The start is the small free car park on Carr Lane in Wetton. Staffordshire Moorlands District Council lists it with 25 spaces and gives its hours as 8AM to 6PM. It can fill quickly at weekends and other busy times, so arrive early. If it's full, you can start from Wetton Mill instead (see Alternative Parking). Please don't park on the village green, on kerbs, or across driveways or the narrow lanes. Check the latest prices here.

Samuel Carrington was the schoolmaster at Wetton and a local antiquary. In Borough Fields near the village he found the remains of an Anglo-Saxon settlement, with signs of Roman life before it, and his friend Thomas Bateman, the leading antiquary of the area, dug there and described their finds in his book Ten Years' Diggings in 1861. In 1864 and 1865 Carrington turned to Thor's Cave and excavated it.

His finds included flint arrowheads, bone combs, bronze bracelets, Roman Samian ware and a Roman coin, and he published an account of the dig in 1866. A second round of digging between 1927 and 1935 followed. Between them, the two digs turned up stone tools, pottery, amber beads and bronze objects in Thor's Cave and in Thor's Fissure Cavern, a second cave below its side entrance, along with the burials of at least seven people. The finds suggest the cave was used from the end of the Old Stone Age, with the busiest times in the Iron Age and the Roman period, and they are now spread between museums in Buxton, Derby, Stoke-on-Trent and Sheffield.

Carrington went on to appear in fiction. In Eliza Meteyard's novel Dora and her Papa, published in 1869, he and Bateman became the leading characters Hornblower and Flaxdale. By then Carrington was schoolmaster and parish clerk at Wetton, and he was buried in the village churchyard. The walk passes close to the church, St Margaret's, near the end. Its tower dates from the 14th century, the rest was rebuilt in 1820, and it has an unusual outside staircase up to the belfry.

The Leek and Manifold Valley Light Railway opened in June 1904 and ran for about eight miles from Waterhouses, up the Hamps and Manifold valleys, to Hulme End. It was built to cheaper light railway standards, on a narrow gauge of just 2ft 6in. Its engineer, Everard Calthrop, had built the Barsi Light Railway in India, and its two little steam engines had a colonial look, with big headlamps that were never used. Thor's Cave had its own halt, which this walk passes on the valley floor below the cave. It was renamed Thor's Cave for Wetton in 1914, and in 1917 its refreshment room was moved up to the village.

The line's main job was milk. Churns, and later tanker wagons carried on special transporter wagons, came from the farms and the creamery at Ecton, and between 1919 and 1926 special milk trains ran straight from Waterhouses to London. Ordinary passengers were few, because most of the villages sat on the hilltops about a mile above the line, but bank holidays were a different story: in Whit Week 1905 the railway carried some 5,000 people, and every engine and carriage was put to work.

The end came quickly. The creamery at Ecton closed in the early 1930s, and buses served the hilltop villages far better than trains in the valley bottom. The last trains ran in March 1934. The trackbed was handed to Staffordshire County Council, which opened it as a footpath in July 1937, and today the Manifold Way is a surfaced track used by walkers, cyclists and horse riders.