Saddleworth Moor
— the colour of heather after rain.
Not only on a wall.
“Peat and heather running for miles between Manchester and the Holme Valley. The wind moves over the cotton-grass and the path disappears into a soft, dark ground that holds water like a sponge. Walkers come up from Greenfield for the reservoir loop. From a distance the moor reads as one colour. Up close it is a dozen browns and a single, slow purple.
Saddleworth Moor, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Saddleworth Moor sits on the western edge of the Peak District in the South Pennines, straddling the boundary between Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire. The high ground rises to 582 metres at Black Hill on the moor's eastern edge and drains south into the Tame valley. The A635 road from Holmfirth to Greenfield crosses the open top. The landscape is blanket bog over millstone grit, designated within the Dark Peak Site of Special Scientific Interest. RSPB Dovestone, on the western shoulder above Greenfield Reservoir, is the busiest access point onto the moor.
Weather changes fast on the open top. The moor sits east of the Pennine watershed and still receives well over 1,300 millimetres of rainfall a year, much of it driven sideways. Summer mornings can start clear and end in low cloud by noon. Mist settles in the cloughs, the small valleys cut by streams running off Black Hill. Cottongrass blooms white in June, the heather turns purple in August, and by November the tops are the colour of wet bracken.
There is almost no settlement on the moor itself. The villages — Diggle, Uppermill, Marsden — sit in the valleys below the open ground, leaving the high tops to walkers and a small population of red grouse, golden plover, and mountain hare. The Pennine Way crosses near Black Hill on its long path from Edale to Kirk Yetholm. On a still day, even with Manchester twenty miles west, the loudest sound is wind passing over peat.