The 700-year-old St Mary's Church at Nether Alderley, where the walk begins, retains many 13th-century features, including a font lost for nearly 300 years after it was buried to protect it from Puritan troops in the Civil War. Inside the church are monuments to the Stanley family, Lords of the Manor, and an unusual family pew — rather like a theatre box. The old village school, which dates from 1628, is next to the lychgate, and the churchyard is surrounded by flower-rich hay meadows.
Jodrell Bank Radio Telescope is visible across the plain to the southwest as you head north to a pond, which is alive with tadpoles in spring and dragonflies during the summer. Hundreds of similar ponds have been filled in during the past 200 years, while adjoining marshy land has been drained. Cheshire is dotted with meres, ponds, and marshes, most of them a legacy of the last Ice Age, 10,000 years ago.
A gentle climb through Manchester's "stockbroker belt" takes you above the town of Alderley Edge. At the foot of a sandstone bluff is Wizard's Well. According to local legend, the wizard is guardian of an army of knights on white horses sleeping in a vast underground cavern while they await the call to come to the rescue of a beleaguered England. The children's author Alan Garner based his tales The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath on this area and its folklore. Near Wizard's Well is the Beacon, site of one of the chain of beacons lit to warn of the coming of the Spanish Armada in 1588. The beacon tower fell in a gale in the 1930s.
Alderley Edge, richly clothed in beech, oak, and Scots pine trees, was given by the Pilkington family to the National Trust in the 1940s. On certain days of the year, the National Trust allows a local caving club to guide members of the public through some of the old copper and lead mines that honeycomb the sandstone and cut shallow gorges in its surface. A small information centre outlines the area's mining history.
The National Trust is also the guardian of Nether Alderley Mill. Visited towards the end of the walk, the mill was restored in the 1980s after several decades of dereliction. The enormous, steep, pitched slab tiles hide machinery little changed from that which first ground corn in the time of the Wars of the Roses. The mill is not, as it seems at first glance, built into the hillside. Uniquely, the back of the mill also acts as the dam to a millpond situated immediately behind the building.
