Burbage Edge

About Burbage Edge

Overlooking the spa town of Buxton, this gritstone escarpment marks the western rim of the Derbyshire Dome. Its trig pillar summit offers a breezy vantage point over the Upper Goyt Valley and the peaks of Axe Edge. It’s a place of high moorland, rich birdlife, and a visible, gritty industrial history.

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Did You Know?

• •The name likely derives from the Old English 'burh-bece', signifying a brook or valley near a fortification, referring to the Burbage Brook that drains the slopes toward Buxton.
• •The ridge serves as a significant geographical divide; it is the watershed between the River Goyt, which flows west toward the Mersey, and the River Wye, which flows east to join the Trent.
• •Beneath the heather lie the remains of the Goyt's Moss colliery, where coal was extracted from the 17th century until 1893 to fuel the Duke of Devonshire's limekilns at Grin Low.
• •In a remarkable feat of Victorian engineering, the 1831 Cromford and High Peak Railway—one of the world's first long-distance lines—passed directly through a tunnel bored into the gritstone deep below the summit.
• •The Edge has a somber aviation history, including a 1943 crash where an RAF Airspeed Oxford struck the ridge’s dry stone wall during a night flight in low cloud.
• •Standing at the trig pillar, you have a clear sightline across the Upper Goyt Valley to the isolated Cat and Fiddle Inn and the dark, flat-topped mass of Combs Moss to the north.
• •Given its position catching the full force of westerly winds, the ridge is an excellent place to discover exactly why the local sheep spend so much of their lives huddled behind the dry stone walls.