Dog-friendly Penistone

A stone hall on Mortimer Road on the southern edge of Penistone, run as a free house with a restaurant in the old conservatory and a public bar at the main entrance. Its own site is specific about where the dog goes: the main entrance public bar, not the restaurant. There is a large car park and grounds, and it sits close to the Penistone end of the Trans Pennine Trail, so it works as the finish of a walk in from Oxspring. It also has bedrooms, but the site says nothing about dogs in them, so ring before you book.

A small community green at Springvale on the eastern side of Penistone, with a refurbished play area, picnic space and a mown path round the grass. Barnsley Council upgraded it under its Love Where You Live programme along with the other Penistone ward greens. It is a five-minute circuit, useful because it sits between the Springvale housing and the Trans Pennine Trail, which you can join a few hundred yards south for the walk to Oxspring. It is a local green, not a country walk.

Penistone's own park at Bridge End, immediately behind Tesco on Back Lane and next to the Trans Pennine Trail car park and the skate park. It is a short flat circuit of mown grass, pitches and boundary trees rather than a walk in its own right, but it is the obvious warm-up or wind-down at either end of the Trail, and it is the only lit green space in the town centre. The leisure centre and the showground are a few minutes north-west up Thurlstone Road. Everything longer starts from the same car park.

A two-mile perimeter circuit of a small Yorkshire Water reservoir just north of Penistone, reached off the A629 Huddersfield Road by the Barnsley Trout Club. Most of it is a well-made surfaced path, which makes it one of the few reservoir rounds in this corner of the borough that stays walkable in bad weather; only the last stretch at the shallow north-western head turns rough and wet. There are steps on the circuit, and Yorkshire Water signs a moderately steep ramp as the way round them. The car park is small and there is a picnic area at the dam end.

Six miles of the old Woodhead railway line running west out of Penistone to the mouth of the Woodhead tunnels, on one continuous track the whole way. It leaves the purpose-built Trans Pennine Trail car park behind Tesco on Back Lane, drops past the skate park, and climbs almost imperceptibly all the way out, so the return leg is the easy one. It passes the showground, the Thurlstone crossing, the Millennium Stone and the Bullhouse mine water treatment scheme, then the site of Hazlehead Bridge station and Wogden Foot nature reserve before finishing at Dunford Bridge car park. Only one crossing, at Millhouse Green, puts you on a road with traffic.

The northern arm of the Trans Pennine Trail out of Penistone, running west along the Woodhead line to Millhouse Green and then turning north over the moor edge to Upper Denby, just over the West Yorkshire boundary. The Trail's own route notes take it past High Bank Quarry, now open access land, with views across Scout Dike and Royd Moor reservoirs on the way. It is about four and three quarter miles one way and the northern half is rougher and more exposed than the railway section. There are pubs and shops at Penistone, Thurlstone and Upper Denby, which is what makes this a plausible one-way walk with a taxi or a lift back.

Five miles of former Great Central railway running south-east from Penistone to Wortley, entirely off-road apart from one access track to cross about halfway. From Penistone to Thurgoland there is a strip of tarmac down the middle, and from Thurgoland to Wortley the surface turns to compacted stone that goes muddy through Wortley cutting; a grass strip runs alongside for horses. It passes the Oxspring split where the trail divides, the Thurgoland tunnels, and the branch down to Wortley Top Forge. Cote Green car park at Finkle Street is the far end, next to the Pennine Equine livery, and the pubs and cafes in Wortley and Thurgoland are a short step off the trail.