Kerridge
Ingersley
ridge & vale
A Landscape History
KRIV
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Preface This booklet describes the historical development of a fascinating and beautiful area of countryside at the edge the Peak District hills of Cheshire. This area of the Pennine fringe between Rainow and Bollington has developed a rich and detailed landscape. It has been created by agricultural enclosures, estate plantings, mining, quarrying and water-powered industry, based on the strong foundation of sandstone geology and the influence of the River Dean draining from the Peak District hills. Unravelling the history of a landscape involves using maps, aerial photographs, historical records, field surveys, archaeological and ecological investigations and even oral history. This small publication may inspire readers to look more closely at the local landscape and enjoy their walks more as a result. We would like to record a special thank-you to the landowners, farmers and local residents of Rainow and Bollington who have allowed us on to their land or provided us with advice and information about the area. The Countryside Agency’s Local Heritage Initiative grant and the subsequent funding through the Heritage Lottery Fund’s Landscape Partnership Scheme have helped us to carry out the research which underpins this publication. The initial text has been written by George Longden, a well-respected local historian, with some minor editing by others. We are grateful to George for contributing his substantial local knowledge. We hope that this booklet will help local residents and visitors to understand a little more about how the landscape has come to look the way it does. We also hope that schools and other educational groups will find it useful, especially when read alongside our detailed landscape heritage map. For the people of Rainow and Bollington we hope that this work will be of lasting value and interest.
Graham Barrow Chairman Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project June 2009 Bollington, Cheshire
Kerridge
Ingersley
ridge & vale A Landscape History I KRIV
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Heritage Map Kerridge Ridge & Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project
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Heritage Map:
Produced by Phil Kenning in association with KRIV Heritage Project 2008.
Introduction Kerridge Ridge stands at the western edge of the southern Pennines, 313m at its highest point. To the west lies the Cheshire plain, with views across to the Welsh hills. Below the ridge to the east is Ingersley Vale, through which run the upper reaches of the River Dean, joined by tributary streams and encircled by the gritstone hills of the western Peak. Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale form an area of outstanding beauty, and also of great historical interest. Here, as in other Pennine valleys, was incubated the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. Many traces survive between the villages of Bollington and Rainow. Walkers on Kerridge Ridge gain what are in effect aerial views of the once-industrial villages in their rural setting. The purpose of this booklet is to provide an account of the historical development of the landscape of the largely rural area included in the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project. The four sections focus on the effects of agriculture, manufacturing industries, extractive industries, and developments in communications. Each section begins with a description of landscape features which may be observed, followed by a largely chronological analysis.
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Constraints of space have meant that references to sources of evidence have been kept to a minimum. More detailed history, and references to primary and secondary sources for most of the information in this booklet, can be found in the Historical Study by George Longden on the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Project website - www.kriv.org.uk
North End Farm
a White Nancy BM 279.47m
Heritage Map: Cover (left) and detail (above).
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Sugar Loaf and Tower
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White Nancy, the iconic monument at the north end of Kerridge Ridge, was described in 1921 as a ‘sugar loaf’ by Anne Gaskell of Ingersley Hall (now known as Savio House), the great granddaughter of its builder. An ordnance or military beacon occupied the site at the opening of the 19th century and may have done so for many years before. From this the name Nancy may have come, first applied to the whole of this end of the hill – Northern Nancy.
At the other end of the ridge, somewhere on or near the highest point, the ‘Saddle’, once stood Turton’s Tower. The site is shown on a map drawn in 1611, but the origin, purpose and appearance of the tower are unknown. A Turton family lived at Kerridge End in the early 17th century, and at least one member was a prosperous silkbutton man, employing domestic workers to make the buttons. The connection of the family with Turton’s Tower, if any, is not known.
John Gaskell, who built the first stage of Ingersley Hall across the valley to the east in 1775, erected the ‘sugar loaf’ in or around 1817, apparently to commemorate the 1815 victory at Waterloo, but also as a whitewashed skyline eye catcher, and as a summer house. Beneath the plaster, applied in 1935 in honour of the Silver Jubilee of George V, the freestone structure has a sealed-up door and window and inside a stone table and seat.
By the 19th century, the existence of the tower seems to have been forgotten, though the name lived on in Tower Hill, Rainow. In the 1890s, a Bollington doctor, while demolishing cottages which he owned near Tower Hill Farm, decided to give future generations a reason for the name. The small tower he built with the stone can still be seen in front of the farmhouse.
Photograph: White Nancy c1905
Photograph: White Nancy in winter 2007
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1. Farms and Fields The land within the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Project boundary is predominantly farmland and quarries. Quarry spoils, together with working quarries, cover part of the western side of Kerridge hill; many of these are now covered with sycamore and ash regrowth. A canopy shades much of Windmill Lane. On the eastern side older woodland, which includes oak, beech and conifers, can be seen at Oakenclough, and in Ingersley Vale. Ornamental planting has taken place in Ingersley Hall parkland, on the skyline of the eastern side of Kerridge near White Nancy, and in strips down the hillside which may also have been intended as shelter belts. Otherwise, apart from patches of modern planting, the Rainow side is divided into fields by drystone walls, hawthorn hedges, and occasionally, east of the river, by hedges set atop low stone walls. Some of these ancient-looking wall and hedge combinations can be seen from the stone field path which connects Waulkmill with Sugar Lane in Rainow. Here the fields, meadow and pasture, are moderately sized and fairly rectangular. The stone walls run straight up the hillside to create regular fields, though some of the walls which can be seen among the scrub, quarry and mine remains at the southern end are more irregular. Farmsteads, many with substantial stone buildings from the 17th or 18th century, some of them still working farms, dot the area in surprising numbers. By the time of the sale and apportionment of tithes in the 1840s eleven farms lay entirely within the area, with sizes ranging between 21 and 62 acres. A further six farms had some land within Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale. In addition, there were at least six smallholdings, with 5 to 12 acres each.
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Main Photograph: Haymaking near Hough Hole Mill,
c 1940 Top Left: Ingersley Hall c 1905 Bottom Left: Kerridge Ridge 2008
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Photograph: Kerridge Ridge in the background
Similarly, the name Ingersley may imply woodland clearance (‘ley’) by Ingiald, the bearer of a Norse name, who could have come from Galloway, Ireland, or the Isle of Man in the tenth century. But as local historian Jane Laughton has pointed out, a Scandinavian dialect was still spoken in parts of Cheshire in the thirteenth century, so early settlement cannot be assumed.
When settlement and farming began in the KRIV area is uncertain. No archaeological evidence has yet been discovered; written place names appear only from the thirteenth century. The Domesday survey of 1086 contains no mention of Bollington or Rainow, though it does list extensive woodlands at Macclesfield and Adlington, which may well have covered Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale. The woods were probably part of the ancient forest of Lyme, the extent of which along the Pennine edge can be judged today from the names Ashton under Lyne, Lyme Hall, and Newcastle under Lyme. It has been argued recently that this well wooded and very marginal terrain had been a frontier zone between different peoples and cultures from prehistoric times, through the Roman occupation and within the kingdom of Mercia. Only in the tenth century, with the creation of the shires, was the Cheshire boundary pushed further east. Whether there was pre-Domesday forest clearance and settlement in Rainow or Bollington is not clear. The name Bollington was once thought to imply settlement by the followers of Bolla, an Anglo Saxon founding father. But J McN Dodgson, the historian of Cheshire place names, preferred the less time-specific ‘Bollin-tun’, or settlement on the Bollin (as the Dean may once have been known).
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It is perhaps most likely that the settlements of Bollington and Rainow were formed in the period between the late 12th and late 13th centuries, as part of the process by which farmland, commons and managed woods were created within Macclesfield Forest. The original purpose of this and other Forests, designated as such after the Norman Conquest, had been to preserve game, and the terrain needed for game, for royal hunting. But the income which could be generated from felling and grazing rights and from rents was increasingly appreciated. In 1215 the Earl of Chester issued a charter which made assarting, or clearance, in the forest easier. The inhabitants of Bollington and Rainow, and other Forest townships such as Pott Shrigley, Hurdsfield, Sutton, Upton, Kettleshulme, and Disley were subject to Forest law, and owed service to the Manor of Macclesfield. The Forest and Manorial courts were held in Macclesfield. In these townships (unlike Adlington and Bosley) there were no rich lords to finance clearance, and assarting was probably slow and piecemeal. The settlement pattern which emerged was one of dispersed hamlets, farms and enclosures, with some open-field strip farming (though not, it seems, in the KRIV project area). By the end of the 16th century, many of the farms in the part of Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale which lies within Rainow were well-established, including Ingersley, Tower Hill, Lower Brook, Old Hall and Brookhouse Farms. The corn mill on the Dean near the Bollington boundary, and the fulling mill a little further upstream, would perhaps have had farmland attached.
Photograph: Dry-stone wall re-built
by the KRIV Project
Each farm would have some arable closes (fields). Jane Laughton’s study of 17th century Rainow has shown that these would be used to grow barley (for bread and brewing) and oats (for oatcakes, porridge and horse fodder), probably for subsistence rather than for the market. Other fields would be used as meadow, for hay. In the early 17th century sheep were kept by almost all Rainow farmers, for wool rather than for meat. Cattle were also kept, mostly black and white cows, in small numbers. Animals would be pastured on the common lands of the townships, though cattle might also be sent to ‘ley’ in the high pastures which had been created in the Forest in such places as Harrop and Saltersford. Bollington Common occupied the valley which later became the industrial centre of the town of Bollington, whilst Bollington Cross seems likely to have been the focus of the original township. Both sides of Kerridge hill were also common land. The Lidgetts, the southern end of the hill, may owe its name to a former entrance to the common by a ‘lidgate’ on the Macclesfield road.
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Some patches of the old woodland survived as demesne or township woods and were managed to provide timber for building and for fuel and fodder. Oakenbank was such a wood, stretching to the lower part of Ingersley Vale. This woodland was still exploited in the 19th century, though under private ownership. “Valuable timber now growing in Ingersley Clough”, including oak, ash, birch, elm, alder, and underwood, consisting of ash, alder, birch, thorn, crab, and hazel, “suitable for turners”, was sold at the Spinner’s Arms in Bollington in 1824 for Thomas Gaskell of Ingersley. Enclosure on the commons appears to have begun piecemeal by the 16th century. A survey of Forest common lands made in the reign of Henry VIII mentioned intakes and houses built by Robert Shrigley and William Aynsworth on ‘the comyne called Coryryge’. Neither Bollington nor Rainow had its own enclosure act, though an act of 1625 encouraged enclosure of commons and the remaining ‘waste’ in the Forest generally. This may have precipitated the enclosure of the quarrying area of the western side of Kerridge, where narrow strips running from the bottom to the top of the hill seem to have been created in the 17th century. The eastern side of the hill was divided into wider vertical blocks which were distributed to the adjacent farms, though it seems that the Gaskell estate farms may have used the northern part in common until the late 18th or early 19th century. Some new farms emerged during or after enclosure, such as Adshead’s Barn Farm on the former Bollington Common, and Stakehouse Farm in Kerridge. A manorial court surrender document of 1792 shows how the latter farm was created (probably in the late 17th or early 18th century) out of “the wastelands of Bollington” which had initially been allocated to nearby Hollin Hall Farm.
earlier it was no longer necessary to grow the limited arable crops which the soils and climate allowed. Transport improvements and the agricultural revolution increased the supply of food available at market, and the local growth of a population increasingly employed in domestic, then factory industry, quarrying and mining, expanded the local demand for wool, milk and meat. Macclesfield, one of the earliest industrial towns, grew fast from the mid eighteenth century, and would be a major market. It seems likely that arable farming only reappeared in the area in 20th century wartime, and that the plough ridges still faintly visible in low sunlight under the grass in a few fields date from this period. The tithe documents indicate a further change which had taken place by the 1840s: the formation of some smaller farm units and smallholdings, underpinned directly or indirectly by other commercial or industrial opportunities. Domestic industry, growing in the 18th century, could make pastoral farms of quite small acreage viable for farmers, and when domestic work declined in the age of the powered machine, work in factories might provide the extra family income. Tower Hill Farm had been divided into two parts, of around 32 and 25 acres. The tenant of the smaller farm in the early 19th century was Daniel Sutton. Family tradition among the Suttons has it that at least two of Daniel’s nine children were sent along the hillside paths to work in a Bollington cotton mill, Joseph, aged six, being carried on the shoulders of his sister.
By the time of the tithe sale and apportionment surveys of the 1840s all common and waste lands in the KRIV area had been enclosed. By then agriculture in the area was modern in another way: almost all the farmland was pasture or meadow. By the later 18th century and perhaps
Photograph: Lower Brook Farm, Smithy Lane, Rainow (O.S map 953 766) J. Oakley in association with KRIV Heritage Project (2008)
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Photograph: Laid hedge on
Savio House estate 2007
Farmers sometimes undertook non-agricultural work. The farmer might at times work on the roads, for instance, while his wife carried out most of the farm work. Thomas Barton, the tenant of North End Farm (c.23 acres) worked the North End coal mines in the early 19th century. On very small holdings, agriculture might be a minor activity for the tenant. Attached to the Bull’s Head, a public house which served the growing quarrying settlement at Kerridge, were three fields (c.5 acres in total), possibly once part of Stakehouse Farm. When landlord John Adams left the pub in 1910, his farming stock, which was put up for sale, consisted of “two choice heifers, in calf for early spring; sixty grand poultry; three ducks; two stacks of well-got meadow hay; implements and dairy utensils”. The fast growth of Bollington as a cotton town in the early 19th century led to the division of Adshead’s Barn Farm. By 1811 four stone cottages had been built at the north western corner of the farm, at the bottom of Lord Street. Either then or soon after, the western part of the farm was sold, no doubt with further housing development in mind. The tithe documents of the 1840s show that a few more houses had been built below the farmstead on Lord Street, and Cow Lane had been formed, with three cottages. But little more building was done, probably because of the steepness of much of the land, and Adshead’s Barn Farm remained as two separate blocks of around 7 and 14 acres, with 8 acres hived off to North End Farm.
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Mellor’s Gardens The unique garden at Hough Hole House, Rainow, was laid out so that the visitor can follow the journey made by Christian to the Celestial City in Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. The historian of the garden, R C Turner, wrote that “the book was chosen as a vehicle for the religious teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg who believed in the correspondence of the natural and spiritual worlds… There is no equivalent garden surviving in Britain.”
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Artist’s Impression: Mellor’s Garden
Kenning Illustration 2008
The garden was the work of James Mellor Jnr (1796-1891), the son of James Mellor, the founder of Hough Hole cotton mill. James Jnr. ran the mill for a while after his father’s death in 1828, then concentrated on farming, from which he retired in the 1850s. The old Hough Hole farmhouse became Hough Hole House and was extended, with a new farmhouse being built in a field to the west. Mellor now devoted much of his time to spiritual contemplation, guided by the works of Swedenborg which he had discovered in his thirties, and to preaching and the creation of the garden. Mellor used existing features in the crofts behind the house and built new ones. A swampy lawn became the Slough of Despond; a hole in the overflow of the pond was the Cave of the Holy Sepulchre; a summer house in which Mellor constructed an Aeolian harp was the Howling House; the new farmhouse was the Doubting Castle; the Celestial City on Mount Sion was a chapel, approached by a spiral staircase, which Mellor had built onto a barn. He also added non-Bunyan elements, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and many inscriptions written and carved in stone by Mellor himself were scattered about. Mellor kept the garden open to the public, apparently at all times. Turner wrote that “the garden became a considerable local attraction. Parties of visitors came every Sunday by wagonette from Manchester; many came from abroad. Good Friday was the special day when over 500 people could be found there.” The gardens fell into disrepair when Hough Hole House passed out of the Mellor family, but were restored and for a time reopened in the late 20th century. More information about Mellor and the garden can be found in Mellor’s Gardens by R C Turner, 2nd (expanded) edition, 1989.
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2. Mills and Pools The manufacturing heritage of Ingersley Vale and Rainow is visible mainly along the streams, for it was water power which allowed the upper Dean valley to participate in the first great burst of growth in the cotton industry, from the 1780s. Factories rapidly colonised the length of the Dean and its tributary streams in the KRIV area, but the most obvious sites are at the ‘Bollington end’, where manufacturing lasted longest. Higher Mills stood where the Ingersley Vale track leaves Church Street, Bollington. The last mill building here was demolished in 2001, but part of the mill pool remains. A few hundred yards further along the track, just over the Rainow boundary, a modern industrial building stands on the site of Rainow Mill. A weir behind the building bears the date 1801 and the initials LPW and WW. The mill pool site is now a private car park. The valley narrows, and the track takes to the hillside, crossing the flue leading up to Ingersley Vale Mill chimney (shown as Ingersley Clough Mill on the map on page 18), the last of the KRIV area’s hillside chimneys. An iron trough high above the track connects a hillside leat with a massive mid-19th century wheelhouse, below which are the walls of an older mill, which survived a fire in 1999. The ‘E 1809 C’ date stone is misleading, as this mill was rebuilt after a devastating fire in 1819. The leat can be seen on the hillside as the track rises to the former Waulkmill Farm. The large mill pool, now silted and choked with willows, lies behind a weir built over a waterfall on a rocky outcrop. Here we see again the initials EC, with the date 1800. At Waulkmill the track ends, but the path above the woods along the side of Kerridge hill gives a view of the next site, Hough Hole Mill. The mill, known as the White Shop, was demolished in the 1940s, but the pool survives, together with a mill manager’s house and a row of cottages. Foundations are all that remain of a hillside chimney. Beyond Hough Hole pool a tributary stream joins the Dean. Half a mile or so up this stream, opposite Lower Brook Farm on Smithy Lane, stood Lower House Mill. In 1899 Bollington Urban District Council bought and demolished the mill, which had been in ruins for decades, and preserved the pool to store water from a borehole, prior to filtering the water and piping it to Bollington. The next mill on the Dean met a similar end. Mill Brook Mill, at the point where the B 5470 crosses the stream, was bought by the BUDC and demolished in 1922 to make way for a pumping station. Water was stored in the former mill pool.
Artist’s Impression: Inner workings of Fulling Mill
Kenning Illustration 2008
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This and other domestic textile trades, including silkbutton making and linen manufacture, would have expanded in Rainow and Bollington in the 17th and 18th centuries. Cotton had been added by at least the mid18th century.
Back in the shadow of Kerridge hill, on the tributary stream which runs down from Brookhouse, stood Cow Lane Mill. From the early years of the 20th century this mill has been falling slowly into ruins. Some clearance has taken place recently, and the hillside chimney has been removed, but the site retains many clues to its history. Scattered stones show the mill at right angles to a pool, now silted and overgrown. On the uphill side of the track is a wheel pit. A leat can be traced along the hillside to the site of a second pool further upstream. The KRIV project has carried out an archaeological survey of Cow Lane Mill and a copy of the detailed report can be viewed on the project’s website. The area of the KRIV project contains one more former mill, high above the stream, close to the B5470 at Kerridge End. Springbank Mill, now a private residence, was a late 19th century steam-powered silk-throwing mill. It is likely that the waters of the Dean in this area were first used to power a medieval corn mill. A possible site for such a mill is below Tower Hill, on what was apparently known as Mill Brook before a cotton mill (Mill Brook Mill) was built there in the 18th century. But the earliest map we have, made as part of a Forest survey in 1611, clearly shows ‘Rainow Milne’ on or near the present Rainow Mill site, very close to the Bollington boundary. The map of 1611 also shows ‘Ralph Thorly’s Walk Mill’ on or near the site of the present Waulkmill Farm. In a walk mill, or fulling mill, water-powered hammers replaced the older method of treading woollen cloth in a trough with fuller’s earth. The presence of a walk mill in Rainow by 1611 suggests that woollen cloth was perhaps being produced in local farms and cottages on a commercial basis.
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It was the cotton industry which had the potential for revolutionary growth, once the patent on Richard Arkwright’s water-powered spinning machine, the Water Frame, had expired in 1783. The opportunity was quickly seized, on the upper Dean as well as in other Pennine valleys. Between 1784, or thereabouts, and 1805, seven water-powered cotton-spinning mills were set up on the streams in the KRIV area together with a further three mills in Rainow and another five in Bollington (where a final water-powered cotton mill was added in 1818). The location and dates of these mills can be seen on the map on the facing page.
Top Left Page : Cow Lane Mill, Boiler house & chimney
viewed from east as seen in 1982 Bottom Left Page : Cow Lane Mill, Boiler house
as seen in 1982 Top Right Page : Rainow Mill c1900 Bottom Right Page : Sketch map
of cotton mills in Bollington and Rainow in 1806 by George Longden.
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Who were the entrepreneurs in this local industrial revolution? We don’t know in every case, but it seems clear that local men were the prime movers. The first off the mark, probably in or around 1784, were John Gaskell in Rainow, and the brothers Philip and George Antrobus in Bollington. Uncertainty about the dating of the Waterhouse Mill, an early Bollington mill, allows Peter Lomas, formerly a tanner, to be a contender. The Gaskells had been yeoman farmers in Adlington in the early eighteenth century. Through advantageous marriage and economic enterprise, the family prospered. John Gaskell inherited the Tower Hill estate in Rainow, bought Ingersley and the surrounding farms in 1768, and built the first stage of Ingersley Hall in 1775. He extended the fulling mill and erected a bleach works somewhere in Ingersley Vale, before building Mill Brook Mill in or around 1784, and Ingersley Vale Mill in 1792 or 1793, as cotton-spinning mills. Both mills were probably leased to tenants from the beginning. Edward Collier was the tenant at Ingersley Vale Mill by 1800, and seems to have himself financed the building of the large pool above Waulkmill, as well as factory extensions. He became bankrupt in 1811.
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Philip and George Antrobus had ‘put out’ cotton to be spun and woven domestically, in a business which had been started by their father at Turner Heath in Bollington before 1761. In or around 1784, the brothers built a cotton mill (or possibly converted an old silk mill) at Oak Bank, Bollington. George went on to build Higher Mill (just inside the KRIV area) in 1789 or 1790, and Lower Mill around 1792. George and Philip worked the mills themselves at times, and at other times leased them out, in whole or part. Rainow Mill, which had at some time in the 17th or 18th century become a paper mill, was converted to cotton spinning in 1801 by Lawrence Wagstaff who had taken over the paper mill from his father four years earlier. His partner in the new enterprise was William Watts. James Mellor, who built Hough Hole Mill in 1803, had been a joiner, a builder and a coal merchant, before buying Hough Hole Farm in 1796. He probably built the mill himself, using stone from his own quarry on the hillside above. Coal came from a mine in the mill yard. Mellor and his son worked at least part of the mill themselves, though at times there were tenants.
Left Page : Gin Glough Mill (O.S map 958 765) Right Page : Waulkmill waterfall 2007
Another farmer, John Latham of Lower House Farm Rainow, built Lower House Mill, and worked it himself for many years, before selling out to his brother, Samuel. The original cotton mills were probably all small and fairly unobtrusive. The only survivor is the older part (c.1794) of Gin Clough Mill, on the Hayles Clough tributary stream above the KRIV project area. This mill was about ten yards long (four bays), eight yards wide and two storeys high. A small mill pool stood in front, and a water wheel of eighteen feet diameter at the side. A combination of fieldwork, old photographs, and old property advertisements suggests that the other mills were only slightly bigger, maybe up to six bays and three storeys. But the mills and their pools were very soon extended. At Cow Lane Mill, for instance, the original pool of c.1789 was next to the mill, but a second pool was built upstream in 1803, and a second wheel installed. Other mills to be extended included Mill Brook, where John Gaskell, in 1805 built a second pool, with a leat along the hillside to a twenty-foot wheel. The water emptied into the original reservoir, which fed a thirty four-foot wheel. At Ingersley Vale Mill, Edward Collier’s second pool and hillside leat fed two wheels, twenty two and twenty three feet in diameter, one on top of the other. Intensive use of the small streams from the beginning posed the problem of continuity in water supply, and the construction of large pools where water could be impounded made this even worse. In 1806, the Rainow millwright William Richardson noted that steam engines had been installed “to assist in turning the machinery” in dry weather at Mill Brook Mill, Lower House Mill (Rainow), and Ingersley Vale Mill. The others followed, probably soon afterwards.
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Expanding mills needed not only more power, but also more workers, and there is an indication that in the early years neither the local workforce nor the number of immigrants was adequate. Ingersley Vale Mill used pauper apprentices, a fact which we know only because after the fire of 1819 the tenant’s surviving property, which was put up for sale, included “in the apprentices’ house three dozen wood trenchers, two dozen and a half tin breakfast cans…[and] nine sets of common bedsteads.” Before the end of the French wars in 1815, cotton mills were typically still fairly small, water-powered, rural, and operated by a diverse band of entrepreneurs, as in the KRIV area. After the French wars, larger steam-powered mills run by bigger firms became more widespread, sometimes producing very fine cotton. They integrated spinning and power-loom weaving and were served by canals and then railways. The term ‘industrial revolution’ comes readily to mind in this context. While Rainow remained a rural village, Bollington became a small industrial town, with a population which grew from 1,723 in 1821 to 5,439 in 1861. The mills at the ‘Bollington end’ of Ingersley Vale, Higher Mill, Rainow Mill, and Ingersley Vale Mill, all connected to Bollington by a track, participated in Bollington’s growth.
Photograph : Ingersley Vale Mill leat 2007 Inset: Higher Mill, sale poster 1859
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All these mills were leased by Martin Swindells (1784-1843), a Bollington ‘cotton master’ of the second generation. Swindells built the large Clarence Mill by the canal in Bollington in the late 1820s, and had cotton businesses in Manchester and Stockport. In various partnerships he also leased Ingersley Vale Mill, which had been rebuilt after the fire, in 1821, Rainow Mill in 1822, and both Higher and Lower Mills in 1832. In the last 2 cases, where second mills were erected in the 1830s, Swindells tenanted in partnership with Thomas Oliver, the son-in-law and successor to Peter Lomas, founder of the Waterhouse Mill, Bollington. It was claimed (when the mill was advertised for sale) that the previous tenants of Higher Mill had produced “very superior” yarn for the manufacture of lace “which is well known in the Nottingham market”. Swindells and his partners probably produced high quality mule-spun yarn at the other Ingersley Vale mills too. Power-loom weaving was introduced at Ingersley Vale Mill in 1826. The use of steam power increased. In the case of Rainow Mill and the Lower Mills, and perhaps in the others too, the steam engines and water wheels were used in conjunction to drive the machinery. By 1859, at the Lower Mills the water wheel and two steam engines coupled to it produced 55hp in all.
Photograph : Remains of Cow Lane Mill in 2007
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Swindells, and then his sons, retained the leases on Rainow Mill and Ingersley Vale Mill until 1842 and on Higher and Lower Mills until 1859. Cotton spinning continued at Rainow Mill until the 1880s (the mill having been rebuilt after a fire in 1856), at Higher Mills until the 1870s, and at Ingersley Vale mill until c.1848.
the original building, was mainly used as a brewery and a bottling plant until it was destroyed by fire in 1931. The Higher Mill built in the 1830s housed a variety of activities including hat making and fustian cutting, before being taken over by Shrigley Dyers who were in occupation until the mill was demolished to make way for housing in 2001.
Ingersley Vale Mill had the most successful life after cotton manufacture. John Brier introduced calico printing; it was probably he who built the wheelhouse which survives today and installed a giant fifty six-foot water wheel.
The other mills in the KRIV project area, which lacked direct road connection to Bollington, mostly abandoned cotton earlier. Cow Lane Mill changed from cotton to silk, perhaps in 1817, and remained a silk mill until the 1870s, under the management of the Thorp family, who were silk manufacturers in Macclesfield and lived at Tower Hill House in Rainow. A short period as a bleach works followed, and then slow decay when the works stopped in 1907.
From 1878 to 1929 Ingersley Vale Mill was occupied by the innovative firm of King’s, bleachers and finishers. From around 1895 the great wheel was used to generate electricity to power the machinery. In a series of extensions to the south, the old master’s house and a row of cottages, which may once have housed the pauper apprentices, were demolished. An Institute for the workers, with cooking and games facilities and a library, was opened in 1902. Later uses of Ingersley Vale Mill, up to the fire of 1999, included the manufacture of edging and tapes, and dyeing and printing. The two Higher Mills were operated separately from the 1870s. The older mill, which included
Photograph: Ingersley Vale Mill 2007
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Cotton spinning ceased at Lower House Mill soon after 1825; abandonment and ruin apparently began at once. At Hough Hole Mill cotton production continued to the mid19th century, after which, and up to about 1914, the Mellor family ran an engineering business in the premises. Cotton production came to an end at Mill Brook Mill in 1868, when there was a devastating fire. The mill was partially restored and used for fustian cutting, before demolition in 1923.
The White Shop and Steam Carriage By 1860, Hough Hole Mill, known as the White Shop, was occupied by the firm of William Mellor & Co, “machinists and manufacturers of all kinds of tools for engineers”. William Mellor was the younger son of James Mellor, the founder of the mill, and brother of James, the creator of Mellor’s Gardens. The firm achieved considerable success and renown both in Britain and in Europe, especially for machine tools including precision planes, drills, lathes, and a steam hammer with valve gear patented in 1863. By 1868, the firm’s inventiveness had led to experiments with a steam road carriage, which the Macclesfield Courier described as having three wheels, the single driving wheel and the driver being at the front end. Sheet metal framing formed a box containing water sufficient for a trip of 15 miles. There were two small horizontal engines, a vertical boiler at the back end of the framing with a coke tender behind it, and the capacity to carry 20 passengers. In July 1868 an experimental trip was made, with 15 passengers, through “the most mountainous parts of the country” by way of Clulow Cross and Wincle to Swythamley, and back by Rushton and Macclesfield. “The machine is under perfect control, and can easily be stopped or turned at will. The construction is such that steam issuing from it is not visible, nor heard… To see the engine rolling along without any visible means of propulsion appears marvellous, and some people on first seeing it, ran out of sight, and only ventured near when they saw nothing to harm them.”
Photograph: View of The White Shop with Rainow village in the distance
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3. Mines and Quarries Almost all of the evidence of the quarry and mine working in the KRIV project area is to be seen on Kerridge hill. Milnrow sandstones are underlain by shales and coal, with some fireclay - the strata dipping toward the west and north. The topmost stone is coarse: it can be seen in the walls which run along the top of the ridge. Below that are beds of the pale Kerridge sandstone, long prized for its appearance, durability and ease of working into regular even-sided blocks and sheets. The stone has been widely used for walls, roofing slates, window sills and lintels, door cases, hearthstones, mantelpieces and flagstones. It has been used to make troughs, sinks and cisterns for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses, and for gravestones and monuments, such as, for instance, Kerridge war memorial on Oak Lane. On the eastern side of Kerridge hill a few old quarries can be seen, high on the steep hillside. On the western side, access to the best stone was easier, from bench land halfway up the hillside. A series of parallel tracks, formerly known as ganks, lead from Windmill Lane through overgrown quarry spoils to the quarry faces, which now form a massive scar reaching almost to the top of the hill. There are signs of largescale investment in these quarries. Windmill Lane crosses a cleft by Victoria Bridge, where a plaque used to bear the date 24 May 1837 – Queen Victoria’s birthday and year of accession. Beneath ran a tramway, short but with major earthworks, from the gank of Victoria Quarry down to a wharf on the Macclesfield Canal.
Artist’s Impression: Coal mining on Kerridge
RidgeKenning Illustration 2008 Photograph : Quarry workers, Kerridge
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Five seams (or mines, in older usage) of coal are known beneath Kerridge hill. Local miners over the years have given them a variety of names. In descending order, the seams are: Great Smut (or Bollington Smut); Little Smut (or Bullion, or Red Ash); Sweet Mine (or Shore Seam), which is underlain by a commercially valuable fireclay; Ribbon Mine (or Stone, or Stinkard); and Bassey (Great Mine or Yard, or Limekiln). Some of the names suggest the qualities of the coal; only the Sweet Mine provided good house coal. The seams were mainly thin, at one or two feet. The Great Mine was thicker, at three to four feet; the coal was also the poorest, though the sellers claimed that it was “well adapted for engines, or burning lime or bricks.”
Legend
The remains of coal mining are most obvious on the lower parts of the north end and eastern side of the hill. From the track which leads from Redway in Kerridge to North End Farm, and then from the paths leading along the hillside to Kerridge End, shallow depressions and spoil heaps, indicating former adits and shafts, can be seen in large numbers. Only the top four seams were mined on the east side, apparently; on the west side the lowest seam was also mined, and perhaps the fireclay. But most of the evidence is below the KRIV boundary. An exception is the castellated circular stone ventilation shaft close to Victoria Bridge on Windmill Lane, which has been described by Roger Bowling, the historian of local mining, as ‘the largest edifice of Bollington’s mining era.’
Geological Information
1.2-1.8m Seam of Fire Clay (Not Worked) Milnrow Sandstone or Kerridge Grit
Cross-section beneath the North End of Kerridge Ridge, showing the five coal seams. The seams dip to the West at 6º
Shale & Thin Bands of Stone
Coal Seams: White Nancy
1 Bollington Smut: (1.2m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)
279.47m
2 Little Smut: (0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)
3West
East 4
3 Sweet: (0.6m Thick Seam of Good Quality Coal) 4 Stone or Stinkard (0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal Containing Ironstone) 5 Bassey: (0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)
Quarries 213.3m
River Dean
154.4m
Artist’s Impression: Geological cross section beneath the north end of Kerridge Ridge, showing the five coal seams. The seams dip to the west at 6º.
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Top Photograph: Quarry workers, Kerridge Bottom Photograph: Spoil heap from
Kerridge coal mine 2006
The Anglo-Saxons may have quarried stone on Kerridge. The name perhaps suggests so, being derived from the Old English terms for stone or boulder (caeg) and for ridge (hrycg). But written records are much later. Late 14th and 15th century references can be found to the use of Kerridge stone in Macclesfield castle, for the repair of buildings at Kinderton, and for the re-roofing of Mobberley church. The medieval quarries were presumably on the western side of the hill. The Forest survey map of 1611 has the words ‘slate pitts’ towards the north end and the survey refers to a quarry at the Hurdsfield end. Coal was exploited less. In 1611 there were apparently only three coal pits in the Macclesfield Forest, in Disley, Pott Shrigley and Rainow. The location of the Rainow pit, where four men were employed, is not known. During the 17th and 18th centuries both quarrying and mining in the area expanded. Quarrying grew more quickly, through the stimulus of the enclosure of local commons and waste, the ‘great rebuilding’ in stone of the houses of the gentry and yeomen, the farmhouses, and the erection of cottages as the population grew.
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Top Photograph: Quarry workers, Kerridge Bottom Photograph: Stone pavings near adandoned quarries at the south end of Kerridge Hill (east side) (O.S. map 944 755)
Kerridge quarries remained for the moment in the hands of small operators, probably eight or so, though now employing more men. Some of the quarrying families, such as the Gatleys and the Greens, had been in the stone trades since at least the early 18th century, probably on Kerridge throughout. It is likely that most of the coal mines were small scale concerns, though as the eastern mines went deeper into the hill, it was necessary to cut expensive drainage soughs, or looses, through to Bollington or Hurdsfield. For the lower seams steam pumps were needed. In 1795 Aikin recorded two, one in Bollington and one in Rainow.
The Kerridge quarries were on common land and under the control of the crown in the middle ages. By the beginning of the 17th century some or all of them were leased to the corporation of Macclesfield. Later in the 17th century the quarries were enclosed, being allotted to the owners of the old enclosed lands nearby. The enclosures on much of the west side of the hill seem to have taken the form of narrow strips running from the bottom to the top of the hill – hence perhaps the succession of ganks or quarry entrances which can be seen along Windmill Lane today. Coal mining grew more slowly. It is not known which of the Kerridge hill mines are the oldest, but presumably the most accessible coal was worked first, with bell pits and adits. The first map to indicate coal mines at all, Burdett’s Cheshire map of 1777, places them at the north end of the hill. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries quarrying and mining were further stimulated by local industrial development. Mills, which used increasing numbers of steam engines, were built in local stone, as were the cottages of industrial Bollington. The turnpike road and canal system, and later railways, made carriage to distant markets cheaper. The market for roofing slates in Cheshire was actually reduced, as lighter Welsh slates could be imported. But for monumental stone, demand grew. The authors of Bagshaw’s Cheshire Directory of 1850 remarked that Kerridge stone was in great demand for the erection of churches and public buildings, and hoped that “its hardness and beautiful whiteness will throw out of use that perishable, brick dust sort of freestone with which most churches and ancient buildings in Cheshire are erected.”
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The building of the Macclesfield Canal brought about major changes in quarrying on the western side of Kerridge, and to the landscape below the quarries. The Macclesfield was one of the last canals, feeding into the Peak Forest Canal to the north, and the Trent and Mersey to the south. The first sod was cut in Bollington in December 1826; the canal was open by 1830. A wharf had been built at the nearest point to the quarries, about half a mile away. In 1829 the Endon and Oak estates, including the wharf, three quarries (later known as Bridge, Turret, and Windmill quarries), and the land between, were put up for sale.
Inset: Receipt for Clayton’s coal, 1848 Photograph: Clayton’s Ventilation Tower, Windmill Lane 2008
The purchaser was William Clayton, who operated the Swanscoe coal mine, and mines in Hyde. It seems he was the same William Clayton who tenanted the large Poynton and Worth coal mines, which were also on the line of the Macclesfield Canal. His lease was due to expire, and Lord Vernon decided to work the mines himself through his agent. It may be that Clayton hoped to reap the advantages of the canal which were being denied him in Poynton by investing heavily in Kerridge. During the 1830s, Clayton built a tramway from the canal wharf up to the track leading to what became known as Victoria or Bridge Quarry. On the first stretch, up to Oak Lane, the gradient was gentle. The next stretch, steeper, consists of a massive embankment, wide enough for the tramway and a cart track. The tramway here seems to have obliterated a previous road down from the hill, and Whiteleys Farm, which lay halfway along it. The embankment took the tramway up to Endon House, where it crossed a road which continued from Higher Lane southwards past Swanscoe Mine to Swanscoe Farm and beyond. So far, the trucks would be horse drawn. On the steep top stretch, under Victoria Bridge, a steam engine wound up the ascending trucks.
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Photograph: Windmill, Kerridge, late 19th century
In the second half of the nineteenth century, large firms operated the quarries on the western side of Kerridge, though not as flamboyantly as Clayton. For instance, Wettons, a Rainow firm, had quarries on Kerridge, and on Billinge, Windyway, Teggs Nose, and in Bollington. They also had two sawmills on Grimshaw Lane in Bollington. Such firms introduced mechanisation in the form of stone crushers, frame saw and planing machines and compressed air hammer drills, together with steam cranes and the use of explosives. Clayton also built the wide straight track which leads from Endon House up to Windmill Lane at the entrance to his Windmill Quarry. The windmill itself, which stood between the quarry entrance and Five Ashes, was apparently transported from Macclesfield Common in 1834. It seems likely that this would be Clayton’s work. Near the entrance to the third of his Endon quarries, Turret Quarry, Clayton built a castellated row of cottages, known as Turret Cottages. Castellation is also seen on the ventilation chimney which he built on Windmill Lane in preparation for extended coal mining. Clayton built Endon House, close to the tramway, for his manager, and the imposing Endon Hall for himself, presumably. At the Hall, he entertained 250 workmen to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. “Each guest had an entire plum pudding to himself, and roast beef and ale were dispensed on an equally generous scale”. However Clayton does not seem to have lived at the Hall during most of the 1840s, and in 1850 he died. His quarries on Kerridge were leased to, and ultimately owned by, his former manager, Williamson.
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The coal mines experienced no such development. Faulting limited their potential: the ‘Red Rock Fault’, for instance cuts off expansion westwards at roughly the line of the Macclesfield Canal. The coal lacked the quality advantage of the Kerridge stone. The canal, and then the railways (arriving in Macclesfield from the north in 1845 and from the south in 1848, and in Bollington in 1870) brought in higher quality coal cheaply. Sporadic mining seems to have continued into the early 20th century, at least on the Rainow side. By the 20th century the cheapness of other building materials meant that the use of Kerridge stone declined. For instance, when Bollington Urban District Council built 56 council houses off Grimshaw Lane in 1921-2, Kerridge stone was used; when the housing scheme was extended after the second world war, the houses were rendered brick. The operation of the quarries had become more sporadic by the late 19th century. By the late 1940s they were almost entirely deserted. From the late 20th century there has been some revival, and Kerridge stone is being sent far afield again.
Photograph: Aerial view of mine and
quarry tracks on the east side of Kerridge ridge showing Hough Hole pool
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4. Tracks and Paths Walkers in the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale area will use tracks and paths which seem to hint at historical significance, but can’t always be easily interpreted. Some trackways, now little used, have an ancient air. This may derive from particular features, such as the small patch of old stone paving, with edging stones, which can be found where the track from Tower Hill Farm passes below the Cow Lane Mill site and begins to climb Kerridge hill. Mill Lane, the narrow walled track which climbs north from the site of Rainow Mill, gives a general impression of age. Rainow Mill was apparently the site of a medieval corn mill, and part of Mill Lane forms the boundary of Bollington and Rainow, and has probably done so since the 13th century, so the impression may be correct.
bridge (the base of which seems rather older than its parapets). A dense network of overgrown paths and tracks can be seen on the eastern side of Kerridge hill, especially when the sun is low in the sky, or after a light snowfall. These are obviously connected to the remains of mines and quarries. The best vantage points are on the main road in and above Rainow. A few similar lost access tracks can be seen in the field below the northern end of Lidgetts Lane.
The bridle road which runs from Smithy Lane in Rainow across High Cliff to join Oakenbank Lane was surely once more important. This is the most direct road between Rainow and Pott Shrigley and Bollington. The trackway is walled, and of normal width for a country road, yet it retains for the most part old stone surfacing, in a desiccated and patched-up state. Traces of completely abandoned roads, surviving as rights of way, can be found in and below Ingersley Park. The path across the park from the entrance near Oakenbank cottages can be seen to use a grassed-over causeway, which was once part of a road leading down into Ingersley Clough. Greenwood’s Cheshire map of 1819 shows another road or track, branching off at the Oakenbank end and running in front of Ingersley Hall then diagonally down the bank into Ingersley Vale. The right of way has now been diverted around the back of the Hall, but the path still follows the former track down to the river, which is crossed by a stone
Perhaps the most remarked upon paths of the area are the stone flagged paths which lead from Waulkmill towards Sugar Lane, and along the eastern hillside from Kerridgeside to the wood above Ingersley pool. Stone paths can also be found in Bollington and Kerridge, from the top of Lord Street to Redway and on to Higher Lane. It seems likely that the latter paths must have been made principally for workers in the Kerridge quarries who lived in Bollington, almost certainly in the nineteenth century.
Photograph: Trod path leading down to the White Shop c 1905
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Photograph: Trod path in
Kerridge 2007
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Photograph: Dry stone footbridge on Gritstone Trail over Ingersley
Clough 2007
Travellers probably passed through the area long before permanent settlements were made, as both the valley of the Dean and the col at the southern end of Kerridge hill provide gateways from the lowlands into the hills. Hunters in the period after the last glaciation may have come this way as early as the 8th millennium BC, following the red deer and aurochs (wild cattle) from lowland winter pastures to upland summer grazing. Later prehistoric traders, bringing perhaps salt from the Weaver valley and copper from the mines of Alderley Edge, may have used these passes into the Peak. Romans from Chester and from Manchester may have approached the springs at Buxton this way. South of Kerridge hill, the main road from Macclesfield probably follows the old way into the hills. This route would increase in importance from the 10th century, when the eastern part of Cheshire was organised around a royal estate at Macclesfield. But old routes through the Dean Valley at Bollington and touching on the KRIV area seem to have been lost, at least in part. The OS map surveyed in 1870-1 noted that the road across Billinge was a ‘Roman Road, supposed site of’. The 19th century supposition was that a Roman route, coming from the direction of Woodford, passed over the north side of the Dean Valley by Beeston, and crossed the stream below Sowcar, before ascending Blaze Hill. Another ancient route, perhaps used by the Romans, has been suggested more recently, in this case passing through the Dean Valley by the north end of Kerridge hill. Some evidence of a Roman route passing north-south through Prestbury has also been identified. From Prestbury a direct line east follows what became field paths to Flash Lane, then passes through Bollington Cross, up Grimshaw Lane (where a Roman coin was found in 1953) to Stakehouse End, along Chancery Lane and Cow Lane, by field paths to Rainow Mill, along Mill Lane, and so on to Blaze Hill.
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The word ‘Stakehouse’ is older than Stakehouse Farm. It can be found on the 1611 Forest map and survey as ‘Steakles’ and ‘Steakulls’. Derived from the Old English words for a stake, and for hill, it perhaps suggests a fortified site. If a long standing political and cultural boundary (as has been suggested) was sited close by, and was crossed by an important long distance route, perhaps a stronghold here would not be surprising. All of this, if it happened, may have preceded the establishment of settlements at Bollington and Rainow. Kerridge quarries may also have been started earlier. The road up to Marksend from Swanscoe is probably as old as the quarries, and so too may be Windmill Lane. As Bollington and Rainow formed as settlements, probably sometime between the late 12th and the late 13th centuries, a network of local paths and tracks would emerge. It can be argued that in Rainow the bridleway from Smithy Lane to Oakenbank Lane was a local route of considerable early importance. The bridle road linked the farms stretched out along the road from Macclesfield with the timber producing Oakenbank Wood, passing the oldestablished Ingersley on the way. Oakenbank Lane and then Spuley Lane carry directly on to Pott Shrigley, where there was a church from (probably) the late 14th century. Rainow had no church until perhaps the late 17th century.
Photograph: Causeway of lost road
leading to Waulkmill through Savio House estate
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In the absence of a route down the valley, the bridle road was perhaps the way by which people from the southern parts of Rainow reached Rainow Mill (the corn mill) and the fulling mill, turning off onto the lost roads across Ingersley Park described above. The bridge above Ingersley Vale Mill, which at present joins together two fields, makes more sense if it was once on the track to the Walkmill. In the mid 18th century, a great boom in the turnpiking of roads took place. The main roads through Macclesfield were turnpiked in the 1750s and 1760s, as were many of the routes through the Peak. The Macclesfield-Whaley Bridge road was turnpiked under an Act of 1770, and was thus the last link in a cross-Peak system of roads. This is why the milestones (which seem to be the 18th century originals) give the mileage to Sheffield and Chesterfield, though the authority of this particular trust ran only from Macclesfield to Fernilee. The turnpike, it is said, was engineered by John Metcalf, ‘Blind Jack of Knaresborough’. For the length which forms the boundary of the KRIV area, the original road seems to have been followed, except for a short stretch where the new road passes on one side of the Rainow Institute, and the old narrow road on the other.
The bridge at the Mill Brook Mill site is presumably one of Metcalf’s famously flood resistant bridges, though now in a widened state. No.1 Hawkins Lane served as a toll house, with only a chain (rather than a toll bar) across the road, at least from 1795. Industrialisation, from the late18th century, seems to have had a limited impact on communications in Rainow, other than to cause the proliferation of mine and quarry tracks on the side of Kerridge hill. It seems surprising that as industrial Bollington grew rapidly in the nineteenth century no direct road was cut through the Dean Valley. Such a road was discussed and planned, but schemes were thwarted, perhaps by the way the valley at its narrowest point was filled by the premises of Ingersley Vale Mill. James Mellor (1796-1891), the builder of the allegorical Pilgrim’s Progress garden at Hough Hole House, was a prominent supporter of plans for a new road, and apparently offered to donate land and stone. It seems likely therefore that it was James Mellor who built the Rainow stone paths, which are all on Hough Hole land, as a substitute for the road.
Top Photograph: Circle of trees on Savio House estate 2006 Left Photograph : Bridge over River Dean below Tower Hill with Mill Brook Mill to right, Rainow c 1905
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Photograph: Oakenbank Lane
(O.S map 949 768)
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Rather more roads and tracks were built on the western side of Kerridge hill, largely due to William Clayton who bought the Endon estate around 1830. Clayton’s activities there were described in chapter 3. It may have been under the influence of his improvements that Lidgetts Lane was constructed at the southern end of the hill. No road or track is shown here on any of the early county maps, even that of Bryant in 1831, which shows many minor trackways. Lidgetts Lane first appears on the unpublished Ordnance Survey 2 inch map of 1837. At Kerridge End, Lidgetts Lane had to join an older track which leads toward quarries and mines; hence the awkward bend. At the northern end, Lidgetts Lane was cut through a mine site. The ghost of the original access to the mine can be seen in the field below. Traces of other tracks leading from Kerridge Road toward Marksend Quarries can also be seen, tracks which would have been unnecessary had Lidgetts Lane been an old established route.
Top Photograph: Victorian lake on Savio House estate 2008 Left Photograph: Stone stile on Gritstone Trail leading to tiered waterfall on Savio House estate 2007
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Photograph: Drystone wall spanning Ingersley Clough 2008
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Conclusion The landscape described in this publication has changed significantly over the centuries. In the past the Kerridge ridge and Ingersley vale have provided a livelihood for many of the families in Rainow and Bollington. The past noise of the mills and the dust and dirt of the mines and quarries have been replaced by the sounds of sheep and cows, an occasional tractor in the summer mowing season and the many walkers who visit throughout the year. The past economic activities outlined in this booklet have left their mark on what is now a relatively peaceful and secluded valley. What future landscape changes the area will experience will be for succeeding generations to understand and enjoy.
Further Reading The following are secondary materials which deal with parts of the KRIV area: Betts, R Norton. Bollington Through the Centuries, 1934. Re-issued 2005 Bollington Festival Committee. When Nancy Was Young, 1974 Broster, W S. Bollington and Kerridge 1830-1980, 1980 Laughton, J. Seventeenth Century Rainow, 1990 Longden, G. The Industrial Revolution in East Cheshire, Six Theme Walks, 1988 Longden, G. Bollington in Old Picture Postcards, 1995 Longden, G & Spink, M. Looking Back at Bollington, 1986. Reissued 2005 Longden, G & Spink, M. Looking Back at East Cheshire, 1989 Meecham, M. The Story of the Church in Rainow, 1996 Rainow History Group. Rainow Caught in Time, 2006 Rainow Women’s Institute. The Story of Rainow, 1974 Turner, R C. Mellor’s Gardens, 1984. Expanded second edition, 1989. Wilmslow Historical Society. Cotton Town, Bollington and the Swindells Family in the 19th Century, 1973
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Ingersley
ridge & vale A Landscape History I KRIV
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ridge & vale
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