun descent was the broken road above, but for a long flowing and fast descent the one from Stannard Edge, through Padley Gorge and down to Grindleford was amazing. We often ride up this section and its a long hard climb, going down was a lot more fun!

Probably the toughest climb was the Brough Lane climb out of Bradwell and up to the top of Shatton Moor. At times the gradient reached 17% and was on a very rutted and uneven track. It was a relief to get this one out of the way!

Once you get to the top the views over the Hope valley are amazing

The offroad climb from Heathersage up to Stannard Edge was also challenging but the path was much smoother and whilst long was never much more than 10% gradient, so after Brough Lane seemed relatively straightforward, with good views of Sheffield in the distance. The official photographer took a nice picture of us on the climb up. This was the highest point of the event at 460m.

Overall we were riding for 5h 43 minutes over an elapsed time of 6h 46m, well you have to enjoy the feed stops after all:)

After the ride the biggest problem was getting the bikes and ourselves clean enough to go out in the evening for a well earned meal.

Would we do it again. I would but preferably on a warmer and dryer day, this was on the edge of being too cold and wet, but we enjoyed it anyway and it was good to be in great company .