The Roaches

Gritstone towers erupt from heather moorland in a jagged ridgeline where wallabies — escapees from a private zoo around 1940 — long roamed below the crags. The Roaches is a two-mile Staffordshire escarpment where climbing meets strangeness in a landscape that looks borrowed from another country.

The Roaches — from the French roche, rock — rise to 505 metres, their gritstone edges sculpted by wind and frost into towers and overhangs that draw climbers year-round; Don Whillans established many of the classic friction-dependent routes here in the 1950s and 60s, and the crag's problems still test bold leaders. The wallaby colony, descended from wartime escapees of a private collection at Roaches Hall, survived for decades in the bracken — sightings became rare and the mob's fate stays a beloved local mystery. The ridge from Hen Cloud, an isolated buttress rising like a ship's prow, runs to the trig point across open access land with views into Cheshire and Derbyshire, and below the crest hides Lud's Church — a deep, moss-walled chasm associated with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, where every sound turns medieval.