Distance: 13.3 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: hard
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the gpx. file from Dropbox
Circular walk from the north Staffordshire market town of Leek out into the Peak District to the prominent and enigmatic Roaches gristone edge.
The Story
The Route
Getting Back
The Peak District’s Enigmatic Roaches
Towering over the Staffordshire market town of Leek to the north east lies The Roaches. This is a dramatic millstone grit escarpment perhaps more akin to the commanding edges on the eastern side of the Peak District National Park running high above the Derwent valley. However, the bands of gritstone run in thin strips down both sides of the White Peak, creating the edges as the rock erodes more slowly than the limestone in the heart of the southern half of the Peak District.
The Roaches, however, are far more impressively craggy than the rocks on the eastern side of the Peak District National Park. The place in the Midlands it perhaps most resembles is the quartzite protrusions of the Stiperstones ridge, high in the Shropshire hills, in the far west of the region.
No wonder that like the Stiperstones with their association with witchcraft The Roaches are a place of myth and legend, featuring in the modern mythology created by Alan Garner alongside Mow Cop, and Shutlingsloe in Cheshire to the north. As well as giving rise to more ancient, folksy myths, like that of the tricksy Doxeys in the muddy Doxey Pool, and the legend of Jenny Greenteeth who supposedly lives there. One weathered and warped chunk of millstone grit is called the Winking Man because of its resemblance – perhaps unsurprisingly – to a man who is winking.
To the north of The Roaches, right at the end of the ridge lies the deep chasm of Lud’s Church. This an ethereal otherworldly place, its deep rocky walls dripping water and covered with green moss. Supposedly it has links with Lollardy the 15th Century English heretical religious movement which foreshadowed Protestantism, and the canonical Arthurian legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which, judging by the dialect the author used, was written by somebody from the north west Midlands or Cheshire.
Most spectacular however, is the situation of the ridge as a whole. It rises out of the hilly but far less prominent landscape of north Staffordshire. Forming a commanding ridge, much steeper and more imposing on its western side, dividing pastoral north Staffordshire from the heart of the Staffordshire moors which run deep into the Peak District National Park, eventually becoming Derbyshire on the far side of the River Dove. In this way The Roaches, from the top of which on a good day you can see the Jodrell Bank Telescope in Cheshire and Snowdon in Wales to the north west, represents a caesura between the north Midlands and the base of the Pennines.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explorer enabling me to take them on my phone. Subscribe yourself via the banner above.
From the bus station on the edge of Leek town centre to reach The Roaches head north, out through the Victorian terraces, and 1930s council estates, and across small clusters of newbuild, to reach a track which comprises part of the Churnett Valley Way.
Follow this track away from the town, and where it peters out, pick up a footpath through woodland and across meadows around the base of Severn Trent’s Tittesworth Water reservoir.
Still following the Churnett Valley Way along footpaths, tracks, and short sections of public road you steadily approach The Roaches, reaching the edge of the village of Upper Hulme.
This is the nearest village to The Roaches where you turn left, following a narrow, but sometimes busy, lane uphill towards the ridge, passing the craggily prominent Hen Cloud to the base of The Roaches.
Here a steep but well worn footpath leads steadily up to the crest of the ridge through woodland.
Once on the ridge, which you crest near the Doxey Pool where Jenny Greenteeth purportedly lives, turn left and follow the path, taking in the weird rock formations and brilliant views on both sides.
Descending you reach the lane at Roaches End.
Turn left here, and then taking the right hand fork at a y-shaped junction you steadily descend, beginning the walk back to Leek.
You reach the small village of Meerbrook lying at the northern end of Tittesworth Water and continue along the pavement of a larger busier road along the side of the reservoir towards Leek.
Before reaching Leek you pick up a farm track heading across parkland before descending to the edge of the town at Abbey Green.
Returning to the lane you head left, before heading left again before reaching the main road which heads up into the town centre.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Leek no longer has a railway station, however, there are buses to many of the towns which lie nearby as well as Stoke-on-Trent city centre. Some of these services are significantly more frequent than others. At the time of writing in October 2023 both D&G Buses and First ran services to Hanley in Stoke from Leek, D&G’s services running half hourly, with the last one leaving at 20:15. Other services run to Buxton, Ashbourne, Macclesfield and outlying settlements like Cheddleton and Cheadle, but these are far less frequent than the ones into Hanley Bus Station in Stoke-on-Trent.