The late fourteenth-century anonymous English romance poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, is generally considered to have been composed in a dialect of the West Midlands, prompting speculation about its authorship and locale. Although the setting of the poem begins in King Arthur's court, the bulk of its lines concerns Sir Gawain's travels north through Wales and from there east into Chesire where he is to meet his fate at the hands of the (headless) Green Knight. Although some scholars have been content to interpret the poem's topography as a generic romance wilderness, Ralph Elliott has suggested that the poet had in mind a very specific locale, namely what is today called the Peak District of North Staffordshire (between Leek and Buxton; visit the Peak District National Park Web site), whose most conspicuous features are the prominence called The Roaches and a natural rock cleft, overgrown with ferns, called Lud's Church, which he speculates is the legendary Chapel of the Green Knight. (See R.W.V Elliott, The Gawain Country, Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series No. 8, Leeds: U Leeds School of English, 1984 and Ralph Elliott, "Landscape and Geography, " A Companion to the Gawain-Poet, Derek Brewer and Jonathan Gibson, eds., Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997, 105-17.)
In late May 2000, I visited this site after a conversation with Prof. John Leavitt, formerly of Keele University, with the adventurous Miss Jacky Clift, formerly of Stoke-on-Trent Sixth Form College, as my trusty guide, and took the photographs included here.
Children in this view (lower center) offer
scale.
Miss Clift permits me to catch
my breath on the pretext of taking her picture.
