History
The village of Rudyard was named after Ralph Rudyard, a man who is reputed to have killed Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Rudyard Lake was constructed by the engineer John Rennie, for the Trent and Mersey Canal company in 1797–98 to feed the Caldon Canal.
On June 26, 1846 the North Staffordshire Railway successfully took over the canal company and lake as part of one of its acts of parliament that resulted in the formation of the North Staffordshire Railway. Having acquired the lake and the land around it the railway used the land down one side as the route for it's Churnet Valley Line between Macclesfield and Uttoxeter. Two stations were built, one at Rudyard village (later renamed Rudyard Lake) and one at the north end of the lake called called Rudyard Lake (later renamed Cliffe Park)
Because of the accessibility brought by the railway stations, daytrippers and tourists began visiting the lake. Visitors included John Lockwood Kipling and Alice Macdonald, the parents of Rudyard Kipling, who met there on a trip from Burslem. They liked the place so much they named their son after it. By the end of the 1800s up to 20,000 people visited the lake each day. Matthew Webb entertained crowds by demonstrating his swimming in the lake, and Charles Blondin performed a tightrope walk across the lake.
Read more about this topic: Rudyard Lake
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“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)