Whichever way you look at it – on foot, on horseback or by bike – the High Peak Trail in the UK's Peak District is full of interest.

For a start, its original layout as the Cromford and High Peak Railway owes more to canal design than railway design, since initial plans were for a waterway. The result had steep inclines rather than locks and all the stations were in fact known as wharves.

Completed in 1831 to link the Cromford and Peak Forest canals, the 33-mile railway rose from 250 feet above sea-level at Cromford to over 1200 feet at Ladmanlow. Limestone, minerals, agricultural produce and eventually passengers, were hauled along the level sections by horse-drawn wagons and subsequently by steam locomotives. The nine inclines were negotiated by attachment to cables powered by stationary steam engines.

Sadly, the picturesque Cromford and High Peak Railway fell to the Beeching Axe – the reduction and restricting of Britain's railways in 1967. More positively, it reopened four years later as the 18-mile High Peak Trail, connecting High Peak Junction near Cromford with Dowlow near Buxton. Stations became car parks and picnic areas, some with toilets and cycle hire facilities.

At High Peak Junction, stone trans-shipment sheds – and a gloomy stall acclaimed as the oldest railway toilet in the world – still stand beside Cromford Canal. A stroll along the towpath leads to Leawood Pump House with its magnificent beam engine, steamed on several weekends throughout the year and still capable of raising 28 tons of water a minute from the river Derwent to the canal.

Next stop is the National Stone Centre with its dramatic range of geological features: five former tropical lagoons scattered with sharks' teeth, Sea Lily Meadow with its fossil lilies, and one of the best fossil reefs in the country. The visitor centre reveals some mind-boggling facts.

The Trail is now approaching Middleton Incline, its derelict wheel pit at the bottom and the fully restored Middleton Top Engine House at the summit. The engine is in motion on various weekends – a spectacle well worth stopping for. Six English counties are visible from Middleton Top on a clear day.

Visitor facilities extend to cycle hire, shop, toilets, parking and picnic area, just right for a breather before tackling the next ascent – the 1 in 14 Hopton Incline.

Deaths from exposure

The reward for this steep climb is an elevated level stretch of track and the opportunity to scramble up Harborough Rocks, offering spectacular views from the windswept summit and where hefty pieces of stone have been roughly hewn into a pulpit, chair and font. On his tour of England in the 18th century, author Daniel Defoe visited a lead mining family who lived in a cave, thought to be that on Harborough Rocks. Defoe needed an interpreter to translate the miner's dialect!

The Trail now heads off into the open landscape of the White Peak, breathtakingly beautiful all year round. Records of deaths from exposure up here include that of a jagger – a packhorse man – and his team of pack mules who became snowbound and starved to death, their bodies not found until spring.

'Fish belly' rail

The old forge at High Peak Junction is put to intermittent use by a working blacksmith, surrounded by relics galore including a length of 'fish belly' rail, the oldest section of railway anywhere.

A rotting runaway wagon lies in a cavernous catchpit at the bottom of the nearby 1-in-9 Sheep Pasture Incline. The catchpit was built after two wagons broke free; reaching 140 miles per hour, they took off into the air – clearing the road and canal before coming to rest in a field.

From the catchpit a long uphill slog passes a small building complete with fireplace and bench, from where the signalman supervised a Heath Robinson alarm system. A sequence of trip wires ran from the rail track to a series of gongs, so that the speed of an approaching train could be judged by the tempo of the clappers. A frenzied clanging might mean a runaway train, obliging the signalman to dash out and change the points.

Evidence of even earlier industry lies to the other side of the track, where a timber-built crane stands abandoned in a small quarry.

Sweeping views open up beyond the derelict engine house at the top of Sheep Pasture Incline, then, on the level now, the Trail continues to Black Rocks – a popular climbing area where chiselled graffiti date back hundreds of years. Ruined buildings and a capped shaft remain from the lead mining era.

The trail next passes over The Causeway – a scheduled Ancient Monument – en route for the Steeple Grange Light Railway where passengers can take a ride in a whimsical little loco that formerly toiled in a coal mine.

Minninglow car park offers a diversion along the Roystone Grange Archaeological Trail but our route continues around the notorious right-angled Gotham Curve, in its day the tightest on the entire national railway system. Apparently, as the train flexed round the bend, its driver and guard could reach out and shake hands.

The High Peak Trail joins the Tissington Trail at Parsley Hay Wharf, another cycle hire and information point.

Nearby is a tunnel built to carry the A515 over the railway. A plaque at one end commemorates Josiah Jessop who built the railway, while a horse-drawn railway wagon is carved in stone at the opposite end.

The last bracing stretch of the Trail ends at Dowlow and joins up with the Mid Shires Way, which at Stockport links with the Trans-Pennine trail, itself part of the long distance trail between Liverpool and Istanbul – a fact that no-one could have guessed back at High Peak Junction.

For more information on the High Peak and Tissington trails, click here.