The walk starts from the National Trust's Haywood car park on the Longshaw estate, a few hundred metres from the Grouse Inn. Spaces are very limited, and it's open from dawn to dusk. The surface is gravel and compacted earth, with some potholes and speed bumps on the way in. National Trust members park free but must check in on every visit, either with the JustPark app or by scanning their membership card at the machine. Everyone else pays £6 for up to 4 hours or £8 for longer, by bank card or the JustPark app; for this walk the 4-hour ticket should be enough unless you stop at the pub. Blue Badge holders park free. The nearest National Trust toilets are at Longshaw Café. Check the latest prices here.

Beside the track at the north end of Froggatt Edge, on a flat shelf of moor, are the remains of a small stone circle, known to archaeologists as Stoke Flat West. It is an embanked circle, about 11.5m across inside, with two entrances facing each other, one to the north-north-east and one to the south-south-west. Two big upright stones flank the south-south-west entrance, the taller standing about 1.1m high. Nine stones still stand on the inner face of the bank, and there were probably about 16 to begin with.

The circle doesn't stand alone. Around it are low banks of stones cleared from the ground, marking out about eight small fields in a long north-south strip, along with about 50 cairns. Most of these were simply heaps of cleared stone, but cairns like these were often reused for burials, and a group of 14 small cairns right next to the circle may hold burials too. Fields of this kind were first laid out in the Neolithic, and most were in use through the Bronze Age, roughly 2000 to 700 BC, the time when these moors were used most intensively. The East Moors as a whole cover about 40 square miles and hold some of the largest and best-preserved prehistoric field systems and cairnfields in northern England.

In the early 20th century the landowner, the Duke of Rutland, partly dug into the circle with his gamekeeper, a man named Peat, and at some point an urn holding a cremation was reported from the site, though both have since been lost. The circle was scheduled as an ancient monument in 1997 and is now protected by law, so please leave the stones as you find them.

From White Edge you look east over Big Moor, home to a herd of wild red deer, the UK's largest land mammal. Their coats are reddish in summer and greyish brown in winter, and in the heather you may only spot a stag's antlers sticking up above it. Professor Ian Rotherham has explained that the herd began in the 1980s, when a small group escaped from Chatsworth and settled on Big Moor. A second small group, let loose by a wealthy landowner at Totley, later joined them.

The numbers grew fast. Only 54 deer were counted on Big Moor in 2004, but the count there had reached 263 by 2014. Too many deer stop young trees growing, hold back the moorland plants and graze meadows that should be left to flower and seed, so the Eastern Moors Partnership, run by staff from the RSPB and the National Trust, counts them every winter using a drone with a thermal camera. It then decides whether some of the hinds need to be culled. A wooded landscape would support about ten deer per square mile, but parts of Big Moor sometimes carry around 50.

The best time to see and hear them is the autumn rut, in October and early November, when the stags arrive to compete for the hinds. They roar, sometimes lock antlers, and often back off without a real fight. The partnership's Danny Udall describes it as a tussle, a test of strength rather than a fight to the death, though stags lose so much weight during the rut that some die of exhaustion in a hard winter. Bring binoculars and stay well back.