Torside Reservoir 8th November 2025

• Rucking with 20kg's
• 10.3km route
• Route difficulty - Moderate. This route is a good test over a variety of different terrains. The route starts out across farmland, then along a path round the reservoir before heading up hill for a challenging ascent, before crossing peatlands and then down a reasonably steep descent back to the carpark, so it has something for everyone and will test you in different ways.

We started out at Crowden Carpark which we found a few weeks back when we rucked to Laddow Rocks. It's free and pretty easy to get to so a great start point to explore the High Peaks around Glossop. The weather wasn't playing ball today and the rain had set in and didn't look like it was going to stop, so we wrapped up in our waterproofs and headed out anyway.

The route starts by taking you out past the Crowden Campsite and across farmland before heading down to the reservoir through pine woodland, so it is a nice gentle start to ease you in. When you come out of the woodland, the path leads you across the road and down to one of the dams across the reservoir, and the path takes you over the dam to the other side. You then take the far path across the back side of the reservoir before heading back across the lower dam and back up to the road.

The route then takes you out onto an open hillside before zig zagging upwards before heading back into woodland for a long, challenging climb for about 1/2 an hour, so time to dig deep and power your way up to the ridgeline.

Once the path starts to level out, we are sure you should have some amazing views across the reservoirs and to the rolling hills beyond, but when we got there, we had climbed in to the low cloud cover so couldn't see a thing, other than the occasional gap in the clouds  where we could get a sense of what might have been. We decided to stop for breakfast and a coffee as we were pretty sure we had earned it after that climb!  

After our breakfast stop, the path carried on up slightly before coming out at the top of the ridgeline where it turned away from the cliff and headed across the peatlands, where it got a bit muddy, so make sure you are wearing good waterproof footwear or be ready to wet muddy feet. Once we got across the peatlands, the clouds started to clear and the rain eased which was nice and we started to get to enjoy some of the spectacular views we look forward to when we go our on our adventures.

Not long after, the path started to lead downhill and we could see the carpark in the distance, but we still had a bit of a tricky muddy route to follow to get there, so there was no rushing as we didn't want to slip and hurt ourselves so close to the end.

All in all, it was a great but challenging ruck, which was made a little more challenging by the rain, but at least we got a bit of clear sky and sunshine near the end.