CSLH Bulletin 59
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Landscape History Today: the Bulletin of CSLH September 2016 Number 59 Sandbach skyline, Discovery Day May 2016 Contents Chair’s Message 3 Editor’s Desk 4 Field Visits... Thornton Hough 5 Blackden Trust 9 Aston Hall and Wall Roman Site 11 President’s Visit 14 Denbigh 22 Discovery Day 2016 24 End Piece 26 Please make sure all contribuons for the January edion of the Bullen are with the editor by 30 November 2016 . Editor: Mrs Julie Smalley 2 Farley Close Middlewich CW10 0PU Email: [email protected] Web: www.chesterlandscapehistory.org.uk Page 2 Chair’s Message As the sun shines through the window it is difficult to believe that when you read this, Autumn will virtually be upon us. However, between now and the end of November, there is much to look forward to: lectures, the Derwent Valley residenal weekend and our 30th Anniversary Celebraons. If you have not booked your place for either the River Cruise or our joint Conference with the Society for Landscape Studies, then me is fast running out (please contact either Mike or myself). Not only will we be celebrang 30 years of the Society, but also the launch of our latest publicaon Landscapes Past and Present: Cheshire and Beyond. Containing extended versions of many of the papers presented at our Research Day last year, the book will be a fing tribute to 30 years of the Society. Like many local sociees the CSLH Planning Team are struggling to recruit new members. Following much thought, we have decided to ask members to complete a quesonnaire in order to find out what our members value most about the Society and to help us tailor our acvies accordingly. We would be really grateful if you would complete a copy (either electronically or paper based) and return it to us by the end of October. Sadly, without addional help we may have to reduce the number and range of acvies we run. The quesonnaire will be emailed to members in the next few days. Before finishing this Chair’s Message, I would just like to thank Julie (Smalley) for taking over the producon and eding of the Bullen. I hope, like me, you feel it is an essenal way of communicang with members and as such is an important facet of the Society’s acvies. As always, I look forward to seeing you again at one of our events. Sharon Varey Page 3 Editor’s Desk Here goes with the second of our two CSLH Bullens for 2016 – and my first. Producon of this is a minor miracle. Please bear with me while I find my way. The most urgent thing I feel I must do therefore is to thank and appreciate Sharon, our former editor, for her numberless expert hours devoted to ‘Landscape History Today’. The next thing I would like to do is invite any of our membership to contribute. Why not? Quality wrien items of interest and value and relevant to the purpose of CSLH are warmly sought. I look forward to arcles, queries, leers or...surprise me! September’s issue contains a panorama of field reports and pictures. I thank all contributors. Also featured is a personal take on May’s Discovery Day (see below) experienced through the eyes of a new member. As the Bullen is about circulang news and views, sharing perspecves is a good way to feel part of our Society—whether just joined, well established or somewhere in between. Roll on with our Autumn acvies! Julie Page 4 Field Visit—Thornton Hough 21 April 2016 Following on from his field trip to Port Sunlight last year, Gavin Hunter led a field visit to this Wir- ral village on the brightest day of the year so far. Thornton Hough is a planned village which has the unusual disncon of having been planned by two different people. We parked by the Seven Stars pub, which was there before both St George's UR (Congregaonal) church of them, and met in the part of the village built by Joseph Hirst, a texle manufacturer from Wilshaw in York- shire, opposite Wilshaw Terrace, a row of coages with a shop, built in the Gothic style in 1870 near a weighbridge on the side of the turnpike road. Round the corner were the original village school, the vicarage, and All Saints Church, all built in the 1860s and paid for by Hirst. The church is unusual in having five clock faces – four where you would expect to find them, one on each face of the tower, and an extra one slightly higher up on the south side, since when the church was built Hirst discovered that he couldn’t see the church clock from his home at Thornton House. Directly outside the church porch is the “wedding lawn” – although there are substanal monuments, mainly to the Lever family, on either side, the space in the middle has been kept clear of burials. It must make an aracve seng for wedding photo- graphs, but on a non-wedding day, with gravestones either side, it was un- selingly reminiscent of a cricket pitch. Page 5 We had a good root around in the churchyard and Gavin pointed out the un- solved mysteries that always exist in churches – who made the stained glass west window in the church that was made as a war memorial? (There was once a signature, but it was smashed by a cricket ball…). Did the Celc cross in the churchyard that is a memorial to Eliza the wife of James Lever migrate to this churchyard from Bolton? We le the churchyard and crossed Raby Road to the part of the village built by Wil- liam Hesketh Lever. The first thing we saw was the Millennium Archway, a rusc arch- way built of oak and erected by Gavin him- self, with colleagues. Although funding was precarious, it chanced that the third (and last) Viscount Leverhulme died in 2000, and The Expulsion from Eden the family provided a substanal donaon to make the arch a memorial to him. The view across the old turnpike road from here is very aracve – we were looking at one of the “typical English villages” created by Lever to house the staff on his extensive estates as a sort of counterpoint to Port Sunlight that was created for his factory workers. At the foot of the hill the village smithy sll stands, though the three farriers there now operate a mobile rather than in- house service and the spreading chestnut tree with which the smithy was origi- nally endowed has succumbed to thunderstorms. There are servants’ and workers’ houses, a former girls’ orphanage, and shops. One very harmonious aspect of the view is the tower of St George’s Congregaonal church, built by Lever (by now Lord Leverhulme) in 1906 on the site of a former Wesleyan Methodist chapel. The tower was kept deliberately rather squat so that it acts as a counterpoint in the landscape to the tower of All Saints. On top of the church is a weathervane in the form of a cockerel with a bugle – heraldic devic- es punning on the name Lever (“[se] lever” is French for “to get up”). Page 6 Ecclesiologists will have spoed the use of “church” rather than “chapel” for St George’s. Lever was a devout Congregaonalist, but he also loved richness in architecture and dignity in worship. The church is cruciform with extensive and elaborate decoraon in Norman style. As well as stained-glass windows, unu- sually for a Congregaonal house of worship it even has an altar of Caen stone with inscribed crosses. In fact, as Gavin told us, the local Roman Catho- lics, who have no convenient church of Thornton Hough smithy (on le ) their own, o en borrow it, and feel right at home. The stained glass around the chancel contains sets of arms that show the rise of Lever through the hierarchy – one side shows the arms of a baronet, the other those of a viscount. There is a red rose for Lancashire, and elephants, which he admired, and are also a symbol of Bolton. Above St George’s church are the few large houses that Lever built in the vil- lage, including the manse for the Congre- gaonal minister and others for mem- bers of his family. Nearby is the primary school – built by Lever in 1904 as a non- denominaonal school, it was closed in 1939 but reopened in 1953. Happy sounds were coming from it on the day of our visit. Behind the school is a build- ing with a mixed history – it was original- ly built as the “iron church” by Lever to Wilshaw Terrace cater for the dispossessed Wesleyans when their chapel was demolished to make way for St George’s. Since then it Page 7 has been an estate workshop, a village gymnasium, a billet for an an -aircra unit, and an inadequately licensed café. The war memorial contains names from the First World War only – no -one from the village was killed in the Second World War, though, as well as the an -aircra unit, the village also played its part when Lever Brothers was assembling parts of the invasion fleet – some components came from the USA and were hidden in local driveways Wilshaw Terrace unl required. Gwilym Hughes expressed the Society’s thanks to Gavin Hunter for what we all knew would be an enjoyable and informave visit. Mike Headon Page 8 t Field Visit—Blackden Trust 14 May 2016 Over twenty members had an im- mensely enjoyable visit to Toad Hall (Cheshire dialect for T'owd Hall) and the Old Medicine House near Goostrey, Cheshire.