“Great crooked crags, cruelly jagged, the bristling barbs of rock seemed to brush the sky,” was how the nameless author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight described Staffordshire’s Roaches in the fourteenth century. Seven hundred years on, the mighty gritstone cliffs, whose knotted, lumpen faces loom above the main Leek to Buxton road, strike a no less imposing profile.
Guarding the southwest approaches to the Peak District, the rocks preside over one of the most dramatic landscape changes in mainland Britain. To the west, green pastureland and low wooded hills, with the Cheshire plains stretching into the distance. In the other direction, an expanse of dark, moody moors entangled by miles of salmon red gritstone walls.
The Roaches’ top edge, which can be accessed via several breaks in the escarpment, is the perfect platform from which to admire this dramatic transition – and provides as compelling a walk as any in the Peak District, boasting superb views along its whole length. The ridge holds four distinct summits, the most prominent of them Hen Cloud, the Midlands’ answer to the Rock of Gibraltar.
Saving Hen Cloud for a grand finale, our route gets under way by following in the footsteps of Sir Gawain: along the ridge’s high tier and down the far side through a tract of twisted oaks and beech trees straight from the pages of a medieval romance. Hidden in the depths of this fairytale forest is Lud’s Church, a kind of miniature gorge draped with mosses and ferns, which scholars have identified as the inspiration for Sir Gawain’s Green Chapel. From there, we loop back up to the ridge and retrace our steps to the foot of Hen Cloud – the final climb of the day.
Although strong walkers could easily complete this circuit in an afternoon, it’s a route definitely best expanded over a full day, which will give you ample time to enjoy the vistas from the Roaches’ edge, watch peregrine falcons swooping over the crags and savour the contrasting atmospheres of high moorland.
Route-finding is easy – except for the final stretch around the flank of Hen Cloud, where the path gets intermittently submerged under ferns during the summer months.
(A) Your typical Peak District gritstone edge, characteristic of the Dark Peak region to the north and west of the park, tends to fall away to near vertical cliffs. The Roaches, however (the name derives from the French for “rocks”, “roches”) are tilted gently skywards, which lends an eerie presence to the summits and phantasmagorical shapes worn out of their sides. In places, the outcrops stand like petrified heads staring mutely across the Staffs-Cheshire border, their features blurred by millennia of wind and rain.
Little could onlookers have imagined that a century later the same crags would be crawling with rock climbers. Since those working-class legends of the sport, Joe Brown and Don Whillans, met here in the 1950s, the Roaches has served as one of the Peak District’s foremost sites, with routes ranging from easy scrambles to E7s. Salford born Whillans, equipped with little more than a pair of plimsoles and his mother’s washing line, is credited with the first lead on the most famous of all: “the sloth”, so named because its ascent involves prolonged spells of dangling upside down in mid-air.
By Whillans’ day, the Brocklehurst estate was on its last legs and the cottage a hovel inhabited by a couple of eccentric hermits, Dougie (aka Lord of the Roaches) and his consort Annie. Judging by the invective they hurled on visiting climbers (and vice versa, by all accounts) the pair little appreciated the rising chorus of karabiners and belay plates clanking above their rooftops. Rockhall now serves as the Whillans Memorial Hut in honour of the climbing hero who cut his teeth on the rocks above it.
(B) Overshadowed by some of the more ghoulish formations in the Roaches, the cave around which Rockhall was originally built played host over the centuries to a succession of smugglers, thieves and deserters. In the Napoleonic wars its inhabitants were an old crone named Bessy Bowyer and her daughter – descendents of a notorious Scottish renegade-bandit, or “moss trooper”. The daughter reportedly possessed an uncommon voice and used to wander at night among the rocks singing, “songs that sounded foreign to English ears.” Local legend has it that she was abducted, and that her ghost still haunts a small, circular tarn on the ridgetop known as Doxy Pool. The pond has, since the Domesday Book, been associated with female occult phenomena (in the medieval dialect of the northwest Midlands, “doxey” meant a fortune teller, healer or “wise woman”). It’s also said that the peaty depths of the pool are inhabited by a mermaid who lures unwary walkers to a watery grave.
(C) It’s easy to see why literary historians connect this chasm with Sir Gawain’s Green Chapel. In the poem, the “hideous oratory” where he travelled for his appointment with the dreaded Green Knight had, “a hole in each end and on either side/And was overgrown with grass in great patches/All hollow it was within, only an old cavern/Or the crevice of an ancient crag.”
The site’s present name derives from the mid-fourteenth century, when it hosted congregations of a religious sect known as the Lollards (later corrupted to “Luds”). As the first group ever to openly oppose the teachings of the Catholic church, the Lollards were considered heretics and burned at the stake, which is why they chose to assemble in this remote spot.
Our path passes directly through the little chasm, and continues out the other side through the forest lining the upper reaches of the Dane river. “Wonderfully wild was their way through the woods”, recounts the narrator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Little can have altered here in many centuries – save perhaps for the appearance in the 1930s of some incongruously exotic animals. Released from a nearby zoo, five Bennett’s wallabies and three Tibetan yaks survived on this windy moorland top for a couple of decades.
The yaks are long gone now, but you may still be lucky enough to catch the bizarre sight of the sole surviving wallaby hopping through the heather. Another rarity to look out for are the peregrine falcons who, after a hundred-year absence, returned to nest on a ledge above Rockhall Cottage in the summer of 2008.