Chapter 9
There is the comfort of a cream tea about English country lanes. As I walk from Shrewsbury to Stoke-on-Trent, the May sunshine is filtered through fresh leaves that cast a soft mantle over the land. The rugged tracks of Ireland and Wales seem a world away, as do the mini mountains of Planet Curlew on the Welsh/English border. Heading further into England, I am aware of another transition, of leaving behind not only different landscapes but also the remnants of a different state of mind. Traces of the ancient Christian synergy with nature can still be found out west, living on through old stories, folklore and the ancient symbols carved into rock, but it was eradicated more thoroughly further east.
Early Christian missionaries to the British Isles converted the pagans to worship one God, but instead of presenting them with complex theological arguments they communicated with these earthy, practical people through a shared experience of nature. The natural world was a language everyone understood, albeit with a different take. For the pagans the Earth was redolent with meaning and nature was to be feared as much as revered. The gods could wreak havoc as well as bless humanity at will, and had to be praised and soothed. People dwelled in the midst of spirits whose minds were capricious. The Christians introduced just one God and one creator who was entirely good, and the natural world was seen as a great book that told of his greatness. The merging of these two mindsets produced an early Christianity that was visceral and rooted in the very stuff of the Earth, as the story of St Beuno and many other tales show. To begin with, therefore, Christians were outdoor people. As Mary Low writes in Celtic Christianity and Nature:
Long ago, before there were churches, it was normal for people to practise their religion out of doors. In the Hebrew Bible, Abraham meets his God under an oak tree and Deborah prophesied under a palm. In the New Testament, Jesus prays in the temple at Jerusalem, but also in the hills of Galilee. Nature was an acceptable place of worship, as it still is in many parts of the world … These are the old wild sanctuaries, the first places of worship.
As a consequence, the first Christian churches were bright places, mirroring the landscapes surrounding them. The walls were covered with paintings telling of biblical tales and often featuring trees, birds and natural features familiar to the congregation. Martin Poulsom, a friend, theologian and Catholic priest, wonders about the effect of pre-Reformation churches on the spiritual imaginations of the faithful. Going into one of these brightly painted sacred spaces, he reckons, ‘might have felt like they were stepping into a building and out into a vast landscape of biblical imagery, the wide cosmos, and the world as it was meant to be’. But over the following centuries huge forces came into play that eroded these connections. The Christian-Pagan fusion, characterised by the cross and the circle, increasingly gave way to straight lines and rigidity, as a centralised, hierarchical Church became established. The battle for the heart of Christian practice raged through the centuries, producing significant turning points for the natural world.
Over time, money and power corroded the message of Christian holiness and simplicity, but the suppression of this opulence by the reformist monk Martin Luther in the sixteenth century, in favour of a back-to-basics, uniform religion, had consequences other than just dismantling a wealthy hierarchy. Nick Mayhew-Smith, an author who has written extensively about spirituality in the landscape, believes the Reformation played a part in the removal of nature from worship. The reformers wanted no distractions from the pure word of God, and the vibrant paintings in churches were whitewashed not just from the buildings but also from the minds of people:
Rather than stopping the march towards human power structures in favour of something more sympathetic to nature, it simply shifted focus to the individual’s relationship with God, which in many ways widened the gulf between the spiritual and the physical worlds. No sacramentality, no need for priests, no need for the transformation of material objects (bread, wine, baptismal water) into anything special, just a person and a Bible.
Many leading reformers deemed colourful paintings a temptation to wrong-thinking, and God was rendered sepia and only accessed through words. This in turn must have helped to separate faith from nature in the worshipper’s heart and mind. Add to this the great intellectual revolution of the Renaissance, when science was divorced from the sacred, and the death knell for a spirit-filled natural world tolled through Christendom. The Celtic-Christian approach to religion clung on in the far west, but for the most part it was suppressed and St Beuno and his curlew faded from view.
This shedding of a Christian practice imbued with nature took many hundreds of years, but eventually the natural world was excluded from liturgy and daily worship. The church swept wildness out of its buildings and back into its place, which was decidedly not at the altar. The joys, fears, challenges and dangers of a wild world were kept outside of the four-square walls in favour of a system that required order and predictability. As Mary Low describes:
Church buildings, temples, mosques and synagogues all represent a retreat from this raw encounter with nature. In many parts of the world it is simply assumed that proper worship needs a roof over its head. Outdoor spirituality is seen as a fringe activity or private affair, and on Sundays throughout the year Christians turn their backs on nature to worship its creator in a house of their own making.
The only nature commonly seen in churches now is in the potent symbolism of water for baptism, images in stained-glass windows, flower arrangements, seasonal holly and Christmas trees, or the produce that represents harvest festival. On the whole, Christian nature has been tamed and confined. God has become an indoor spirit.
Indeed, Christian theology looked with increasing suspicion on the natural world, concerned about a return to a more pagan mindset. Non-human life was seen as integral to the fall of Man, nature was unbridled, lustful and immodest in every way. The Book of Genesis tells us that a snake deceived Eve by offering her the forbidden fruit from the tree of life. Wilfully tempting, she fell for its wiles, and in so doing condemned all of humanity to lives of toil and hardship. ‘By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.’
Far from being bright and spiritual guides to our inner lives, a view held by the early Church, the non-human world was now deemed incapable of reaching heaven. To truly be created in the image of God, said theologians, animals need both rationality and intellect, two qualities present only in human beings. Creaturely life was downgraded from co-creators on a spiritual Earth to irrational creatures in a fallen one. This shift in vision was a wretched analysis and has ever since dominated the fate of nature in the mainly Christian west. The ruthless way in which some Christian people treat the world around them follows from that re-visioning of non-human life from spirit-filled to soulless.
These themes I explore with Martin Poulsom, my Catholic priest friend, who accompanies me for two days on this Midlands stretch of my walk. His offer of company is well timed. I am tired and in need of encouragement for the long, curlew-free walk to the Staffordshire moors. I also feel the need to let off some theological steam about the loss of nature from religious doctrine. Back in 2005 I gave a talk in Clifton Cathedral, in Bristol, urging the Catholic Church to rediscover its original connection to nature. After all, some of the most precious habitats on Earth are held in its hands. The whole of the Amazon basin and the Philippines, large parts of the Congo and sub-Saharan Africa are in areas where Catholicism is the dominant form of organised religion and still has political and social influence, yet enormous environmental destruction takes place. In recent years, all of the world’s major religions have paid more attention to climate change, particularly because it adversely affects poorer nations, but the protection of species is low down on their agendas, if it is present at all. Martin is a kind, non-judgemental listener and he lends a sympathetic ear, though he can offer no solutions.
Some poets have looked enviously upon non-human creatures, and the freedoms that they enjoy as a result of their downgraded status. Being devoid of an eternal soul means life can be unfettered and unbound by the moral choices that dominate human existence. Creaturely life is not torn between the temptations of bodily desires and the rigours of holy living, nor is it tormented by visions of heaven and hell. R.S. Thomas considered this ignorant bliss in his poem ‘The Minister’. Looking at a cow, he wryly observed that:
No one ever teased her with pictures of
Flyless meadows,
Where the grass is eternally green
No matter how often the tongue bruises it,
Or the dung soils it.1
And in ‘Tales from the Twilight’, W.B. Yeats playfully describes the Christian natural world as ‘Nations of gay creatures, having no soul, nothing in their bodies but a mouthful of sweet air.’
Martin and I sit in the sun, drinking tea by a canal a few miles outside Market Drayton, and we watch children feeding noisy ducks. Gulping sweet air and squabbling over bread, much to the amusement of onlookers, doesn’t seem such a bad existence, and I feel heaven will be the poorer if it does not welcome such bright and beautiful beings.
The next stage on my walk is an emotional stopover in Stockton Brook, a village in the Staffordshire Moorlands where my family lived for forty-five years. Instead of going home I stay for two nights with our next-door neighbours, Maggie and Mark. Just a few months earlier, we sold the family house after the death of my parents, and another family lives there now. It is strange to stand in the garden and look over a high hedge to the trees my father had planted and to the greenhouse I helped him dismantle and clean out one summer. There are people talking and noises of activity coming from the garden, but they are not voices I recognise. The same birdsong fills the air, though, and I am sure my dad’s spirit drifts among the flowers that he so loved. It hits me hard that I can no longer talk to him sitting on his bench by his pond, or watch my mother pick soft fruit from the vegetable patch by the bottom hedge. It was my father who often took me to the Peak District, just a few miles up the road, and showed me the fossils in the limestone walls and the remains of old mineshafts. We stood on bridges and marvelled at the dry river beds in summer, when just a few months earlier there had been rushing water. We took identification books and tried to remember the names of common wildflowers, but neither of us was much good at it. We walked quietly around the Arbor Low Stone Circle, trying to imagine who raised these slabs and why. I saw how sad he was at the pulling up of the railway to form the Tissington Trail (he was a great steam train enthusiast), but he always laughed at the ‘Winking Man’, a natural stone feature on The Roaches. The rock formation looks like a man’s face, and as you drive past he seems to wink at you. One day we broke open a piece of limestone and revealed a perfectly preserved shellfish. I must have been about twelve years old. The feelings of awe and wonder were so powerful. I knew we were the only people ever to see this creature and I had so many questions. How come a shellfish was now in a landlocked valley? What else lived alongside it? How old was it? What colour was it when it was alive? That moment set me on a path to study geology at university, and my curiosity about the Earth and its life came directly from those shared times. All these thoughts and more came back as I look at what was once our house. Maggie and Mark are sensitive souls and understand how emotional it is to be so near and yet so far from home. They make sitting next door a warm and fun-filled time.
I reach the Staffordshire Moors in the Peak District a couple of days later and a cross curlew is transforming the blustery air into full-throated anger. I must have been near a nest or chicks. Its harsh, anxious, klacking call is a full-on curlew bombardment, described by poet Clyde Holmes in ‘Curlew’s Nest’:
Incensed wing flames.
An aerial attack
sputtering his aggression
in machine-gun rhythms.
The male (I assume by the length of the bill) swoops first one way then another in a desperate attempt to drive me away. I search briefly to try to see what he is protecting. Through binoculars I look for the periscope neck of a sitting bird, scanning and alert. Or perhaps glimpse some tiny curlew fluffballs, with their impossibly large feet and bright black eyes. But the incessant screeching of the curlew is too distracting. The experience of being attacked by a curlew is something I share with poet Jonathan Humble in his charming poem, ‘Incoming’. Jonathan was so astonished at the ferocity of a curlew he fell off his bike:
I am not your enemy dear messenger,
but still your intent feels murderous …
I cannot help but admire your bravery and the skill
with which you missed my skull by inches. How are you
to know, my crescent beaked Nemesis, that I am,
in fact, a fully paid up member of the RSPB and have
no designs on the eggs you’ve hidden …
I leave, and my curlew assailant retreats. It is silent once more. The intensity of the male’s reaction shows how high the stakes are – it’s all or nothing for their nest. If it is predated they most likely won’t lay again, unless the eggs are lost very early. So much time and effort goes into getting this far, so much pair bonding, energy for egg production, defence of territory. Through curlew eyes there are dangers everywhere, from snakes to foxes to birds of prey. Add to those problems the modern ones of domestic dogs, cows, sheep, horses, hill walkers, joggers and mountain bikes, and there is no room for complacency and little time to rest.
Walking The Roaches is to feel the sky vast above your head and little shelter from the wind. But the starkness of the moors is electrified by the call of a curlew. ‘A moor without a curlew is like a night without a moon, and he who has not eyes for the one and an ear for the other is a mere body without a soul,’ wrote naturalist George Bolam in 1912. Whether it’s the bubbling song, the soul-searching curlee, or the harsh alarm calls, all of a curlew’s repertoire is part of the magic of the moorland. I don’t particularly remember hearing them when I came here as a child, but I think they must have entered my subconscious, weaving themselves into my psyche.
The Roaches is an escarpment of rock and heather, the closest patch of moorland to Stoke-on-Trent. It sits at 500 metres above sea level, between Leek and Buxton, an area known as the South West Peak, part of the Peak District National Park. And it happens to be one of the places on Earth I love the most. Although only a few square miles across, it is surprisingly wild and dramatic. The area was supposedly named by French prisoners from the Napoleonic Wars who called it Les Roches, The Rocks, because of the slabs of dark millstone grit that jut out of the heather like blunt teeth. The coarse sand that makes up the gritstone was carried by rivers into a vast delta where layer upon layer built up, the bedding planes crisscrossing as the rivers altered course. These laminated, shifting sands are now visible in the outcrops that stick out of the moor. Rounded by aeons of weathering and erosion, the crags provide sloping ledges for nesting peregrines, and testing routes for rock climbers. They say that scaling them is like climbing an elephant’s bum, all rounded wrinkles and gritty friction. The dark towers of rock look like they’ve had a hard life and seem to stare resentfully out towards the genteel and far more frequently visited White Peak to the east, where green rolling hills and creamy limestone walls create a Postman Pat-like landscape that many find more appealing.
But this brooding dark moor is curlew country, and it is here that they nest amongst the wet rushes and cattle-grazed fields. A jolly band of Staffordshire Wildlife Trust volunteers accompanies me over The Roaches and we pass two of my favourite landmarks. On top of the ridge is the supposedly bottomless Doxey Pool, said to be home to a mermaid with the unalluring name of Jenny Greenteeth. Ms Greenteeth is supposedly the manifestation of a woman who drowned in the pool one foggy day, and who now takes her revenge by enticing unwary walkers to their deaths. And below us, hidden from view, is the mysterious Lud’s Church, one of the most evocative and atmospheric natural features in Britain. Rarely visited, it remains a treasure to be stumbled across (and hopefully not into) by hikers wandering from the track. Formed by a landslip, the narrow chasm is 100 metres long and 15 metres tall. It is said to have been a hideout for Robin Hood and the site of the Green Chapel in the medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. What is certain is that in the fifteenth century the Lollards, the heretical followers of John Wycliffe, met here to hold their services, hence the reference to a church. But it is also thought to be a site of worship with more sinister connotations. Water constantly trickles down the walls. The interior air, even on the warmest of days, is dank and cold. Not much light reaches the nave of this natural sanctuary, and the weak shafts that do penetrate the ferns seem too afraid to reveal the crevasses. Legend has it that this is the place where the Devil chooses to say Matins.
Full of tales and mystery, The Roaches mark the start of vast tracts of upland that define much of northern Britain. Rolling hills, moors and mountains over 800 metres make up 40 per cent of Britain’s topography, and most of this high ground is in the north. These are varied landscapes, some dry and heathery, others wet and bog-like. Upland farms and areas of rough grassland are part of the mosaic. Heather moorland like The Roaches makes up a quarter of the upland areas, and indeed 75 per cent of all heather moorland in the world is in Britain. While these high areas may seem wild, and in our imaginations we may like to think of them as wildernesses, the truth is that they are all worked and managed to some degree. Traditionally, farming was the mainstay, with livestock periodically moved up and down the hills with the seasons. More recently, hill farming has decreased, and forestry, wind farms and the leisure industry have become ways of making a living. Grouse shooting developed over the nineteenth century, and although it has declined, shooting estates still make up 12 per cent of heather moorland. The vast majority of breeding curlews in Britain nest in this complex landscape; in fact, one-quarter of the world’s population of Numenius arquata breeds in these uplands. How we decide to develop Britain’s mountains and moors in the future is vital to the survival of curlews, and many other ground-nesting birds, too.
The changes wrought over the centuries in The Roaches, small and compact as the area is, also apply to the story of the larger tracts of heather moorland further north. It is a tale of isolation, farming, shooting, abandonment and then a re-imagining and reclamation. It can pretty much be told through the history of one unusual building – Don Whillans’ Hut.
An overhang of rock in the middle of the escarpment shelters an eerie, mock Gothic house. It protrudes directly from the rock face, which forms its back wall. Were it larger it would no doubt have been used in horror films, where hapless young women find themselves marooned for a night in a thunderstorm, but it is actually a rather small two-storey building designed to look grand. Made out of the same gritstone it is built into, the roof is turreted and the windows arched. The rocks and trees shield it from sunlight and the walls are green with moss. Don Whillans’ Hut, or Rockhall Cottage as it used to be called when I was familiar with it, is dark, damp and hugely atmospheric. It is as much a part of The Roaches for me as the heather and the crags, and it commands a breathtaking view over the valley to the west.
It was built in the nineteenth century on the site of a cave formed from fallen blocks. In the eighteenth century this dark and cold cavern housed the ‘old crone’ Bess and her beautiful daughter. They sheltered ne’er-do-wells and law-breakers and surrounded themselves with intrigue. One legend says Bess’s daughter could be heard singing haunting ballads amongst the rocks at night in a language that wasn’t English. Add to this atmospheric scene numerous appearances of the anguished ghost of a local murderer called John Naden, who was hanged for cutting the throat of his lover’s husband, and this place takes on a mysterious and dangerous aspect. With just a scattering of farms, few tracks and no transport, The Roaches of old was wild, a perfect place for eccentrics and outcasts who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, live in society. I am sure many British moors have housed such characters, real or imagined. Daniel Gumb was a cave dweller on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall about the same time, for example. As a repository for our fears and dark imaginings, moors are hard to beat.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century The Roaches was absorbed into the Swythamley Estate, owned by the wealthy Brocklehurst family. They developed it for shooting red grouse, following the pattern of so many moors at this time. Shooting grouse for sport was increasingly popular through the nineteenth century as an emerging wealthy elite developed an enthusiasm for pastimes in the romantic uplands. They travelled there on the railways built on the back of the Industrial Revolution, and shot birds with the new, mass-produced, breech-loading guns, which were quick to load and fire. The grouse moors became the equivalent of today’s expensive golf courses – exclusive places to do business and make influential friends, even to arrange marriages. As Lady Aberdeen put it in her Memories of a Scottish Grannie:
An informal and pleasant mode of intercourse sprang up which … had important results to the country, for when politicians of different parties were fellow guests under the same roof for a week, differences were apt to be smoothed over and compromises effected.
The Roaches were part of this very British trend. Locals were kept away and poachers dealt with severely. Access to shooting estates for ordinary folk became increasingly difficult, as the UK census of 1871 records as many as 17,000 gamekeepers across the country. In 1862 Rockhall Cottage was built specifically to house gamekeepers, and it was located on the site of Bess’s old cave dwelling. It had no facilities and was little more than a shell, but it certainly looked the part, a cross between a small castle and a folly. One of the keepers who lived in Rockhall Cottage apparently brought up twelve children there.
The moor gradually changed character as the Brocklehursts put in roads and bridges, and cut footpaths through the estate. The management of the land for grouse became increasingly intense, as shooting proved to be a good way to gain revenue. Drainage channels were dug to dry out the ground to encourage heather growth, and the heather itself was managed by a cyclic pattern of burning and by sheep grazing. The resulting mosaic of fresh new growth provided food for grouse, and the older, denser patches were ideal for nesting. The gamekeepers also controlled predators, shooting foxes, stoats, weasels, pine martens, polecats, crows, jays, ravens and rooks. Birds of prey such as red kites, buzzards, peregrines, hen harriers and some owls were also eradicated. Anything that compromised the production of grouse chicks was removed, classed under the catch-all derogatory term: vermin.
Not only did the grouse benefit from this intense management of heather, tooth, beak and claw, but meadow pipits, curlews, golden plover, black grouse and lapwings also thrived. The springtime air was filled with the call of waders. The Birds of Staffordshire, by T. Smith, records that the gamekeepers liked curlews and encouraged them, using their loud protestations at intruders near their nests to alert them to foxes or poachers. It also states that curlews were ‘numerous’ on the moors. In fact, they were still so common on The Roaches in the first half of the twentieth century that a curlew was chosen as the symbol on the crest of the Staffordshire Moorlands District Council. This heraldic shield shows one rising out of the heather, and the motif is stamped on the sides of household rubbish bins throughout the moorlands region. Not many people nowadays realise their bins are decorated with a curlew; most of the people I ask think it is a phoenix rising out of flames.
The burgeoning of curlew numbers on the moorland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to them spreading down the hillsides and colonising the rush-filled fields of the farms on the lower slopes, a pattern seen throughout the UK. This was the curlew’s heyday, the time when they bred over most of the country, their numbers swollen by successful breeding on upland areas. As predator control was also common in the lowlands, not just on pheasant-shooting estates but on farms more generally, the scene was set for curlews to become farmland birds. They had made the transition from spirits of the wilderness to birds of the fields, entering our lives and more fully engaging with us in everyday places.
The two World Wars, however, changed everything – for people and the landscape. Many keepers went off to fight, and the social and political upheavals shifted society away from the old order. By the end of the Second World War, activities like grouse shooting faded in many areas, as it did on The Roaches, and many estates resumed grazing as the main source of income. Another pastime of the wealthy also declined. Like many wealthy landowners of the time, the Brocklehursts had built up an exotic menagerie that was housed on the moor near their shooting lodge. After the main animal lover of the family, Courtney Brocklehurst, was killed in action, the animals were simply released into the ‘wild’. Most died very quickly (emus, Asian antelopes, peacocks), but the Bennett’s wallabies and a single yak roamed the moor for a while, regularly surprising walkers and car drivers. The yak apparently lived until the 1950s, but the wallabies survived longer and often appeared in the local paper. At their peak there were about fifty of them, but cold winters and poor food saw them gradually dwindle to the odd one or two. A local farmer, Frank Belfield, wrote on a Peak District website, ‘In 1963, which was an exceptionally cold winter, with daytime temperatures below freezing for a number of weeks, I fed hay to the wallabies along with my sheep. However, at the end of the cold spell, one night the foul weather returned with a vengeance and the next morning I found 13 dead wallabies behind the north wall bordering Rockhall wood’. Occasional sightings still come in, but the last confirmed one was from a photograph taken in 2009.
The last of the Brocklehurst family died in 1974, and Swythamley Estate was broken up and sold. A large part of The Roaches was bought by sheep farmers in Macclesfield, who crowded it with animals and restricted access to the public. Despite no drainage, electricity or running water, Rockhall Cottage was bought by an unconventional couple who wanted to get away from it all, namely ‘Lord Dougie, King of the Roaches’ and his wife Annie. An eccentric to cap all eccentrics, Lord Dougie wore an eyepatch and prowled around the boulders and trees, having altercations with the climbers and snarling at walkers. I often walked here as a child with my dad and we loved seeing him, and he was totally harmless. The poor man was driven mad by thoughtless climbers, and nosy people who would hang around trying to get a look at him and his garden. To be fair, it was quite a sight. Painted on the side of a huge boulder in the middle of his garden was a none-too-subtle warning, ‘Keep Out Or I’ll Shoot You!’ Over the gate was a hangman’s noose. Next to a wall was a grave with the name of his wife (despite the fact that she was still alive) carved into the headstone. Set against the backdrop of an eerie house, there’s little wonder he attracted so much attention.
Lord Dougie kept the magic of his little patch of moorland going, but the rest was under serious threat. Fuelled by farming subsidies, sheep took over. The Peak District saw a five-fold increase in sheep numbers over the twentieth century, most markedly in the last half.2 They did untold damage. Overgrazing destroyed the heather and their many hooves trampled the nests of waders. Further drainage was put in place to make the land better for livestock, increasing the damage to the soils. Many areas not grazed were turned over to Sitka spruce plantations, which sheltered foxes and crows. The face of The Roaches became battered and scarred. With no predator control, no management of heather, and widespread wildlife-unfriendly farming and forestry, curlew numbers plummeted. For the last quarter of the twentieth century the number of breeding curlews on the Staffordshire Moorlands fell by more than 60 per cent, and there are now not many more than a hundred pairs in total for the whole area, around 230 square miles. Stemming this decline seems a Herculean task.
In 1980 the Peak District National Park bought a large part of the land, and sheep numbers were reduced. Access was reopened and walkers encouraged back into the area. In 1990 Rockhall Cottage was deemed unfit for human habitation, and Dougie and Annie were moved to a warm, sanitary flat with all the mod cons. Their dilapidated castle was restored and upgraded by the British Mountaineering Council, and turned into comfortable accommodation with heating, water, hot showers and a well-equipped kitchen. It was renamed Don Whillans’ Hut after the famous climber, who established some iconic routes amongst the crags. This development symbolised a revival of outdoor sports seen across Britain. The Roaches is now incredibly popular, not just with rock climbers and hill walkers but also with mountain bikers, birdwatchers, photographers, horseriders, dog walkers and picnickers. It is estimated that 100,000 visitors each year come to The Roaches, making erosion of footpaths and disturbance to nesting birds an increasing problem. As car parking has become more difficult, restrictions have been put in place along the narrow roads below the escarpment and a shuttle bus operates at weekends. The Roaches has been ‘discovered’ and The Ramblers has placed it in ‘the top 50 walking routes for Britain’s finest views’.
It is not only people that are returning. Since 2008 a pair of peregrines has nested once more on the crags, the first pair for a hundred years after the sustained persecution by gamekeepers and farmers. The Staffordshire Wildlife Trust set up ‘Peregrine Watch’ to show the birds to the public through a telescope in a car park, but it also helps keep an eye on them. Anti-raptor activists and the illegal falconry trade are a constant threat, and in 2015 four chicks disappeared from their nest just two weeks before fledging. With the increase in visitor numbers through the area, disturbance is a major worry, but it is heartening to see that walkers and climbers are generally cooperative in keeping away from the breeding ledge each year. Merlins are also seen in the area during the breeding season, although no nest has been recorded. Buzzards are once again a common sight, and red kites can also be seen flying over the moor.
In 2011 the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust took over the management of The Roaches and began a programme of restoration. Drains have been unblocked and wet areas restored to try to persuade redshank and snipe to return. Footpaths have been upgraded. The Sitka plantations are being felled and the rushy pastures, with cooperation from the farmers, are being managed to encourage curlews back to the fields. The aim is to join up the fragmented landscape of this small patch of moor to create a coherent fabric. Slowly but surely, The Roaches are being managed back into a more bio-diverse landscape, but always with the restrictions imposed by the sheer number of visitors.
Whether the few remaining pairs of curlews (there are only around six pairs left in the immediate Roaches area) can increase is anyone’s guess; there may well be just too many pressures. Dean Powell is a blogger who writes about Staffordshire Moorlands’ wildlife. Just a couple of days before I reach The Roaches myself, he writes the following post on his site, Nature’s Parliament:
What would the Staffordshire Moorlands be like without Curlew, the largest wader species in the western Palearctic. For me, Wolf Edge, Knotbury, Three Shire Head, Gibb Tor, The Roaches, Morridge, Ipstones Edge and the fields around Cheadle and Denstone would be empty of song and voice, of poetry and musical beauty, empty of a wonderful feathered friend. No doubt I would weep and there would be pain, loss and grief. Perhaps I would sit, watch, wait and listen to the ghosts of this species in vast moorland spaces, with only memories of what was once a thriving bird in this part of the world, only memories of what used to be.
The stories of Bess’s Cave, Rockhall Cottage and Don Whillans’ Hut are the stories of The Roaches, and they resonate across moorland Britain. Once remote and isolated, this landscape has undergone numerous transitions, and curlews have found themselves both the beneficiaries and the victims of our upland endeavours. What the future holds for these birds is not at all certain. Brexit, social and political trends and climate change will all play major roles as the twenty-first century unfolds. The world for curlews looks very uncertain indeed.
It is time to make my way to the White Peak, a few miles to the east. As I say my farewells to my fellow walkers, and to what will always to me be Rockhall Cottage, I give thanks for Lord Dougie and the wallabies, and to my dad for bringing me here all those years ago when it still felt wild. That time has gone and the eccentricity and unpredictability of The Roaches have been replaced with something far more controlled. But the magic of the moorlands is still there in moments of solitude. At dawn or late in the evening, I am sure that Bess, the tortured ghost of the hanged murderer, and the long-dead gamekeepers reclaim their time and space:
Like the white waves that lap at lonely beaches
Like the windsong where there is no ear to hear,
I know they call in vain to us –
The old forgotten things of man.