In some cases the ascent starts abruptly at a very awkward height from the ground. For instance, at Ashover the lowest step of the rood-stair is 6 feet above the floor level; 6 ft. 3 in. at Wingerworth. Nor in either case is there any perceptible trace of the steps having descended lower towards the ground. For them to be reached, then, where they are, is a feat that could not be accomplished without the help of a ladder. In the case of Wingerworth, however, it is true that, as to whether the rood-stair originally terminated at its present distance from the floor, there is, for the following reasons, much uncertainty. The mother of one Arthur Mower, of Barlow, dying in 1574, and being buried in Wingerworth church, her son wrote down minute particulars of the site of her interment; and the old memorandum book, still extant, records how she “lyeth in the church in the north alley at the head of the alley on the north side, and her feet lieth as nigh of the north side of the grysse” (_i.e._, stair, from the Latin _gressus_) “that goeth up into the Rood-loft as may be.” Now nobody at the present day who wanted to be accurate—and the sole _raison d’être_ of a memorandum like this is to preserve and hand down as trustworthy a record as possible—would dream of describing the feet of a body lying in the north-east corner of the north aisle as being close to the ascent of the rood-stair! To obviate the discrepancy, then, is one not forced to the conclusion that the rood-stair must have been somehow or other prolonged downwards in a northerly direction until it reached the ground at the spot indicated? Rood-stairs, being no longer required once the lofts had been overthrown, have met with shameful neglect, often with violent maltreatment. In some cases they have been allowed to survive only through having been turned into cupboards for brooms and ladders, gas meters, or water cisterns; but, nevertheless, after full allowance is made for rood-stairs that formerly were and now have perished, there is still left a large percentage of Derbyshire churches in which no permanent stone stairs can be supposed to have existed. In such cases, unless there was a fixed wooden staircase, access must have been obtained by no better means than a ladder the whole way from floor to loft. The practical inconvenience of this proceeding, together with the narrow dimensions of rood-doors and stairs—while their builders were constructing them, it would in most cases have been just as easy to make them half a dozen or so inches wider had there been any occasion—affords corroborative evidence of the impossibility of parochial rood-lofts having been used, or designed to be used, for ceremonial purposes by the officiants at divine service.