Britain’s most scenic drives: The Snake Pass, Peak District

On a quest to discover the country's most glorious roads, Annunciata Elwes explores The Snake Pass in the Peak District.

Scenic Serpentine Road in Peak District UK
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

Snake Pass slithers across the Pennines between the market town of Glossop and Ladybower Reservoir’s Y-shaped valley. This route, one of Britain's most scenic drives, opened by George VI in 1945.

Snake Pass over the Pennines, Derbyshire, England, Europe

Whenever it snows, it is usually the first road to close, its elevation of 1,680ft above sea level making it prone to ice.

A sheepfold of drystone walls beside Snake Pass in Derbyshire with hillside of purple flowering heather.

With treacherous bends and blind summits, this patch of A57 — a Tour of Britain favourite — makes for a hair-raising wiggle, tempered only by the clearest of clear air and a glorious, undulating patchwork of moorland cooled by the gleam of the River Ashop, over which, when descending to Glossop on a fine day, you can see all the way to Manchester.

Waterfall at the Snake Pass in the Peak District in the UK


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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.