All Saints has an octagonal spire you can pick out from across the Manifold Valley, which is how it came to be called the Cathedral of the Moorlands. It is a large church for a village of 221 people. The Francis brothers finished it in 1848, in Gothic style, and covered it in carved heads and animals — there are creatures working their way down one corner of the tower, and a sundial above the porch.
Underneath all this, the village runs light on facilities. The Cavalier closed in 2006 and is now a private house. It had been the pub for centuries, in a building said to be over 400 years old, and was the Shoulder of Mutton before it was the Cavalier. Grindon has been dry ever since. There are no shops, no butcher, no farm shop. The nearest provisions are in Leek, about ten miles off, and the closest coffee is at the National Trust café at Wetton Mill, down in the valley.
So you come here for the walking, and the walking is the reason to come. The main circular drops out of the village down a steep hairpin road to Thor's Cave, a limestone cavern with a high vaulted mouth and evidence of Stone Age occupation and old burials. It's about 7.5 miles round with 406 metres of climbing, and you feel the climbing on the way back up.
Along the valley floor runs the Manifold Way, eight tarmacked miles laid on the trackbed of the old Leek & Manifold Valley Light Railway. It's flat, traffic-free, and good for children on bikes. There's free parking at Weag's Bridge and at Wetton Mill. The railway itself opened in 1904 and closed in 1934; the village station survived exactly thirty years before the line gave up.
One local peculiarity: the rivers are often not there. The Manifold and the Hamps run dry for much of the year, the Manifold sinking underground near Wetton Mill and coming back up at Ilam.
Back inside the church, the collection is odd for a moorland parish. There's a Saxon font, two medieval bone coffins, three sixteenth-century bells, and an organ built for a church in Dresden in 1840 and moved here in 1953.
The south aisle holds the village's saddest story. On 13 February 1947, during the winter that snowed the moors shut, a Handley Page Halifax of No. 47 Squadron tried to air-drop a ton of bread, meat, cheese, flour and fat to cut-off Butterton. On the third pass over a drop-zone marked with a cross of soot, the starboard wing clipped the ground and the aircraft cartwheeled. All eight aboard were killed. The roads reopened the next day. A cairn stands near the crash site, and the church keeps a memorial embroidery made by Andrew Barlow of the Leek Embroiderers' Guild.
Robert of Stafford held the place at Domesday, when it was written down as Grendone — green hill. It still is one. The spire still does most of the talking.
