Silkstone, Cawthorne, Cannon Hall, Clayton West, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Darton

The train service going to Sheffield is still being disrupted due to the strike and so I didn't want to be delayed if I went to the Peak District today. The good news though is that next Sunday the regular engineering work on the line that's been in place for the last few weeks is due for completion so I'll be hoping for good weather to be able to travel south to Derbyshire.

Today I travelled west: I didn't make detailed plans for the walk though, I just got on the Barnsley bus and then decided where to go out to the west when I arrived at the bus station and found out which buses were due for departure.

I ended up at Silkstone: The last time I started a walk from Silkstone I went the wrong way when I left the village, so today I made sure that I didn't repeat that mistake...I correctly headed to the north after taking some photos of the church.

The footpath I took was actually an ancient waggonway.

I left the waggonway and took a path over to the left, taking me to Cawthorne - there was a short stretch of road, but most of the way I was walking in beautiful countryside.

I visited the church at Cawthorne before heading off through the village and then  parkland to Cannon Hall.

I then walked along a narrow road until I found the path going across the fields and through a wood to Clayton West. It's the Kirklees Way that then goes to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park; I approached the Sculpture Park from the southwest today and visited areas of the park that I'd never seen before. En route though I walked through a field where nearly every sheep in the flock was lying down; I've never seen this before...there must be some countryside lore to explain this - as I approached they all got up and ran away.

When I arrived at the Sculpture Park it was cloudy and so I couldn't take any wide-angle landscape shots with my camera, so I had to concentrate on the close-up detail of the sculptures and features.

I'd not walked around the Upper Lake before.

There are a lot of informative signs in the park.

I continued to visit most of the sculptures and popped in to the visitor centre to use the toilets.

There's some building work being undertaken, it's all a bit science-fiction though.

When I left the sculpture park and reached the bus stop on the road I was expecting a bus would be going back to Barnsley at 13:36...but that's not the case on a Saturday though.

Never mind, I just had to extend the walk by about a mile and a half and go to Darton; the footpath goes alongside the River Dearne all the way. I had twenty five minutes to wait for a bus at Darton, but only ten minutes at the bus station in Barnsley waiting for my bus back home to Doncaster.