Derbyshire County Council said it was increasingly having to resurface Snake Pass following landslips, but it does not have enough money for bigger repairs.

“There’s one place on Snake, at Alport, where you can see that half the road has gone,” said Ms Cupit.

Traffic lights have therefore been installed so that cars can still use one of the lanes.

“We haven’t got the resources to be able to carry out the repair, because that’s many millions of pounds, and that would take it off the wider highways budget that we currently get,” said Ms Cupit.

Although the road links Sheffield and Manchester – which are not in Derbyshire – it is paid for by Derbyshire County Council rather than from a central budget.

“County-wide we only get about £27m a year as a base, and that’s for the whole county – 3,500 miles of roads,” said Ms Cupit.

The council has therefore asked the Department for Transport (DfT) for a “landslips fund” to keep the road open in future.

However, the DfT told the BBC it was “not responsible for Snake Pass” and “does not hold contingency funding for major repairs of this sort”.

Ms Cupit said in response: “We have specific challenges in Derbyshire with landslips, which have been recognised by the DfT in the past.

“Other areas just don’t have these issues to the same extent as us, and this is not recognised in our funding from the government.”

She warned the council would not have the resources to deal with a major landslip.

“There are four landslips along Snake Pass at the moment, of varying degrees of severity,” she said.

“That’s quite a big alarm bell that potentially there could be a bigger source of movement.”

Mr Hargreaves said there was precedent for closing the road, as part of another road in the Peak District – the A625 – was abandoned in 1979.

“The road through Hope Valley had to be closed in the 1970s for similar reasons, that it was collapsing at Mam Tor, and in the end the county engineers just gave up and said they couldn’t do anything more,” he said.