STAFFORDSHIRE: The part of North Staffordshire that marches with Derbyshire is a strange wild country of heather moors rising to low hills topped with fantastic jagged outcrops of millstone-grit which have names as rugged as their appearance - Ramshaw Rocks, the Roaches, Gradbach Hill. From the hanging woods above the river Dane we scrambled up through Ludchurch, a great cleft in the rocks some hundreds of feet deep and hundreds of yards long. Local legend has it that secret meetings used to take place there, but whether Luddite machine-wreckers or the then unpopular Methodists I have been unable to discover. One can see the recess halfway up the cliff which forms a natural pulpit from which the meetings were addressed. In spite of the strip of blue sky above, Ludchurch is a dank uncanny place of slippery rock with little vegetation but liverworts and ferns and sparse tufts of aira grass, and we were glad to emerge from it on to the moors where the sun was shining and red grouse were calling. Even there, however, one has to move cautiously for, half hidden in the heather, there are many deep holes and fissures which could swallow a man as easily as a dog. On the high moors the sun was so warm and the air so still that it was hard to believe that the date was November 1 and not mid-May.
Ludchurch is more commonly known as Lud’s Church
