When viewed from the south, the Weaver Hills rise boldly and majestically, out of the gently hilly east Staffordshire countryside.
Their highest peak, called The Walk and equipped with a trig point at its summit, is 371 metres high. Pretty tall by the standards of most of the Midlands, being comparable to the bulk of the Malvern range, and significantly higher than many of the region’s county tops. As a rule most of the Weaver Hills’ summits are over 350 metres high.
The short ridge lies just outside the Peak District National Park but is considered the southernmost outpost of the Pennine’s limestone geology, making it part of the White Peak which extends across the southern part of the protected landscape.
Walking the Weaver Hills certainly feels like being in the landscape of the National Park further north. It is open access land, despite quite a few fences. The Peak and Northern Footpaths Society have planted their distinctive waymarks here and there. Certainly the most southerly place I have seen them.
The Weaver Hills’ exclusion from the Peak District is probably due to their situation south of several serious limestone quarrying operations at Wardlow and Cauldon. The latter supplies a big on-site cement works operated by LaFarge. While Wardlow Quarry these days is an R&D centre for local industrial titan JCB who have an HQ at nearby Rocester and manufacturing plants right across eastern Staffordshire. Contributing to the nearby Churnet Valley’s nickname of “Staffordshire’s Rhineland”.
Quarrying, JCB and a major road around the southern edge of the Peak District aside, the area is pretty remote and quiet. Qualities which attracted Jean-Jacques Rousseau to rent a house near the Weaver Hills in 1766 during a period of exile from France. Not that they gave him much respite. The solitude and slow pace of life in the far east of Staffordshire on the fringes of the Peak at that time, purportedly was terrible for his fretful, neurotic, and at times outright paranoid, state of mind.