I’ve been up in the Peak District a fair bit recently. It’s funny, isn’t it, how we have such different expectations of UK national parks than we do of those abroad. So much of them is rolling farmland and forestry monocultures that I wonder, if we were to suggest them as National Parks now, whether we’d be laughed out of the room. I’m not saying that these pastoral landscapes aren’t valuable, and the Peak District is undoubtedly beautiful- but I am saying that, for me, those landscapes never quite match that magic feeling I get in a nature reserve.
Except when I walk into Lud’s Church. The 18m chasm, hidden in Staffordshire’s Back Forest, comes out of nowhere and plunges you into a damp world of rock, ferns and moss. It has squeezes where both your shoulders graze the rock, and gorgeous light that filters down from above and picks out the texture of the gritstone. It has wider, higher sections from which you can see the ferns tumbling down the cliffs like waterfalls. The air around you changes and you can feel the dampness of the walls around you, and the world of grass and heather you’ve just stepped out of feels like it’s a hundred miles away.
The first time I walked into Lud’s Church, it shot straight to the top of my places to show people in the Peak District (and I love Pride and Prejudice as much as anyone, so this is saying something). Sure enough I was back less than three weeks later- that second time we had it all to ourselves, which really did make it feel like you’d stumbled across a well kept secret.
You can join footpaths to Lud’s Church from the old Mill at Gradbach, or from the Roaches – I’ve done both, because I can’t overemphasise how much I love this place. It’s a fairly straight forward 20 minute walk (ish) from the mill, and 30 minutes from the Roaches, depending of course on which side of them you’ve started off at (30 mins is from the side that’s closest to the Back Forest). Both routes are really lovely, but if you tackle it from the Roaches there’s a chance that an ice cream van will be there on the way back. Natural beauty, a Yorkshire tea, and a 99- the holy trinity of a good day in the Peaks.
