The Shape of It

A county that was once a principality, nearly an island, and still won’t give Wales the time of day.

The Ground Beneath

Two hundred and twenty million years of evaporated sea, and what happened when people started pumping it out.

Three towns in Cheshire carry the suffix —wich: Northwich, Middlewich, Nantwich. The suffix is not a corruption of any Welsh word, nor a variant of “village.” It is the Anglo-Saxon wic, in its specific meaning of a salt-making settlement. Salt made these towns; salt shaped the economy of the entire county for a thousand years; and it is still being extracted today, from the mine at Winsford whose original shafts were sunk in 1844.

The Romans knew about the brine springs and built their settlement at Northwich — Condate — partly to exploit them. They used lead pans to boil the brine. By the sixteenth century, Nantwich alone had two hundred and sixteen salt houses. The industry peaked, declined, and then found a second wind in 1670 when employees of the Smith-Barry family, digging on their estate at Marbury near Northwich, were looking for coal and found instead a bed of rock salt thirty feet below the surface. Northwich swiftly eclipsed Nantwich and Middlewich both.

What followed was a century of aggressive extraction and its consequences. In the nineteenth century, so-called “wild brine pumping” — injecting water into the salt beds to dissolve and pump out the resultant brine — was discovered to cause the ground above to subside unpredictably. Buildings leaned, streets cracked, entire sections of Northwich shifted by several metres. Water-filled hollows called flashes opened in fields without warning. The subsidence could manifest up to eight kilometres from the pumping site, which made assigning blame between the dozens of competing brine operators practically impossible.

Parliament eventually intervened, and by the mid-twentieth century controlled methods had largely replaced the wild ones. The old mine workings under Northwich were only stabilised in the twenty-first century by pumping several million tonnes of grout into the flooded cavities beneath the town. Cheshire has been managing its own undermining for centuries. It is, by now, expert at it.

Notable Folk

A prophet who starved in a cupboard, a poet who died blind and still writing, a soldier undone by his own leg, and the man who invented Wonderland.

The Cheshire Tongue

A dialect recorded since the fourteenth century, still recognisable to those who listen for it.

Egerton Leigh, who compiled his Glossary of Words Used in the Dialect of Cheshire in 1876, was already sounding an elegy for words under threat from “emigration, railways, and the blending of shires.” Some of the words John Ray had collected two centuries earlier had already vanished by the time Leigh went looking for them. The words below have survived rather longer than most of their compilers expected.

Cheshire has the further distinction that the works of the Gawain Poet, probably composed in the 1380s, are written in its dialect. When Alan Garner read sections of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight aloud to his father — a man of the same countryside, six hundred years later — his father knew more than ninety percent of the words. Garner notes that the phonetics of the vowels had barely shifted. The dialect is, in this sense, very old indeed.

Place Names

The county that gave the world Peover Superior, Wildboarclough, and a town that used to be three.

The three —wich towns deserve more than a mention in a list. Northwich, Middlewich, and Nantwich take their suffix from the Anglo-Saxon wic, specifically in its sense of a salt-production settlement. The suffix does not appear elsewhere in Cheshire — only where the brine ran, or the rock salt lay close to the surface. The Romans built at Northwich for this reason. The Domesday Book records eight salt houses in Nantwich. By 1590, Nantwich had two hundred and sixteen. The English salt trade was largely a Cheshire business for several centuries, and the evidence is still in the names.

At Alderley Edge, a local legend holds that a farmer walking his white mare to Macclesfield market was stopped by an old man in grey who offered to buy the horse. The farmer refused, expecting better money in town, and returned empty-handed. The old man stopped him again on his return. This time, the farmer followed him to Stormy Point, where the old man raised a wand, uttered a spell, and opened an iron gate in the rock. Behind it: a cavern full of sleeping men and horses, all white. The old man explained that these were King Arthur’s warriors, resting until England stood in mortal danger. He paid for the horse, took it into the cave, and the gates closed. The Edge has been attracting people who claim to feel something strange there ever since. Alan Garner set two of his novels there. Make of all this what you will.

Three Shires Head served a practical purpose beyond the merely scenic. Being a point where three counties’ jurisdictions met, it was a favoured venue for illegal prize-fighting. When the authorities of one county approached, the fighters and their audience simply moved across the packhorse bridge into the next one. An elegant solution to the problem of law enforcement.

At the Table

The oldest named cheese in England, and why it may — or may not — have anything to do with a grin.

Cheshire cheese is the oldest named cheese in England. It appears in records from the twelfth century, though the practice of making it in the county is almost certainly older than any surviving document. The French — not generally noted for their enthusiasm about English dairy produce — have long been partial to what they call Le Fromage Chester. They get the name slightly wrong, but the appreciation is genuine.

In 1590, it became the first cheese to be exported outside its home region when Queen Elizabeth’s court ordered it for the Privy Council’s dinner. The French, one suspects, were paying attention.

The phrase “to grin like a Cheshire cat” has several proposed origins. One holds that the cheese was formerly moulded in the shape of a grinning cat, and that the last portion to be eaten was the head — leaving, for a moment, a grin without the body behind it. This is pleasing as an explanation, though the evidence for cat-shaped moulds is not overwhelming. Another theory points to a sign painter in the county who was repeatedly commissioned to paint lions rampant on inn signs, and repeatedly produced results that looked more like grinning cats. A third points to the stone carving on the tower of St Wilfrid’s Church at Grappenhall, five miles from Lewis Carroll’s birthplace at Daresbury. The origin is, as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable admits, “an old simile, popularized by Lewis Carroll.” Carroll subscribed to Notes and Queries where the question was extensively debated. Whether he ever settled it in his own mind, he kept to himself.

Signs & Songs

What Cheshire says when it thinks it’s being amusing — and when it isn’t trying at all.

Did You Know?

A selection of facts which reward the curious and unsettle the complacent.

• That Chester’s Roman walls are the longest, oldest, and most complete Roman city walls remaining in Britain? The Romans were here for almost four hundred years, from around AD 71. The walls have been added to, rebuilt, and walked along continuously ever since.
• That the Roman amphitheatre at Chester is the largest yet discovered in Britain? It could hold approximately seven thousand spectators. The site was excavated only partially in the twentieth century; much of it still lies under modern Chester.
• That in 973, King Edgar of England came to Chester and was rowed along the River Dee by eight subordinate kings, demonstrating the hierarchy of the age? The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records it without apparent irony. Chester was, by any measure, the place to be.
• That the Magna Carta of 1215 did not apply to Cheshire? As a County Palatine, Cheshire’s Earl operated independently of the Crown. He issued his own Chester Charter instead, at the petition of his own barons. There are, in effect, two Magna Cartas.
• That Richard II was so devoted to his Cheshire bodyguard that in 1397 he elevated the county to a Principality and added “Prince of Chester” to his title? No other English county has ever been similarly honoured. Richard was deposed two years later. The principality did not survive him.
• That the first rock salt mine in Cheshire was sunk in 1682 at Marbury near Northwich, not by anyone looking for salt but by employees searching for coal? They found salt instead, and Northwich’s fortunes were made — and, in time, its buildings undermined.
• That the Winsford salt mine, currently the only working salt mine in the UK, was originally sunk in 1844 — and that the rock salt it produces, 220 million years old, is used primarily to grit British roads in winter?
• That in the village of Tushingham near Malpas, all seven members of the Dawson family were killed by plague in 1625? The father, a large man and knowing that help was beyond reach, dug his own grave and lay down in it to die. The village remembers this.
• That the packhorse bridge at Three Shires Head, where Cheshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire meet, was a regular venue for illegal prize-fighting? When the authorities of one county arrived, the fighters simply moved to the next one. The bridge has seen more law-avoidance than any local history guide fully acknowledges.
• That “grin like a Cheshire cat” was already an established English expression in 1788, recorded in a slang dictionary, nearly eighty years before Lewis Carroll made use of it? The origin of the phrase remains genuinely uncertain. This is appropriate.
• That Sir Arthur Aston of Catton Hall near Frodsham was declared by Charles I to be more feared by his enemies than any other man in the Royalist army — and that he was subsequently beaten to death with his own wooden leg by soldiers who believed a fortune was concealed inside it? No fortune was found.
• That Congleton borrowed sixteen shillings from its Bible fund to replace a dead bear for the Wakes festival in the 1620s? The intention was to repay the fund from the bear’s earnings. Whether this ever happened is unrecorded. The story that Congleton “sold the Bible to buy a bear” has been its nickname ever since.
• That Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford, which sold continuously for over a century and gave the English novel some of its most gently devastating social comedy, is a portrait of Knutsford, Cheshire, where she grew up? The name is altered. The portraits are said to be recognisable.
• That the Gawain Poet, author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — the finest poem in Middle English after Chaucer, and arguably finer — wrote in the dialect of Cheshire? His identity is entirely unknown. His poem has been in print, in various forms, for over a hundred and fifty years, and is studied on four continents. Cheshire does not make enough of this.
• That the Tarporley Hunt Club, of which Rowland Egerton-Warburton was eventually president, was founded in 1762 and is one of the oldest fox-hunting clubs in England? Its members used special toasting glasses inscribed Quaesitum meritis — “sought by those who deserve it” — which Egerton-Warburton made the title of his finest poem.
• That Alan Garner, who grew up at Alderley Edge and set two of his novels there, was given a copy of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by J.R.R. Tolkien after a chance meeting, with a note saying he had read it “with great interest”? The two writers had claims on the same underground mythology. The Cheshire one has been rather less celebrated, which is not entirely fair.
• That Cheshire cheese was the first English cheese to be exported outside its home region — ordered for Queen Elizabeth’s Privy Council dinner in 1590? The French, who have been importing it ever since and calling it Le Fromage Chester, may or may not be aware of its precedence.
• That a ten-ton glacial boulder in West Park, Macclesfield, carried south from Cumbria by the advancing glacier approximately twelve thousand five hundred years ago, was presented to the people of Macclesfield in 1857 as a gift — having been found during excavations nearby? It is called the Macclesfield Erratic. It is, by considerable margin, the oldest thing in Macclesfield.