Morridge and Blakemere Mermaid Pool is best approached from the Bottomhouse  side, where Blakemere Road begins its climb out of lower farming country and moves steadily towards the long exposed back of Morridge, passing from enclosed fields, walls, lanes, and working pasture into that higher Moorlands atmosphere where distance becomes more noticeable, and where weather seems to possess a larger authority over human movement.

As the road rises, it gives the place a more deliberate order than any simple visit to a pool could manage, because this is old road country rather than scenery alone, a line of passage shaped by gradient, drainage, shelter, and visibility, where travellers once had to understand the land practically, reading wall gaps, farms, inns, ridges, and cloud with the same attention later generations would give to signposts, maps, and the hard certainty of surfaced roads.

Before the water is reached, the Mermaid Inn (sadly now closed and offers only accommodation) appears as the first sign that this route is not merely carrying traffic, but carrying story, its name drawing the legend forward along the road and setting it beside the ordinary world of shelter, drink, horses, travellers, and the long human need for a stopping place on exposed ground. An inn in such a position is never only a building; it is a pause in weather, a small treaty with distance, and a witness to all those crossings made before roads became quick enough for people to forget them.

Beyond the inn, Blakemere Road continues towards the Mermaid Pool, and by the time the dark water appears near the higher ground it does not feel like an isolated curiosity placed beside a lane, but like a still point on a route that has carried many kinds of movement: farm traffic, packhorses, local carriers, drovers, walkers, inn-goers, and those unnamed figures who crossed the Moorlands when the difference between daylight and darkness was not picturesque, but serious.

The pool itself is small enough to surprise anyone expecting the grand theatre of legend, yet its modest size is part of its strength, for still water on open moorland needs very little scale to unsettle the imagination, especially when the surface is dark, the land around it bare, and The Roaches appear beyond as a weathered wall of gritstone holding the western horizon.

The old mermaid story seems at first like a tale added afterwards to give the place a sharper edge, but after a little while beside Blakemere it becomes easier to believe that the legend was condensed from the behaviour of the place itself, from peat-dark water, sudden cloud-shadow, poor upland drainage, travelling fear, and the ancient human suspicion that lonely pools have depths not always measurable in feet.

In one version she rises at midnight and draws men towards the water; in another she is the spirit of a wronged woman, or a witch, or some local memory of violence and accusation that could no longer be carried plainly, and so passed into folklore, where grief, desire, warning, and punishment can survive under the safer form of a story told beside a fire, repeated in an inn, or carried along the road by someone who had heard it from someone else.

The wider view gives the legend its country, for from the Morridge road the eye can travel across to The Roaches and Ramshaw Rocks, down towards Longnor’s market settlement logic, out across the Cheshire Plain, and, on clear days, towards Jodrell Bank, which appears in the distance as a pale instrument of listening, oddly appropriate in a landscape where people have long listened to weather, rumour, stock, road, and silence.

Past the pool, Blakemere Road continues towards its meeting with the newer Leek–Buxton road, where Royal Cottage stands near the end of the smaller way like a human full stop placed against a broader sentence of movement. Here the contrast between the old local road and the later engineered route can still be felt: one belongs to the slower habits of crossing country by knowledge, shelter, weather, and necessity, the other to the age of turnpikes, stone surfaces, coaching, and more formal traffic.

By early summer, when scudding clouds move across the sun and brightness passes over the ridge in broken sheets, Morridge and Blakemere Mermaid Pool becomes less a destination than a register of upland memory, holding in one small basin the behaviour of water, the unease of folklore, the practical intelligence of old roads, and the enduring human habit of making meaning wherever the land grows silent.