The Roaches

About The Roaches

The Roaches is a prominent rocky ridge in the Staffordshire Peak District, rising steeply to 505 metres above Leek and Tittesworth Reservoir. The name comes from the French les roches, 'the rocks'. With Ramshaw Rocks and Hen Cloud — the latter from the Old English Henge Clud, 'steep rock' — the ridge forms a gritstone escarpment that draws hikers, rock climbers and freerunners, and the crowds can be considerable, especially at weekends.

The Roaches are the most prominent section of a curving ridge several miles long, which begins at Hen Cloud in the south and continues to Back Forest and Hangingstone in the north-west. In clear conditions the view takes in much of Cheshire and reaches as far as Snowdon in Wales and Winter Hill in Lancashire.

The Roaches Estate came into the ownership of the Peak District National Park Authority in the 1980s, bought to protect the area from unwelcome development; management of the estate passed to Staffordshire Wildlife Trust in May 2013.

Background written from facts in the Wikipedia article on The Roaches (CC BY-SA 4.0). Heights, prominence and grid references come from the Database of British & Irish Hills, not from Wikipedia.

Access rights here

General position for England — local byelaws, seasonal restrictions and closures can override it. Full details: access rights in England ·check another location.

Daylight at this summit today

Sunrise

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Sunset

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Daylight

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Civil twilight ends

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Computed astronomically for 53.172, -2.000. Plan your finish with the daylight safety planner.

Finding the summit

The recorded summit point is benchmarked rock. That distinction matters on broad or flat tops, where the obvious cairn is not always the true high point.

Survey method

Abney level

Record revised

28-Mar-10

Drop measured from

SK014629 · 382 m

Survey notes are field observations recorded in the Database of British & Irish Hills (v18.3, CC BY 4.0) by the hill-surveying community.

Get food nearby

3 places to eat or drink within 10 km of the summit, rated under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (Scotland runs its own Food Hygiene Information Scheme, a pass/fail equivalent).

Classifications and ratings are the local authority's own and can be coarse — this is a lead, not a guarantee of opening hours or that food is served to non-residents. Follow a name through to the official rating page to check, and confirm before you rely on it.

Food hygiene data from the Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland (Open Government Licence v3.0). Distances and directions computed by OpenFell from the summit.

Which hill this one belongs to

The Roaches is not counted as an independent hill in its own right. In prominence terms it belongs to Shining Tor (559 m) — the nearest Marilyn you can reach from this summit without first dropping below its key col, 382 m.

Grouping is by prominence alone: a summit belongs to the nearest higher Marilyn it connects to without a deeper intervening col. Over a large massif that can gather hills no one would walk in a single day, and which few would describe as parts of the same mountain — it is a measure of independence, not a suggested route.

Nearest listed peaks