Kinderlow

... A later generation than the old wife has been known to pour out a libation of good red port to "whatever gods may be," during the exhilaration which followed reaching the highest point of our county - the cairn on Kinderlow. There was folk lore in this too. The climbers were of a hard, sceptical kind, believing in nothing, not even in themselves, yet they wasted good wine on this ritual. There on the top, against the sky, the present day world had dropped away and there was a feeling of being surrounded by they know not what elemental forces moulding the timeworn world.

At a meeting of the Society of Manchester Scientific Students, Sept. 27, 1882, the members visited Hayfield. On leaving Hayfield railway station the party proceeded to the edge of Leygate Moor. From thence they reached the Old Oak wood near the lower house. A short walk from here is the Downfall. Near here is the Mermaid's Pool, of which the natives have a tradition that a beautiful woman lives in the side of the Scout; that she comes to bathe every day in the Mermaid's Well, and that the man who has the good luck to behold her bathing will become immortal and never die. The old people of Hayfield, moreover, tell a long story of a man who, sometime in the last century, went from Hayfield over the Scout, and was lucky enough to meet this mountain nymph, by whom he was conducted to a cavern hard by. Tradition adds that she was pleased with this humble mortal, and that he lingered there some time, when she conferred on him the precious gift of immortality.