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Snake Pass

The A57 across the Dark Peak, between Sheffield and Manchester

Location Profile
Type Mountain pass · high road
Road A57
Route Glossop (Greater Manchester) to Sheffield, via Ladybower
Summit 512 m (1,680 ft), on the watershed between Kinder Scout and Bleaklow
National Park Peak District National Park
Opened 1821 (turnpike road; engineer Thomas Telford)
Character Exposed moorland crossing; among the first roads in England closed by winter snow
First Appearance Cambion, Chapter Fifty: Yesterday

Snake Pass

The high road over the Dark Peak.

Overview

The Snake Pass is the high section of the A57 where it crosses the Dark Peak between Glossop, in Greater Manchester, and Sheffield to the east, the name usually applied to the stretch between Glossop and the Ladybower Reservoir at Ashopton. At its highest point, on the watershed between the moorland plateaux of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow, it reaches 512 metres (1,680 feet) above sea level — one of the highest classified roads in England, and among the most reliably difficult.

Snow arrives early on the pass and stays late; ice forms on the exposed ridgeline when the valley roads below are merely wet, and wind crosses the open moor without the interruption of trees or buildings. It is regularly the first of the trans-Pennine routes to be closed by winter weather, and has a poor accident record by national standards. When the pass is shut, the Sheffield–Manchester traffic is thrown onto the Woodhead Pass to the north until it reopens.

Geography & Atmosphere

The pass runs as a narrow shelf of tarmac across some of the most significant blanket bog in England, the gritstone plateaux of Kinder Scout to the south and Bleaklow to the north having held their peat for the better part of ten thousand years. From a distance the road and the moor are not easily told apart. On a clear day the crossing is among the more extraordinary ordinary experiences the Peak District offers; on a winter night, with freezing fog and the snow coming in off Bleaklow, it is something else, and it makes no concession to either.

It is also one of the few direct routes between Derbyshire and the north-west — between the valley that holds Hope's End and the country beyond it. A journey leaving the valley northward or westward crosses under the Snake's ridgeline or takes the long way round; and in winter, when the gates are shut, that choice is made for the traveller.

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History

A direct way over the high ground between Manchester and Sheffield is ancient: an older packhorse route, the Doctor's Gate, climbs the moor near the line of the modern pass and is marked on Ordnance Survey maps as a Roman road, though the evidence for its age is thin. The road as it now runs is a product of the turnpike age. Authorised by Parliament in 1818 and engineered by Thomas Telford, it opened in 1821 as a toll road taking the most direct line across the Pennines, and tolls were collected on it until the turnpike trust was wound up — heavily in debt — in 1870.

The road was financed in part by the Cavendish family, the Dukes of Devonshire, whose seat at Chatsworth lies to the south. The pass takes its name not from its winding course but from the Snake Inn, one of the few buildings on the high road, which was itself named for the serpent on the Cavendish coat of arms; the snake, in other words, is heraldic before it is topographic, even if the road's own twisting line suits the name well enough. The inn, near the top of the pass, was for much of its life one of the most isolated public houses in England, and was later renamed the Snake Pass Inn as the road grew more famous than the house that had named it.

In the twentieth century the more northerly Woodhead Pass (the A628), lower and less steep, took over as the primary signposted route between the two cities, leaving the Snake Pass to the through-traffic willing to risk it, to cyclists and motorcyclists drawn by the climb, and to the recurring winter closures and landslips that have dogged the highway authority since the road was built. A subsidence closure in 2008 shut the pass for the better part of seven months; heavy snow has closed it many times over.

Role in the Saga — Cambion spoilers Refers to a late-book scene.

The Snake Pass is heard, not seen. It is named once in Cambion, in Chapter Fifty: Yesterday, in a radio traffic update — and that single mention is the whole of its appearance.

The radio is a small one at a hospital nurses' station, tuned to Peaks FM, a mid-morning presenter filling the silence between a Simply Red record and a traffic update on the Snake Pass, the clipped sentences slipping beneath the pulse of a heart monitor at Robert's bedside. Ben sits low beside the bed, reading aloud from a worn copy of The Witches and watching Robert's breathing for a sign of him, when Robert's eyes begin to stir.

The detail does the work the saga's grounding details usually do: the ordinary world carries on at its usual pace, indifferent to the room, reporting the state of an A-road while something far less ordinary happens at the bedside.

Trivia

  • The Snake Pass is one of the most frequently closed A-roads in England, regularly shut by snow or ice across a winter season. The closures are managed by a gate system; when the gates are shut, the question of crossing the Dark Peak becomes a different calculation entirely.
  • The road crosses some of the oldest continuously boggy ground in Britain, the blanket peat of Kinder Scout and Bleaklow having formed over roughly ten thousand years on the impermeable gritstone. The surface that looks like ground beside the road is not always ground in any firm sense, and walking off the path here is actively discouraged.
  • The Snake Inn, near the top of the pass, was for much of its history one of the most isolated pubs in the country — and, on the days the pass was closed at both ends, effectively one of the most isolated buildings in England. Cambion places no character there; it is the kind of detail the landscape simply offers.
  • Although the road's twisting line suits its name, the ‘snake’ is in fact heraldic: the serpent of the Cavendish arms, by way of the Snake Inn, by way of the Dukes of Devonshire who helped pay for the road.

Appearances

Title Role Notes
Cambion
Book One · Book of Thoth Saga		 Background atmospheric reference Named once, in Chapter Fifty: Yesterday, in a radio traffic update heard at a hospital nurses' station while Ben sits at Robert's bedside. Heard, never visited; grounding texture for the scene.