Finding the Dakota C47-A (and associated bits)!

Sunday morning arrived and the weather, whilst chilly, was going to be relatively clear in contrast to our recent excursion to the lake District. Daysacks quickly sorted we headed off to the bus terminus at Old Glossop to start our fun outing!

Once underway, we wandered past the shooting grounds, which were alive to an abundance of people ‘Clay pigeon’ shooting at the venue on the side of the Edge Plantation. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it quite so busy as today, and as such, the sound of the 12 bores was echoing off the plantation as we ascended up Lightside to pick up our route alongside Yellow Slacks.

Once clear, we spent the best part of the morning de-layering and re-layering as the sun appeared not to know whether it was supposed to be out to play or otherwise. No worries through, we maintained a reasonable pace until we located the stream crossing that would take us onto Shelf Moor and onwards to the classic site of ‘Over Exposed’.

Not too many people were out and about this morning, so we quickly captured a few shots at the site and then found a convenient location for coffee and a snack, away from the wind at Higher Shelf Stones.

The excitement of the day was to locate the crash site of the ‘Dakota’ located just off the nose of James Thorn.

As I had previously plotted the initial two or three Grid references on the map, we fell onto the first few scatterings with ease.

Time for the real fun bit now though, for those of you that know navigational terminology, we were about to get ’Flirty at 30’ as we descended Ashton Clough in order to locate the numerous aged piles of debris that once was a Douglas Dakota, that met its unfortunate demise on 24^th July 1945. (Killing all seven passengers on board).

What a fabulous morning’s hunting, whilst we did not locate the two Pratt & Whitney wasp engines, we did find multiple evidence of the unfortunate incident. Never mind, I guess I’ll just have to go again!!