Daily photos no. 78: Lud's Church

The high moorland between Leek and Buxton is so under-rated: wild, cold and dramatic. It's also full of surprises, like Lud's Church, a hidden cleft in the ground frequented – allegedly – by the Green Knight and the Lollards.

“a mound as it might be near the marge of a green, a worn barrow on a brae [slope] by the brink of a water, beside falls in a flood that was flowing down; the burn [fast stream] bubbled therein, as if boiling it were. He urged on his horse then, and came up to the mound, there lightly alit, and lashed to a tree his reins, with a rough branch rightly secured them. Then he went to the barrow and about it he walked, debating in his mind what might the thing be. It had a hole at the end and at either side, and with grass in green patches was grown all over, and was all hollow within: nought but an old cavern, or a cleft in an old crag; he could not it name aright. … Then he heard from the high hill, in a hard rock-wall beyond the stream on a steep, a sudden startling noise. How it clattered in the cliff, as if to cleave it asunder” and occupied by “the worst wight in the world…for he is stout and stern, and to strike he delights, and he mightier than any man upon middle-earth is, and his body is bigger than the four best men” 

(Tolkien's translation of Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written in the local dialect). 

You slip between some rocks and down a slight slope, pass a sharp corner and the ravine opens out in front of you, which features a log into which people still press devotional offerings in the form of coins: the exit brings you out at the top through a gap hidden in whinberry bushes as thought you'd stepped out of an Alan Garner portal fantasy.