Though the village of Alderley Edge ('Chorley' until the 1880s) is easily dismissed as a haven of nouveau riche footballers, the red sandstone escarpment to the south-east is definitely worth visiting. In 1948 the woodland was donated to the National Trust by the Pilkington family (of glass fame), ensuring protection from development and public access to a network of paths amongst the deciduous woods, punctuated by rocky outcrops and cliffs.
The Edge was celebrated as the heart of Alan Garner's 'Weirdstone of Brisingamen' novels, and despite its popularity with dogwalkers and young families, there's still a sense of a mystic landscape overlooking the Cheshire Plain. Garner's stories are built on a preexisting local legend, of an army sleeping under the hill, tended by the Wizard of the Edge. The main NT car park stands next to a pub of that name.
This is the 'Goldenstone', a 2.6×1.9×0.9 m boulder of local sandstone (specifically Engine Vein conglomerate), deliberately split at some point in its history. It may have been a Bronze Age standing stone, later definitely used to define the boundary between the mediæval de Trafford and Stanley estates, and is the subject of local folklore, so it has protection as a Scheduled Ancient Monument.
As Garner noted, there's "nothing golden about it", and the name probably comes from the Saxon verb 'gielden', 'to pay', apt for a trading place on the boundary, without especial mystical significance.
The local rock has been studied for centuries as an examplar of Triassic sandstone. It plainly has an alluvial (probably reedbed) source, with rounded pebbles encased within a sand matrix.
