As part of my birthday weekend, we went for a lovely walk down in Cromford. I had a WI meeting to go to in Darley Dale for a couple of hours that afternoon; we decided we’d make a day of it, with a walk first, and then our packed lunches, and then we’d go get my birthday cake and then come home.

I’m partial to ice cream cakes, which we’ve tried to make but failed at a few times, so given up. We were absolutely delighted to find that we could, after all, get them here in the UK, in a few select Baskin Robbins locations – and thankfully one of them is near enough to us to make this a viable option. So that last stop was in Sheffield.

It’d been raining all weekend, so we reckoned the ground was all muddy, and more rain threatened still, so we opted for walking along the Cromford Canal, which would be graveled or paved or the like, and less muddy (mostly) than hill walking. It did mean walking in a straight line for awhile and then turning around and walking back, but it was pretty.

We naturally forgot the umbrella in the car, so when it did decide to pour down, I held part of Chris’ coat over my head (he was still wearing the other part) so I could still be vaguely presentable at my afternoon meeting – I’m sure we made quite a sight! It worked, at least. 😉

We had our lunch, the meeting was less useless than I expected, and then the time had gotten away so I decided we’d have dinner there in Matlock before going on to Sheffield. I regretted this decision later on, but hey ho. We wandered around Matlock til the restaurant opened – I’ve never had a chance to explore Matlock before; now I’m quite familiar with it. We got the cake, which was lovely, and headed home. It was a nice day, overall. Have some photos from the walk.