The Roaches
hill in Staffordshire, England, UK
The Roaches (from the French les roches – the rocks) is a prominent rocky ridge above Leek and Tittesworth Reservoir in the Staffordshire Peak District of England. The ridge with its rock formations rises steeply to 505 m (1,657 ft).
Along with Ramshaw Rocks and Hen Cloud, from Old English Henge Clud, meaning "steep rock", they form a gritstone escarpment, which is popular with hikers, rock climbers and freerunners. It is often very busy especially at weekends.
The Roaches Estate was purchased by the Peak District National Park Authority in the 1980s to safeguard the area from adverse development. From May 2013 Staffordshire Wildlife Trust took on the management of the Roaches Estate.
In clear conditions, it is possible to see much of Cheshire and views stretching as far as Snowdon in Wales and Winter Hill in Lancashire.
The Roaches are the most prominent part of a curving ridge which extends for several miles from Hen Cloud in the south to Back Forest and Hangingstone in the northwest. At the top there is a small pool called Doxey Pool that is, according to legend, inhabited by a water spirit. Nearby are the broad hills of Gun and Morridge.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “The Roaches” as hill in Staffordshire, England, UK. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7761048. Authority coordinates are 53.171, -2.000. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2013.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Roaches” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.