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England > North West England > Cheshire

The Cheshire Plain is one of England's most fertile expanses of countryside, rich with woodlands, meadows, grassy slopes, streams and buttercups, and decorated with box-framed black-and-white houses. These distinctive dwellings built in the 16th century and called "magpie" houses locally, have their timbers darkened and their plaster painted white. Ancient Britons built wooden forts on ridges in this region and the Romans who followed them made Chester a key stronghold. The village of Daresbury, off the A56 just north of Chester, was the birthplace in 1832 of Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Among the rhododendrons you'll find the village church, adorned with a stained glass window depicting the Mad Hatter, Alice and other Carroll creations. Carroll was a Cheshire man, which might explain the grinning Cheshire cat in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The cat, you may remember, peered down from a tree branch and kept disappearing.

"I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy," Said Alice. "All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. "Well! I've often seen a cat without a grin," thought Alice; "but a grin without a cat! It's the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!"

As you wander back from the church, keep an eye out for hares and people wearing hats as you contemplate another extract from Carroll's tale:

"What sort of people live about here?"
"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."


Knutsford, with its winding streets and old black-and-white houses, is worth a visit. Manchester glove maker and philanthropist, Richard Watt, erected a number of dwellings here in a vague Mediterranean style, in between twiddling with his gloves. Next to the town, the 1000-acre estate of Tatton Park surrounds rambling, regency Tatton Hall. You can drop in on the hall and its fine formal gardens between April and October. Jodrell Bank, one of the world's giant radio telescopes, is located six miles south of town. Scientists at Jodrell Bank search the airwaves for signals from aliens as part of a project called SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. They also perform other, more mundane, tasks. Jodrell Bank radio telescope is so powerful it can detect the grin of a Cheshire cat in a tree on the moon.


Rhododendrons grow well around the village of Malpas, with its black-and-white cottages and Georgian houses. They flourish on No Man's Heath and in the gardens of 18th century Gothic-style Cholmondeley Castle. A green mound behind the red sandstone church was once the site of a Norman Castle built to keep out the marauding Welsh. Malpas was built on the hotly disputed border route between Cheshire and Wales. The name means "difficult passage" in Norman French.


If you notice a few of the Tudor-style houses in Northwich are leaning or shored up, there's a good reason. The village is built on salt mines, which have been operating continuously since the days of the Roman Empire. Some of them have collapsed, causing a bit of subsidence. The Salt Museum in town tells the story. The Romans used to extract the salt by bringing it to the surface as brine and evaporating it in lead pans. The Romans never knew lead was poisonous; in fact some historians claim lead poisoning caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Lead cups were used to drink ale or spirits right into medieval times. The combination of lead and alcohol would sometimes knock drinkers out for a couple of days. Someone walking along the road would take them for dead and prepare them for burial. They were laid out on the kitchen table for a day or two and the family would gather around and eat and drink and wait and see if they would wake up. Hence the custom of holding a "wake". Appropriately for a salt-mining town, take that with a grain of salt.
Nantwich is another old salt-mining town. Take a look at Sir Edmund Wright's Almshouses, built in 1638 and decorated with tiny carved figures. When the whole town burned down in 1583, Elizabeth I organised a national appeal to rebuild it, contributing £1000 from her own purse. Elizabeth didn't want to jeopardise her source of salt, a vital commodity in bygone centuries. Salt was widely used as a preservative in the days before the British invented refrigeration. Some people, after sampling warm British beer on a hot day, have observed cuttingly that: "The British invented refrigeration and then abandoned it." Never you mind - British beer is just fine when you get used to it: Just hurry up and drink your beer before it goes cold. Speaking of beer, if you want a good ale in Nantwich, the Crown Hotel in the High Street is the place to head. Full of atmosphere. "Two pints please, landlord..."
Hack Green, not far from Nantwich, is the site of Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker. (Oops - if it was secret before, it isn't now!) The bunker used to be secret (sort of) in the Cold War era (although locals knew all about it), when it was set up to serve as a UK Government command headquarters in the event of a flat-out nuclear war. After the nuclear war, the victors would have emerged in triumph from the bunker just as soon as radioactivity fell to safe levels - say in about 50,000 years. Now the Cold War is over (blown away by a rare blast of sanity) the bunker is open to the public.


Macclesfield made its money out of silk rather than salt. French silks became scarce during the Napoleonic Wars and the fortunes of Macclesfield, a big silk manufacturing centre, soared. Silk stayed a big earner right into World War II, when it was used for parachutes, stockings (OK, stockings were rationed, but people with connections could still obtain them) and for making ingenious little maps of Europe, incredibly detailed, that could be folded up to pencil size. Allied airmen carried the silk maps in case they were shot down over occupied Europe and needed to find their way home. After World War II, artificial fibres took off, nylon stockings were all the rage and the good people of Macclesfield had to find other things to keep them occupied. To see one of those dandy little silk maps, visit The Heritage Centre in Roe Street.
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