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Stockport 1Walk Details: Top details: The Walk: |
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With Jus and Cat having headed off home after our excellent Black Hill walk, it was just Jim and I remaining on the quest for more tops. We’d already bagged 19 county tops this weekend and were secretly determined to beat our previous record of 20 in one trip. However, bearing in mind the long journey home to come, some quick and easy tops were required. Looking at the map, the two Stockport tops seemed ideal. The main problem is actually finding your way there – both tops are lost in the midst of a network of tiny lanes. However, with an OS 1:25,000 scale map to hand we had no trouble, and were soon parked up. We left the car with some alacrity (now we no longer had to wait for Cat to finish her fag) and strode purposefully along a wide track towards our objective, passing three twenty-somethings trying to fly a kite (nice to see them not just trying to get out of their heads in a pub...).
Other theories include a route marker (reinforced by the fact that they’re inscribed with “N” and “S” – north and south?), a boundary stone (they do lie on a county boundary), a plague stone or a tool for making longbows. It may be that they’ve actually had several uses over the years. Our own theory was based on our renaming them the Nose Picking Stones. After the giant had inadvertently created The Wrekin (see trip report for The Wrekin), he’d got a bit of dirt up his nose. Being a discourteous fellow, he decided to resolve this by excavating his sinuses with a couple of handy rocks. His rotary cleansing motion turned them into cylinders; when he discarded them afterwards his nasal secretions (that’s bogies to you and I) left them glued upright in their current position. Our theory may be a little unusual, but at least it’s interesting! If we’d had more time I’d have liked to extend the walk up to the interesting-looking ridge formed by Cown and Coombes edges, but we wanted to bag another top and so headed back from whence we came. The kite-flyers were still practising the noble art of running very fast whilst dragging a diamond of material along the ground behind you. Verdict:
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The
Picking Rods were just a few hundred metres further up the track and consisted
of a tall thin rough-hewn column next to a shorter, broader one, both
of which were set in a flat base. Needless to say, the origins of the
monument are lost in a haze of mythology. We know they were once called
the Druid Stones, supposedly because the Druids advised a Celtic Chieftain
to sacrifice his eldest daughter here to prevent the advance of the Romans
(one wonders if the clear lack of success of such drastic measures led
to the rapid decline in Druidism!). The stones may have been renamed to
their present name due to a local story that Robin Hood chipped one of
the stones after shooting it from an improbable distance. Archaeologists
believe the columns were actually carved by Anglo-Saxons in the 9th Century
AD, and may have originally formed part of a stone cross. The evidence
presented by English Heritage on this theory (