The best route, when it is desired to ascend this noble eminence, is _viâ_ Hayfield, beginning at Bowden Bridge, and going up the valley past Farlands. It is indispensable, however, either to be provided with a map, or to be accompanied by a guide, as well as to take precautions in regard to possible trespass.[19] Once upon the summit, the reward is ample, alike in the magnificent scenery, rich with distant purple shadows, and in the inspiring atmosphere. If in the landscape there is nothing gay and festal, no slight thing is it to stand in the presence-chamber of these antique solitudes, reading the silent history of centuries of winter ravage, so terrible that no wonder the very rocks have thrust up their grey heads to ask the meaning of it. No slight thing is it either at any time to find ourselves beside the very urn of a bounding and musical stream, such as trots along the valley, this one having its birth in "Kinder Downfall"--a far-seen shoot of water from the western cliff, a single silver line of pretty cataract that might have heard of Terni and the Bridal Veil, and so much the more precious because the only one of its kind within the distance, which is from Manchester, say precisely twenty miles. Rain of course is needed, as at Lodore, for the full development. The writer of the "Guide" says that another very beautiful and not infrequent spectacle to be witnessed here is when in wet weather, or after a storm, the wind blows strongly from the W.S.W. "Coming from the direction of Hayfield, it sweeps over the Upper Moor and the bare backs of the bleak Blackshaws, and beating against the high flanking walls of rock is concentrated with prodigious power into the angle of the mountain, forcing back the whole volume of the cascade, and carrying it up in most fantastic and beautiful lambent forms, which are driven back again as heavy rain and mist for half a mile across the bog, then perhaps to return to be shivered into spray once more, unless in some momentary lull the torrent rushes down in huge volume." "Sometimes," he adds, "in winter, the fall, with the huge walls of rock flanking its sides, becomes one mass of icy stalactites, which as the sun declines present a magnificent spectacle." According to Mr. H. B. Biden, in _Notes and Queries_, Feb. 16th, 1878, though other writers think differently, and, as it seems to us, less reasonably, it is to the downfall that Kinder Scout owes its name. Kin-(cin)-dwr-scwd, he tells us, in Cymraeg signifies "High water cataract."