SWINSCOE.
THE HAMPS AND THE MANIFOLD
Here, across Hanging Bridge, the road has left Derbyshire and entered Staffordshire. It goes up a long, long, staggering hill out of the valley of the Dove and comes to some very grim uplands, where the fields have stone walls instead of hedges, and moors presently take the place of fields. The situation is extremely exposed; hence perhaps the name of the neighbouring village of Blore, i.e. a blowy, windy place. Swinscoe, or Swinecote, as it is more properly styled, i.e. “Swine’s house,” is a lonely hamlet with a background of dense plantations crowning two forbidding hills. Calton Moor succeeds to it, with a farmhouse at the cross-roads, once the Calton Moor Inn, and the scenery now grows wildly beautiful; the road at last descending with alarming steepness to Waterhouses, with a dangerous level crossing of quarry, or other, works at the bottom. Here the river Hamps sings along the valley, on its way to join the river Manifold, disappearing underground, among the limestone rocks, for some miles: the neighbouring village of Waterfall taking its name from this phenomenon. Waterhouses was in the coaching days nothing more than its name implies: a few scattered houses, chiefly inns, where the coaches changed horses, built in modern times beside the river Hamps, bordering the road. Nowadays it has grown considerably, and since the recent opening of the Leek and Manifold Valley Railway, with a Waterhouses station, it has grown very popular with trippers to the wonderful scenery of the neighbourhood. There are limestone rocks, picturesque cliffs, and ancient bridges along the valley of the Manifold, and a cavern dedicated by the superstitious Saxons to their deity, Thor.
At Winkhill Bridge, down the road, we had bid good-bye to the Hamps, and then came on a hill-top to what used to be known, perversely enough, as “Bottom” inn, now called the “Green Man.” The green man himself, in the guise of an archer, appears on the sign. Cross-roads go off, left to Cheadle, famed in Limerick-lore for a young lady, a needle, and a beadle, and right to Hartington, passing on the way the hamlet of Onecote, whose name gives a fine opening for cheap wits.
WATERHOUSES.
It is now chiefly downhill to the town of Leek, the “metropolis of the moorlands,” as it has been called, but a metropolis only in a very restricted sense, for its inhabitants number only about 15,000. The sombre, rocky moors of this wildest corner of Staffordshire surround it, and indeed have given the place its name, which comes from the Cymric “llech”: a rock. A tall, mouldering cross in the churchyard of the old parish church, covered with ancient Celtic devices, bears witness to the immemorial antiquity of the settlement.
BOTTOM INN: THE “GREEN MAN.”