Lud Church

Location: Gradbach, Staffordshire

If there is a place in England that is crying out for a decent mythology to be attached to it, it is this magical place.

Hidden away in the Staffordshire moorlands, you don't spot this place until you turn off the footpath and descend into it. If you did not know it was there you would walk straight past, and not realise you had just missed one of the wonders of the Peak District.

What you find, when you do explore, is a great fissure in the rock, about the length of a football pitch, and magnificently green with moss and ferns. The sheer sides are sixty feet high, and only a few feet apart. It is like exploring the underworld.

As I have said repeatedly on this blog, our ancient ancestors walked the same lands as we do. Indeed, it is the only thing we can say for sure that we have in common with them. They must have seen this wonder too. We can only wonder ourselves what they thought of it.

If they thought of the earth is a goddess, then there is only really one part if her body this can be.

However the only clue to what went on her is the name - Lud's Church - which suggests a connection with a male deity. Lud is a character who turns up a few times in British mythology, and we will meet him again in the Peak District when we get to Lose Hill. He is usually connected with Lugh, the Irish god of light who fought alongside Nuada against the Fir Bolg (see Cockersand Moss Temple), although in this case there may be a less prosaic explanation: a Walter de Ludank, or Lud-Auk, who was a local Lollard.

The Lollards were fourteenth century 'pre-Protestants', protesting against the corruption of the Catholic Church. There was a lot of Lollard activity in this area, so this much might be true. However the story of the daughter of a local Lollard being buried her after a tragic death is probably just myth. Equally mythical are connections with Robin Hood and Bonnie Prince Charlie.

No, this place needs better legends than those, and here's why. Firstly, there's the face in the rock. Can you see it above? Some people call him the Red Knight, but that is probably a very recent name.

Secondly, and this fact really doesn't seem to be very well known, even amongst people who make a habit of visiting these sorts of places, the chasm is aligned so that the sun shines directly into it at midday on the Summer Solstice. I've been there myself and can verify this is true. How many days either side of the longest day this is works for I cannot say, but given how narrow the place is, not many. This fact alone surely puts this on the A-list of spiritual places in England?

So here we have one somewhere that is very special, is there no legend at all we can hang on it? Well, yes there is. And, as befits an A-list liminal place like Lud Church, it's a A-list legend.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the preserved stories we have of King Arthur and his Round Table companions. It was a story that interested, and inspired, Tolkien. A story of the brave Sir Gawain (Michael Palin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail - if that doesn't spoil the ambiance) who beheads the mysterious Green Knight one Christmas at Camelot, and has to go and meet the chap again a year later to have the favour returned at the mysterious Green Chapel.

Pagans get very excited about the story because, although the faith and piety of Gawain is mentioned at every opportunity, the knight goes off on his adventure with a pentagram on his shield. On his way from Camelot - which appears to be Caerleon in this story - he passes through the 'Wilderness of Wirral', where he fights trolls under bridges and other such perils. Parts of it are still like that. Eventually he arrives at the castle, of the red-faced Sir Bertilac, who tells him the Green Chapel is nearby.

Could it be Lud Church?

Possibly. The name certainly fits this church of nature. The landscape the noble knight passes through on the way also sounds right: "Mist hugged the moor, melted on the mountains, Each hill had a hat, a huge cloak of mist". The entrance to the Chapel though is "Nothing but an old cave, Or a crevice in an old crag." 

There is other evidence to suggest we are in the right neck-of-the-woods, so to speak. Who wrote the poem is not known, but the chief suspect lived in nearby Cheshire. The date of the work we are a bit more certain of, the fourteenth century, which mean he may have been writing it whilst the Lollards were lolling in Lud Church, which raises interesting questions.

In the end Gawain doesn't lose his head. Thanks to his honesty the Green Knight spares him, and turns out to be the alter-ego of Sir Bertilac.

Being both red and green Sir Bertilac sounds like he should be an environmentalist, but perhaps we shouldn't put too much of a modern interpretation on the story. This is not a place for modern stories.

Worm Stones

Location: Glossop, Derbyshire

Many of the liminal places in this blog aren't just on the edge in the imagination, they also occupy a place somewhere between certainty and speculation about the past.

Every square metre of Britain was, of course, once pagan, and mystics of old would have looked at every natural wonder, and given most them a place in their shared mythology. Very occasionally we have an historical record of sorts. More often we have nothing at all. Sometimes, though, we have a clue.

The Worm Stones stand on Shaw Moor, clearly visible from the A624 as you leave the market town of Glossop, heading towards Hayfield. They stand on the edge of open access land. To their east is Chunal Moor, and then the high plateau of Kinder Scout. To their west is the Greater Manchester urban conglomeration. Depending on your point of view, they either stand guard over the town, or hold back the urban jungle threatening the Peak District.

For most ramblers they are, at most, a place for a rest and a sandwich. There is a, now very hard to
find, footpath that leads to the shooting cabin that can be seen to the north, or you can carry on to the trig point called Harry Hut, then turn left to climb Kinder, passing on the way the wreck of a Liberator bomber. This crashed during World War Two, and is one of the better preserved wrecks in the area. Although both crewmen were injured, they lived to tell the tale, which was unusual.

This was once the land of the pagan Brigantes, before the Romans came, and then after they left the home of the Anglo-Saxon Pecsaetan tribe, who were equally pagan, in a different way. They have left us little but their name, which means peaklanders. Glossop also got its name from the Anglo-Saxons. It was originally Glott's Hop. Glott must have been somebody in his time, which was probably the seventh century, and his Hop was his valley.

We don't know how old the name Worm Stones is. However, there is reason to think that it too might be Anglo-Saxon. In the language of their mythology a drake was a flying dragon, like Smaug in The Hobbit,  but a dragon without wings that crawled was a wyrm. A better translation would be 'great serpent', and wyrms are clearly related to the beasts of Egyptian, Ancient Greek and Biblical stories.

Visit this place with that in mind, and it is not long before the eroded limestone brings forth a face and other features. These rocks on which the occasional weary walker rests is bottom soon become a sleeping dragon, a secret guardian of this wild places.

Tread carefully, and respectfully.