KRIV Heritage Brochure

A Landscape History

Kerridge Ingersley

ridge & vale

KRIV I Countryside and Heritage Project

A Landscape History I KRIV 1

This booklet describes the historical development of a fascinating and beautiful areaof countryside at the edge the Peak District hills of Cheshire. This area of thePennine fringe between Rainow and Bollington has developed a rich and detailedlandscape. 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 PeakDistrict hills.

Unravelling the history of a landscape involves using maps, aerial photographs, historical records, field surveys, archaeological and ecological investigations and evenoral history. This small publication may inspire readers to look more closely at thelocal landscape and enjoy their walks more as a result.

We would like to record a special thank-you to the landowners, farmers and localresidents 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’sLocal Heritage Initiative grant and the subsequent funding through the HeritageLottery Fund’s Landscape Partnership Scheme have helped us to carry out theresearch which underpins this publication. The initial text has been written byGeorge 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 littlemore about how the landscape has come to look the way it does. We also hope thatschools and other educational groups will find it useful, especially when read alongside our detailed landscape heritage map. For the people of Rainow andBollington we hope that this work will be of lasting value and interest.

Graham BarrowChairmanKerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage ProjectJune 2009Bollington, Cheshire

Preface

Kerridge Ingersley

ridge & vale

KRIV I Countryside and Heritage Project2

Heritage MapKerridge Ridge & Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project

Introduction


Kerridge Ridge stands at the western edge of the southern Pennines, 313m at itshighest point. To the west lies the Cheshire plain, with views across to the Welshhills. Below the ridge to the east is Ingersley Vale, through which run the upperreaches 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 ofgreat historical interest. Here, as in other Pennine valleys, was incubated theIndustrial Revolution of the eighteenth century. Many traces survive between thevillages of Bollington and Rainow. Walkers on Kerridge Ridge gain what are ineffect 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 KerridgeRidge and Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project. The four sections focuson the effects of agriculture, manufacturing industries, extractive industries, anddevelopments in communications. Each section begins with a description of landscape features which may be observed, followed by a largely chronological analysis.

Constraints of space have meant that references to sources of evidence havebeen kept to a minimum. More detailed history, and references to primary andsecondary sources for most of the information in this booklet, can be found inthe Historical Study by George Longden on the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley ValeProject website - www.kriv.org.uk

The stone is now listed by EnglishH

North End Farm

A

White Nancy BM 279.47m

a

Heritage Map: Cover (left) and detail (above).

Heritage Map:Produced by Phil Kenning in association with KRIV Heritage Project 2008.


Sugar Loaf and Tower

Photograph:White Nancy c1905 Photograph:White Nancy in winter 2007

White Nancy, the iconic monument at the north end ofKerridge Ridge, was described in 1921 as a ‘sugar loaf’ byAnne Gaskell of Ingersley Hall (now known as SavioHouse), the great granddaughter of its builder. An ordnance or military beacon occupied the site at theopening of the 19th century and may have done so formany years before. From this the name Nancy may havecome, first applied to the whole of this end of the hill –Northern Nancy.

John Gaskell, who built the first stage of Ingersley Hallacross the valley to the east in 1775, erected the ‘sugarloaf’ in or around 1817, apparently to commemorate the1815 victory at Waterloo, but also as a whitewashed skyline eye catcher, and as a summer house. Beneath theplaster, applied in 1935 in honour of the Silver Jubilee ofGeorge V, the freestone structure has a sealed-up doorand window and inside a stone table and seat.

At the other end of the ridge, somewhere on or near thehighest point, the ‘Saddle’, once stood Turton’s Tower. Thesite 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 silk-button man, employing domestic workers to make thebuttons. The connection of the family with Turton’s Tower,if any, is not known.

By the 19th century, the existence of the tower seems tohave been forgotten, though the name lived on in TowerHill, Rainow. In the 1890s, a Bollington doctor, whiledemolishing cottages which he owned near Tower HillFarm, decided to give future generations a reason for thename. The small tower he built with the stone can still beseen in front of the farmhouse.

1. Farms and Fields


Otherwise, apart from patches of modern planting, the Rainow side is divided into fields by drystone walls, hawthornhedges, and occasionally, east of the river, by hedges set atop low stone walls. Some of these ancient-looking wall andhedge combinations can be seen from the stone field path which connects Waulkmill with Sugar Lane in Rainow. Herethe fields, meadow and pasture, are moderately sized and fairly rectangular. The stone walls run straight up the hillsideto create regular fields, though some of the walls which can be seen among the scrub, quarry and mine remains at thesouthern end are more irregular.

Farmsteads, many with substantialstone buildings from the 17th or18th century, some of them stillworking farms, dot the area in surprising numbers. By the time ofthe sale and apportionment of tithesin the 1840s eleven farms lay entirelywithin the area, with sizes rangingbetween 21 and 62 acres. A furthersix farms had some land withinKerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale. Inaddition, there were at least sixsmallholdings, with 5 to 12 acreseach.

The land within the Kerridge Ridge andIngersley Vale Project boundary is predominantly farmland and quarries.Quarry spoils, together with working quarries, cover part of the western side ofKerridge hill; many of these are now coveredwith sycamore and ash regrowth. A canopyshades much of Windmill Lane. On theeastern side older woodland, which includesoak, beech and conifers, can be seen atOakenclough, and in Ingersley Vale.Ornamental planting has taken place inIngersley Hall parkland, on the skyline of theeastern side of Kerridge near White Nancy,and in strips down the hillside which mayalso have been intended as shelter belts.


Main Photograph: Haymaking near Hough Hole Mill, c 1940

Top Left: Ingersley Hall c 1905

Bottom Left: Kerridge Ridge 2008


When settlement and farming began in the KRIV area isuncertain. 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 itdoes list extensive woodlands at Macclesfield andAdlington, which may well have covered Kerridge Ridgeand Ingersley Vale. The woods were probably part of theancient forest of Lyme, the extent of which along thePennine edge can be judged today from the names Ashtonunder Lyne, Lyme Hall, and Newcastle under Lyme.

It has been argued recently that this well wooded andvery marginal terrain had been a frontier zone betweendifferent peoples and cultures from prehistoric times,through the Roman occupation and within the kingdom ofMercia. Only in the tenth century, with the creation of theshires, was the Cheshire boundary pushed further east.

Whether there was pre-Domesday forest clearance and settlement in Rainow or Bollington is not clear. The nameBollington 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 settlementon the Bollin (as the Dean may once have been known).

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 Isleof Man in the tenth century. But as local historian JaneLaughton has pointed out, a Scandinavian dialect was stillspoken in parts of Cheshire in the thirteenth century, soearly settlement cannot be assumed.

It is perhaps most likely that the settlements of Bollingtonand Rainow were formed in the period between the late12th and late 13th centuries, as part of the process bywhich farmland, commons and managed woods were created within Macclesfield Forest. The original purpose ofthis and other Forests, designated as such after theNorman Conquest, had been to preserve game, and theterrain needed for game, for royal hunting. But the incomewhich could be generated from felling and grazing rightsand from rents was increasingly appreciated. In 1215 theEarl of Chester issued a charter which made assarting, or clearance, in the forest easier. The inhabitants ofBollington and Rainow, and other Forest townships suchas Pott Shrigley, Hurdsfield, Sutton, Upton, Kettleshulme,and Disley were subject to Forest law, and owed service tothe Manor of Macclesfield. The Forest and Manorial courtswere held in Macclesfield. In these townships (unlikeAdlington and Bosley) there were no rich lords to financeclearance, 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 thefarms in the part of Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Valewhich lies within Rainow were well-established, includingIngersley, Tower Hill, Lower Brook, Old Hall andBrookhouse Farms. The corn mill on the Dean near theBollington boundary, and the fulling mill a little furtherupstream, would perhaps have had farmland attached.

Photograph: Kerridge Ridge in the background


Each farm would have some arable closes (fields). JaneLaughton’s study of 17th century Rainow has shown thatthese 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 allRainow farmers, for wool rather than for meat. Cattlewere also kept, mostly black and white cows, in smallnumbers. Animals would be pastured on the commonlands of the townships, though cattle might also be sentto ‘ley’ in the high pastures which had been created in theForest in such places as Harrop and Saltersford.

Bollington Common occupied the valley which later became the industrial centreof the town of Bollington, whilst Bollington Cross seems likely to have been thefocus of the original township. Both sides of Kerridge hill were also commonland. The Lidgetts, the southern end of the hill, may owe its name to a formerentrance to the common by a ‘lidgate’ on the Macclesfield road.

Photograph: Dry-stone wall re-built by the KRIV Project


Some patches of the old woodland survived as demesneor township woods and were managed to provide timberfor building and for fuel and fodder. Oakenbank was sucha wood, stretching to the lower part of Ingersley Vale. Thiswoodland was still exploited in the 19th century, thoughunder private ownership. “Valuable timber now growing inIngersley Clough”, including oak, ash, birch, elm, alder, andunderwood, consisting of ash, alder, birch, thorn, crab, andhazel, “suitable for turners”, was sold at the Spinner’s Armsin 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 mentionedintakes and houses built by Robert Shrigley and WilliamAynsworth on ‘the comyne called Coryryge’. NeitherBollington nor Rainow had its own enclosure act, thoughan act of 1625 encouraged enclosure of commons and theremaining ‘waste’ in the Forest generally. This may haveprecipitated the enclosure of the quarrying area of thewestern side of Kerridge, where narrow strips running fromthe bottom to the top of the hill seem to have been created in the 17th century. The eastern side of the hillwas divided into wider vertical blocks which were distributed to the adjacent farms, though it seems thatthe Gaskell estate farms may have used the northern partin common until the late 18th or early 19th century.

Some new farms emerged during or after enclosure, suchas Adshead’s Barn Farm on the former BollingtonCommon, and Stakehouse Farm in Kerridge. A manorialcourt surrender document of 1792 shows how the latterfarm was created (probably in the late 17th or early 18thcentury) out of “the wastelands of Bollington” which hadinitially been allocated to nearby Hollin Hall Farm.

By the time of the tithe sale and apportionment surveysof the 1840s all common and waste lands in the KRIVarea had been enclosed. By then agriculture in the areawas modern in another way: almost all the farmland waspasture or meadow. By the later 18th century and perhaps

earlier it was no longer necessary to grow the limitedarable crops which the soils and climate allowed. Transportimprovements and the agricultural revolution increasedthe supply of food available at market, and the localgrowth 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 fastfrom the mid eighteenth century, and would be a majormarket. It seems likely that arable farming only reappeared in the area in 20th century wartime, and thatthe plough ridges still faintly visible in low sunlight underthe grass in a few fields date from this period.

The tithe documents indicate a further change which hadtaken place by the 1840s: the formation of some smallerfarm units and smallholdings, underpinned directly or indirectly by other commercial or industrial opportunities.

Domestic industry, growing in the 18th century, couldmake pastoral farms of quite small acreage viable forfarmers, and when domestic work declined in the age ofthe powered machine, work in factories might provide theextra family income. Tower Hill Farm had been dividedinto two parts, of around 32 and 25 acres. The tenant ofthe smaller farm in the early 19th century was DanielSutton. Family tradition among the Suttons has it that atleast two of Daniel’s nine children were sent along thehillside paths to work in a Bollington cotton mill, Joseph,aged six, being carried on the shoulders of his sister.

Photograph: Lower Brook Farm, Smithy Lane, Rainow (O.S map 953 766)J. Oakley in association with KRIV Heritage Project (2008)


Farmers sometimes undertook non-agricultural work. The farmer might at times work on the roads, forinstance, 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, agriculturemight 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 ofStakehouse Farm. When landlord John Adams left the pub in 1910, his farming stock, which was put up forsale, consisted of “two choice heifers, in calf for early spring; sixty grand poultry; three ducks; two stacks ofwell-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’sBarn 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 furtherhousing development in mind. The tithe documents of the 1840s show that a few more houses had beenbuilt below the farmstead on Lord Street, and Cow Lane had been formed, with three cottages. But littlemore building was done, probably because of the steepness of much of the land, and Adshead’s Barn Farmremained as two separate blocks of around 7 and 14 acres, with 8 acres hived off to North End Farm.

Photograph: Laid hedge on Savio House estate 2007


Mellor’s GardensThe unique garden at Hough Hole House, Rainow, was laid out so that the visitor can follow the journey made byChristian to the Celestial City in Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’. The historian of the garden, R C Turner, wrote that “thebook was chosen as a vehicle for the religious teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg who believed in the correspondenceof the natural and spiritual worlds… There is no equivalent garden surviving in Britain.”


The garden was the work of James Mellor Jnr (1796-1891), the sonof 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. Theold Hough Hole farmhouse became Hough Hole House and wasextended, 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 histhirties, 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 thepond was the Cave of the Holy Sepulchre; a summer house in which Mellor constructed an Aeolian harp was the Howling House; the new farmhouse wasthe Doubting Castle; the Celestial City on Mount Sion was a chapel, approachedby 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 writtenand carved in stone by Mellor himself were scattered about.

Mellor kept the garden open to the public, apparently at all times. Turner wrotethat “the garden became a considerable local attraction. Parties of visitors cameevery Sunday by wagonette from Manchester; many came from abroad. GoodFriday 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 Mellorfamily, but were restored and for a time reopened in the late 20th century.

More information about Mellor and the garden can be found inMellor’s Gardens by R C Turner, 2nd (expanded) edition, 1989.

Artist’s Impression:Mellor’s GardenKenning Illustration 2008


The manufacturing heritage of Ingersley Vale and Rainow is visible mainly alongthe 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 theKRIV 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 poolremains. 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 weirbehind the building bears the date 1801 and the initials LPW and WW. The millpool site is now a private car park.

The valley narrows, and the track takes to the hillside, crossing the flue leading upto Ingersley Vale Mill chimney (shown as Ingersley Clough Mill on the map onpage 18), the last of the KRIV area’s hillside chimneys. An iron trough high abovethe 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 in1999. 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 WaulkmillFarm. The large mill pool, now silted and choked with willows, lies behind a weirbuilt over a waterfall on a rocky outcrop. Here we see again the initials EC, withthe date 1800.

2. Mills and Pools

At Waulkmill the track ends, but the path above the woods along the side of Kerridge hill gives a view of thenext site, Hough Hole Mill. The mill, known as the White Shop, was demolished in the 1940s, but the poolsurvives, 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 LowerBrook Farm on Smithy Lane, stood Lower House Mill. In 1899 Bollington Urban District Council bought anddemolished 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 thestream, was bought by the BUDC and demolished in 1922 to make way for a pumping station. Water wasstored in the former mill pool.

Artist’s Impression: Inner workings of Fulling MillKenning Illustration 2008


Back in the shadow of Kerridge hill, on the tributarystream which runs down from Brookhouse, stood CowLane Mill. From the early years of the 20th century thismill has been falling slowly into ruins. Some clearance hastaken place recently, and the hillside chimney has beenremoved, but the site retains many clues to its history. Scattered stones show the mill at right angles to apool, now silted and overgrown. On the uphill side of thetrack is a wheel pit. A leat can be traced along the hillsideto the site of a second pool further upstream. The KRIVproject has carried out an archaeological survey of CowLane Mill and a copy of the detailed report can be viewedon the project’s website.

The area of the KRIV project contains one more formermill, high above the stream, close to the B5470 at KerridgeEnd. Springbank Mill, now a private residence, was a late19th century steam-powered silk-throwing mill.

It is likely that the waters of the Dean in this area werefirst used to power a medieval corn mill. A possible site forsuch a mill is below Tower Hill, on what was apparentlyknown as Mill Brook before a cotton mill (Mill Brook Mill)was built there in the 18th century. But the earliest mapwe have, made as part of a Forest survey in 1611, clearlyshows ‘Rainow Milne’ on or near the present Rainow Millsite, very close to the Bollington boundary.

The map of 1611 also shows ‘Ralph Thorly’s Walk Mill’ onor near the site of the present Waulkmill Farm. In a walkmill, or fulling mill, water-powered hammers replaced theolder method of treading woollen cloth in a trough withfuller’s earth. The presence of a walk mill in Rainow by1611 suggests that woollen cloth was perhaps being produced in local farms and cottages on a commercialbasis.

This and other domestic textile trades, including silk-button making and linen manufacture, would haveexpanded in Rainow and Bollington in the 17th and 18thcenturies. Cotton had been added by at least the mid-18th century.

It was the cotton industry which had the potential for revolutionary growth, once the patent on RichardArkwright’s water-powered spinning machine, the WaterFrame, had expired in 1783. The opportunity was quicklyseized, on the upper Dean as well as in other Pennine valleys. Between 1784, or thereabouts, and 1805, sevenwater-powered cotton-spinning mills were set up on thestreams in the KRIV area together with a further threemills in Rainow and another five in Bollington (where afinal water-powered cotton mill was added in 1818). Thelocation and dates of these mills can be seen on the mapon 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 houseas 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.


Who were the entrepreneurs in this local industrial revolution? We don’t know in every case, but it seemsclear that local men were the prime movers. The first offthe mark, probably in or around 1784, were John Gaskellin Rainow, and the brothers Philip and George Antrobus inBollington. Uncertainty about the dating of theWaterhouse Mill, an early Bollington mill, allows PeterLomas, formerly a tanner, to be a contender.

The Gaskells had been yeoman farmers in Adlington in theearly eighteenth century. Through advantageous marriageand economic enterprise, the family prospered. JohnGaskell inherited the Tower Hill estate in Rainow, boughtIngersley and the surrounding farms in 1768, and built thefirst stage of Ingersley Hall in 1775. He extended thefulling mill and erected a bleach works somewhere inIngersley Vale, before building Mill Brook Mill in or around1784, and Ingersley Vale Mill in 1792 or 1793, as cotton-spinning mills. Both mills were probably leased totenants from the beginning. Edward Collier was the tenantat Ingersley Vale Mill by 1800, and seems to have himselffinanced the building of the large pool above Waulkmill, aswell as factory extensions. He became bankrupt in 1811.

Philip and George Antrobus had ‘put out’ cotton to bespun and woven domestically, in a business which hadbeen started by their father at Turner Heath in Bollington before 1761. In or around 1784, the brothers built a cottonmill (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 attimes, and at other times leased them out, in whole or part.

Rainow Mill, which had at some time in the 17th or 18thcentury become a paper mill, was converted to cottonspinning in 1801 by Lawrence Wagstaff who had takenover the paper mill from his father four years earlier. Hispartner in the new enterprise was William Watts.

James Mellor, who built Hough Hole Mill in 1803, hadbeen a joiner, a builder and a coal merchant, before buying Hough Hole Farm in 1796. He probably built themill 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.


Another farmer, John Latham of Lower House Farm Rainow, built Lower HouseMill, 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 onlysurvivor 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 infront, 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 millswere only slightly bigger, maybe up to six bays and three storeys. But the mills and their pools were verysoon extended. At Cow Lane Mill, for instance, the original pool of c.1789 was next to the mill, but a secondpool 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 leatalong the hillside to a twenty-foot wheel. The water emptied into the original reservoir, which fed a thirtyfour-foot wheel. At Ingersley Vale Mill, Edward Collier’s second pool and hillside leat fed two wheels, twentytwo 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, andthe 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.

Left Page : Gin Glough Mill (O.S map 958 765)

Right Page :Waulkmill waterfall 2007


Photograph : Ingersley Vale Mill leat 2007

Inset: Higher Mill, sale poster 1859

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, afact 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 setsof 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 KRIVarea. After the French wars, larger steam-powered mills run by bigger firms becamemore widespread, sometimes producing very fine cotton. They integrated spinningand 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 atthe ‘Bollington end’ of Ingersley Vale, Higher Mill, Rainow Mill, and Ingersley ValeMill, all connected to Bollington by a track, participated in Bollington’s growth.


Photograph : Remains of Cow Lane Mill in 2007

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 thecanal in Bollington in the late 1820s, and had cotton businesses in Manchester and Stockport. In various partnerships he also leased Ingersley Vale Mill, which hadbeen rebuilt after the fire, in 1821, Rainow Mill in 1822,and both Higher and Lower Mills in 1832. In the last 2cases, where second mills were erected in the 1830s,Swindells tenanted in partnership with Thomas Oliver, theson-in-law and successor to Peter Lomas, founder of theWaterhouse Mill, Bollington.

It was claimed (when the mill was advertised for sale) that the previous tenantsof Higher Mill had produced “very superior” yarn for the manufacture of lace“which is well known in the Nottingham market”. Swindells and his partnersprobably produced high quality mule-spun yarn at the other Ingersley Vale millstoo. 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 LowerMills, and perhaps in the others too, the steam engines and water wheels wereused in conjunction to drive the machinery. By 1859, at the Lower Mills thewater wheel and two steam engines coupled to it produced 55hp in all.

KRIV I Country and Heritage Project22

Swindells, and then his sons, retained the leases onRainow Mill and Ingersley Vale Mill until 1842 and onHigher and Lower Mills until 1859. Cotton spinning continued at Rainow Mill until the 1880s (the mill havingbeen rebuilt after a fire in 1856), at Higher Mills until the1870s, and at Ingersley Vale mill until c.1848.

Ingersley Vale Mill had the most successful life after cotton manufacture. John Brier introduced calico printing; itwas probably he who built the wheelhouse which survivestoday and installed a giant fifty six-foot water wheel.

From 1878 to 1929 Ingersley Vale Mill was occupied by theinnovative firm of King’s, bleachers and finishers. Fromaround 1895 the great wheel was used to generate electricity to power the machinery. In a series of extensionsto the south, the old master’s house and a row of cottages,which may once have housed the pauper apprentices, weredemolished. An Institute for the workers, with cooking andgames 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 dyeingand printing. The two Higher Mills were operated separately from the 1870s. The older mill, which included

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 beingtaken over by Shrigley Dyers who were in occupation untilthe mill was demolished to make way for housing in 2001.

The other mills in the KRIV project area, which lackeddirect road connection to Bollington, mostly abandonedcotton 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 Housein Rainow. A short period as a bleach works followed, andthen slow decay when the works stopped in 1907.

Cotton spinning ceased at Lower House Mill soon after1825; abandonment and ruin apparently began at once. AtHough Hole Mill cotton production continued to the mid- 19th century, after which, and up to about 1914, theMellor family ran an engineering business in the premises. Cotton production came to an end at Mill BrookMill in 1868, when there was a devastating fire. The millwas partially restored and used for fustian cutting, before demolition in 1923.

Photograph: Ingersley Vale Mill 2007


The White Shop and Steam CarriageBy 1860, Hough Hole Mill, known as the White Shop, was occupied by the firm ofWilliam Mellor & Co, “machinists and manufacturers of all kinds of tools for engineers”. William Mellor was the younger son of James Mellor, the founder ofthe mill, and brother of James, the creator of Mellor’s Gardens. The firm achievedconsiderable success and renown both in Britain and in Europe, especially formachine tools including precision planes, drills, lathes, and a steam hammer withvalve 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 framingformed a box containing water sufficient for a trip of 15 miles. There were twosmall horizontal engines, a vertical boiler at the back end of the framing with acoke tender behind it, and the capacity to carry 20 passengers.

In July 1868 an experimental trip was made, with 15 passengers, through “themost mountainous parts of the country” by way of Clulow Cross and Wincle toSwythamley, and back by Rushton and Macclesfield. “The machine is under perfectcontrol, and can easily be stopped or turned at will. The construction is such thatsteam issuing from it is not visible, nor heard… To see the engine rolling alongwithout any visible means of propulsion appears marvellous, and some people onfirst seeing it, ran out of sight, and only ventured near when they saw nothing toharm them.”

Photograph:View of The White Shop with Rainow village in the distance


3. Mines and Quarries

Almost all of the evidence of the quarry and mine working in the KRIV projectarea is to be seen on Kerridge hill. Milnrow sandstones are underlain by shales andcoal, 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 topof the ridge. Below that are beds of the pale Kerridge sandstone, long prized for itsappearance, durability and ease of working into regular even-sided blocks andsheets. The stone has been widely used for walls, roofing slates, window sills and lintels, door cases, hearthstones, mantelpieces and flagstones. It has been used tomake troughs, sinks and cisterns for domestic, agricultural and industrial uses, andfor gravestones and monuments, such as, for instance, Kerridge war memorial onOak Lane.

On the eastern side of Kerridge hill a few old quarries can be seen, high on the steephillside. On the western side, access to the best stone was easier, from bench landhalfway up the hillside. A series of parallel tracks, formerly known as ganks, leadfrom 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 large-scale 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 andyear of accession. Beneath ran a tramway, short but with major earthworks, fromthe 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


Five seams (or mines, in older usage) of coal are knownbeneath Kerridge hill. Local miners over the years havegiven them a variety of names. In descending order, the seams are: Great Smut (or Bollington Smut); Little Smut (orBullion, or Red Ash); Sweet Mine (or Shore Seam), which isunderlain 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 thecoal; only the Sweet Mine provided good house coal.

The seams were mainly thin, at one or two feet. The GreatMine was thicker, at three to four feet; the coal was alsothe poorest, though the sellers claimed that it was “well adapted for engines, or burning lime or bricks.”

The remains of coal mining are most obvious on the lowerparts of the north end and eastern side of the hill. Fromthe track which leads from Redway in Kerridge to NorthEnd Farm, and then from the paths leading along the hillside to Kerridge End, shallow depressions and spoilheaps, indicating former adits and shafts, can be seen inlarge numbers. Only the top four seams were mined onthe east side, apparently; on the west side the lowestseam was also mined, and perhaps the fireclay. But mostof the evidence is below the KRIV boundary. An exceptionis the castellated circular stone ventilation shaft close toVictoria Bridge on Windmill Lane, which has beendescribed by Roger Bowling, the historian of local mining,as ‘the largest edifice of Bollington’s mining era.’

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.

Legend

1.2-1.8m Seam of Fire Clay (Not Worked)

Milnrow Sandstone or Kerridge Grit

Shale & Thin Bands of Stone

Coal Seams:

1 Bollington Smut:(1.2m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)

2 Little Smut:(0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)

3 Sweet:(0.6m Thick Seam of Good Quality Coal)

4 Stone or Stinkard(0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality CoalContaining Ironstone)

5 Bassey:(0.6m Thick Seam of Poor Quality Coal)

Cross-section beneath the North End of Kerridge Ridge, showing the fivecoal seams. The seams dip to the West at 6º

Geological Information

White Nancy

East 43West

279.47m

Quarries

213.3m

River Dean

154.4m


The Anglo-Saxons may have quarried stone on Kerridge. The name perhaps suggests so, being derived fromthe 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, forthe 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 hasthe 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 commonsand waste, the ‘great rebuilding’ in stone of the houses ofthe gentry and yeomen, the farmhouses, and the erectionof cottages as the population grew.

Top Photograph:Quarry workers, Kerridge

Bottom Photograph: Spoil heap from Kerridge coal mine 2006


The Kerridge quarries were on common land and under thecontrol of the crown in the middle ages. By the beginningof the 17th century some or all of them were leased to thecorporation of Macclesfield. Later in the 17th century thequarries were enclosed, being allotted to the owners of theold enclosed lands nearby. The enclosures on much of thewest side of the hill seem to have taken the form of narrowstrips running from the bottom to the top of the hill –hence perhaps the succession of ganks or quarry entranceswhich can be seen along Windmill Lane today.

Coal mining grew more slowly. It is not known which of theKerridge hill mines are the oldest, but presumably the mostaccessible coal was worked first, with bell pits and adits. Thefirst map to indicate coal mines at all, Burdett’s Cheshiremap 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 ofsteam engines, were built in local stone, as were the cottages of industrial Bollington. The turnpike road andcanal system, and later railways, made carriage to distant markets cheaper. The market for roofing slates in Cheshirewas actually reduced, as lighter Welsh slates could beimported. But for monumental stone, demand grew. The authors of Bagshaw’s Cheshire Directory of 1850 remarkedthat Kerridge stone was in great demand for the erection ofchurches and public buildings, and hoped that “its hardnessand beautiful whiteness will throw out of use that perishable, brick dust sort of freestone with which mostchurches and ancient buildings in Cheshire are erected.”

Kerridge quarries remained for the moment in the handsof 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 stonetrades since at least the early 18th century, probably onKerridge throughout. It is likely that most of the coalmines were small scale concerns, though as the easternmines went deeper into the hill, it was necessary to cutexpensive drainage soughs, or looses, through toBollington or Hurdsfield. For the lower seams steampumps were needed. In 1795 Aikin recorded two, one inBollington and one in Rainow.

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 theland between, were put up for sale.

Top Photograph:Quarry workers, Kerridge

Bottom Photograph: Stone pavings near adandoned quarries at the southend of Kerridge Hill (east side) (O.S. map 944 755)


Inset: Receipt for Clayton’s coal, 1848

Photograph: Clayton’s Ventilation Tower, Windmill Lane 2008

The purchaser was WilliamClayton, who operated theSwanscoe coal mine, and minesin Hyde. It seems he was thesame William Clayton who tenanted the large Poyntonand Worth coal mines, whichwere also on the line of theMacclesfield Canal. His lease was due toexpire, and Lord Vernon decided to work the mines himselfthrough his agent. It may be that Clayton hoped to reap the advantages of thecanal which were being denied him in Poynton by investing heavily in Kerridge.

During the 1830s, Clayton built atramway from the canal wharf up tothe track leading to what becameknown as Victoria or Bridge Quarry.On the first stretch, up to Oak Lane,the gradient was gentle. The nextstretch, steeper, consists of a massiveembankment, wide enough for thetramway and a cart track. The tramway here seems to have obliterated a previous road downfrom the hill, and Whiteleys Farm,which lay halfway along it. Theembankment took the tramway up toEndon House, where it crossed a roadwhich continued from Higher Lanesouthwards past Swanscoe Mine toSwanscoe Farm and beyond. So far,the trucks would be horse drawn. Onthe steep top stretch, under VictoriaBridge, a steam engine wound up theascending trucks.


Clayton also built the wide straight track which leads fromEndon House up to Windmill Lane at the entrance to hisWindmill Quarry. The windmill itself, which stood betweenthe quarry entrance and Five Ashes, was apparently transported from Macclesfield Common in 1834. It seemslikely 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 inpreparation for extended coal mining.

Clayton built Endon House, close to the tramway, for hismanager, and the imposing Endon Hall for himself, presumably. At the Hall, he entertained 250 workmen tocelebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838. “Eachguest had an entire plum pudding to himself, and roastbeef and ale were dispensed on an equally generousscale”. However Clayton does not seem to have lived atthe Hall during most of the 1840s, and in 1850 he died.His quarries on Kerridge were leased to, and ultimatelyowned by, his former manager, Williamson.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, large firmsoperated 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 onBillinge, Windyway, Teggs Nose, and in Bollington. Theyalso 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 cranesand the use of explosives.

The coal mines experienced no such development.Faulting limited their potential: the ‘Red Rock Fault’, forinstance cuts off expansion westwards at roughly the lineof the Macclesfield Canal. The coal lacked the qualityadvantage of the Kerridge stone. The canal, and then therailways (arriving in Macclesfield from the north in 1845and from the south in 1848, and in Bollington in 1870)brought in higher quality coal cheaply. Sporadic miningseems to have continued into the early 20th century, atleast on the Rainow side.

By the 20th century the cheapness of other buildingmaterials meant that the use of Kerridge stone declined.For instance, when Bollington Urban District Council built56 council houses off Grimshaw Lane in 1921-2, Kerridgestone was used; when the housing scheme was extendedafter the second world war, the houses were renderedbrick. The operation of the quarries had become moresporadic by the late 19th century. By the late 1940s theywere almost entirely deserted. From the late 20th centurythere has been some revival, and Kerridge stone is beingsent far afield again.

Photograph:Windmill, Kerridge, late 19th century


Photograph: Aerial view of mine and quarry tracks on the east side of Kerridge ridge showing Hough Hole pool


4. Tracks and PathsWalkers in the Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale area willuse 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. Thismay derive from particular features, such as the smallpatch of old stone paving, with edging stones, which canbe found where the track from Tower Hill Farm passesbelow the Cow Lane Mill site and begins to climb Kerridgehill. Mill Lane, the narrow walled track which climbs northfrom the site of Rainow Mill, gives a general impression ofage. Rainow Mill was apparently the site of a medievalcorn mill, and part of Mill Lane forms the boundary ofBollington and Rainow, and has probably done so sincethe 13th century, so the impression may be correct.

The bridle road which runs from Smithy Lane in Rainowacross High Cliff to join Oakenbank Lane was surely oncemore important. This is the most direct road betweenRainow and Pott Shrigley and Bollington. The trackway iswalled, and of normal width for a country road, yet itretains for the most part old stone surfacing, in a desiccated and patched-up state.

Traces of completely abandoned roads, surviving as rightsof way, can be found in and below Ingersley Park. The pathacross the park from the entrance near Oakenbank cottagescan 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 ortrack, branching off at the Oakenbank end and running infront 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

bridge (the base of which seems rather older than its parapets).

A dense network of overgrown paths and tracks can beseen on the eastern side of Kerridge hill, especially whenthe sun is low in the sky, or after a light snowfall. Theseare obviously connected to the remains of mines andquarries. The best vantage points are on the main road inand above Rainow. A few similar lost access tracks can beseen in the field below the northern end of Lidgetts Lane.

Perhaps the most remarked upon paths of the area are thestone flagged paths which lead from Waulkmill towardsSugar Lane, and along the eastern hillside from Kerridgeside to the wood above Ingersley pool. Stone paths can also befound in Bollington and Kerridge, from the top of LordStreet to Redway and on to Higher Lane. It seems likelythat the latter paths must have been made principally forworkers 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


Photograph: Trod path in Kerridge 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, bringingperhaps salt from the Weaver valley and copper from the mines of Alderley Edge, may have used these passes intothe Peak. Romans from Chester and from Manchester mayhave approached the springs at Buxton this way.

South of Kerridge hill, the main road from Macclesfieldprobably follows the old way into the hills. This routewould increase in importance from the 10th century,when the eastern part of Cheshire was organised around aroyal estate at Macclesfield. But old routes through theDean Valley at Bollington and touching on the KRIV areaseem to have been lost, at least in part.

The OS map surveyed in 1870-1 noted that the roadacross Billinge was a ‘Roman Road, supposed site of’. The19th century supposition was that a Roman route, comingfrom the direction of Woodford, passed over the northside of the Dean Valley by Beeston, and crossed thestream 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. Someevidence of a Roman route passing north-south throughPrestbury has also been identified. From Prestbury a directline 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 StakehouseEnd, along Chancery Lane and Cow Lane, by field paths toRainow Mill, along Mill Lane, and so on to Blaze Hill.

The word ‘Stakehouse’ is older than Stakehouse Farm. Itcan be found on the 1611 Forest map and survey as‘Steakles’ and ‘Steakulls’. Derived from the Old Englishwords for a stake, and for hill, it perhaps suggests a fortified site. If a long standing political and culturalboundary (as has been suggested) was sited close by, andwas crossed by an important long distance route, perhapsa 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. Theroad up to Marksend from Swanscoe is probably as old asthe quarries, and so too may be Windmill Lane.

As Bollington and Rainow formed as settlements, probablysometime 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 fromSmithy Lane to Oakenbank Lane was a local route of considerable early importance. The bridle road linked thefarms stretched out along the road from Macclesfield with the timber producing Oakenbank Wood, passing the old-established 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: Dry stone footbridge on Gritstone Trail over Ingersley Clough 2007


Photograph: Causeway of lost roadleading to Waulkmill through Savio House estate


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 moresense if it was once on the track to the Walkmill.

In the mid 18th century, a great boom in the turnpiking ofroads took place. The main roads through Macclesfieldwere turnpiked in the 1750s and 1760s, as were many ofthe routes through the Peak. The Macclesfield-WhaleyBridge road was turnpiked under an Act of 1770, and wasthus the last link in a cross-Peak system of roads. This iswhy the milestones (which seem to be the 18th centuryoriginals) give the mileage to Sheffield and Chesterfield,though the authority of this particular trust ran only fromMacclesfield to Fernilee.

The turnpike, it is said, was engineered by John Metcalf,‘Blind Jack of Knaresborough’. For the length which formsthe boundary of the KRIV area, the original road seems tohave been followed, except for a short stretch where thenew road passes on one side of the Rainow Institute, andthe old narrow road on the other.

The bridge at the Mill Brook Mill site is presumably one ofMetcalf’s famously flood resistant bridges, though now ina widened state. No.1 Hawkins Lane served as a tollhouse, with only a chain (rather than a toll bar) across theroad, at least from 1795.

Industrialisation, from the late18th century, seems to havehad a limited impact on communications in Rainow, otherthan to cause the proliferation of mine and quarry trackson the side of Kerridge hill. It seems surprising that asindustrial 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 werethwarted, perhaps by the way the valley at its narrowestpoint was filled by the premises of Ingersley Vale Mill.

James Mellor (1796-1891), the builder of the allegoricalPilgrim’s Progress garden at Hough Hole House, was aprominent 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 theRainow stone paths, which are all on Hough Hole land, asa 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 BrookMill to right, Rainow c 1905


Photograph:Oakenbank Lane (O.S map 949 768)


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 unnecessaryhad 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 waterfallon Savio House estate 2007


Photograph: Drystone wall spanning Ingersley Clough 2008


Further Reading

Conclusion

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 the19th Century, 1973

Kerridge Ingersley

ridge & vale

The landscape described in this publication has changed significantly over thecenturies. In the past the Kerridge ridge and Ingersley vale have provided alivelihood for many of the families in Rainow and Bollington. The past noiseof the mills and the dust and dirt of the mines and quarries have beenreplaced 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 onwhat is now a relatively peaceful and secluded valley. What future landscapechanges the area will experience will be for succeeding generations to understand and enjoy.

Kerridge Ingersley

ridge & vale

www.kriv.org.uk

Countryside and Heritage Project

Material manufactured using pulp from renewable timber produced on a fully sustainable basis.Virgin pulp bleached by an Elemental Chlorine Free process (ECF). Paper suitable for recycling

www.kenning-illustration.co.uk

H O L L Y H I L L

D E S I G N

LL

UK £6.50

Published by Kerridge Ridge and Ingersley Vale Countryside and Heritage Project

KRIV Heritage Brochure

Documents

Transcript of KRIV Heritage Brochure