Wander only a few minutes away from the main paths and – if you know where to look – you’ll be rewarded with an awe-inspiring, time-travel moment, where you can see and sometimes feel the ghosts of the past.
For scattered across an area from Glossop to the west and Sheffield’s borders on the east are almost 70 air crash sites, around half with debris still laying on the ground.
A new book, High Peak Air Crash Sites, explains how the sheer height of the national park lured pilots and navigators into believing they were 2,000ft up, rather than just inches above moorland sitting 2,000ft above sea level.
The evidence is there through the tons of metal strewn across 30 individual sites. A further 36 sites, often showing tell-tale craters and crash scars, can also be found. Most date from the Second World War but others are from as recently as 2006.
The author, Pat Cunningham, is a former RAF and British Midland aviator of 40 years standing, with more than 20,000 hours of operational and commercial flying under his belt.
The book tells the moving story behind each crash, discovered using coroner’s reports and researching official investigations as well as talking to the people involved and people who know the land today.
Inevitably they are stories of tragedy. One, from 1948, recalls how a US Air Force Boeing F-13A perished along with its 13-man crew on a local delivery flight between Scampton, in Lincolnshire, and Burtonwood, Liverpool, after a successful mission over Russia during the blockade of Berlin. It was their final flight and the crew would have been on their way back to the US a few days later.
Cloud conditions led the pilot, Captain Landon Tanner, to use Visual Flight Rules for the 86-mile trip. But he never completed the 22-minute journey.
Pat, getting to the human story behind the tragedies, records that the aircraft wreckage was found in line with the direct route it would have taken, and just three miles north.
The book records: “There had been no witnesses and no recorded emergency transmissions. Beyond this, a crew member’s watch had been smashed while reading 1050 hours. Taking this as the time of impact, and calculating from the known take-off time to obtain the planned estimate for Burtonwood – around 1037 hours – they might well have reasoned that the crew has done some sightseeing before entering the cloud belt; a reasonable assumption in view of their imminent departure from the United Kingdom.”
Pat, who lives in central Derby, said: “I’m a flier and a walker and I take an interest from both points of view.
“Many walkers are only interested if there is a lot of metal about but I find the stories fascinating.
“It’s the human side that’s important. A lot of people would have said in the 40s, for instance, that a crew should have known better. But you have to realise these were young chaps who were floating around in a very darkened landscape and with communications silence, so they were on a hiding to nothing.
“And very, very few were flying in anger. Of the 300 crashes in the wider area, we have about four with battle damage.
“Most were simply getting lost thinking they were over low ground and thinking they had flown higher.”
High Peak Air Crash Sites is illustrated with photographs on almost every page, as well as map references to allow walkers and sightseers to pinpoint these historic and fascinating monuments to the past.
High Peak Air Crashes (Central), [ISBN 978 1 84674 219 4] is by Pat Cunningham and published in paperback by Countryside Books, priced £12.99.
(Words by Patrick Astill; First published and copyright Derby Telegraph 27-8-2010)
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