Our Local Heritage
A fascinating collection of stories and articles covering the diverse local heritage of Marple and District.
The articles are presented in Blog format (in title order) or as an article listing (also in title order).
Building the new Community Hub in the park means that we have lost the metal sculpture resembling a crown that has enjoyed pride of place in front of the library since Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012. It has not been lost forever as a prime position has been reserved for it in the new scheme, thanks to the lobbying efforts of the Friends of Marple Memorial Park but it gives us a chance to remind ourselves of how this relatively new piece of Our Local Heritage came about. It sounds simple but the process was much more involved and tortuous than you might expect.
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Pear Tree Farm in Mill Brow recently came up for sale. Grade II listed, it was originally a seventeenth century farm house, complete with mullion windows and a stone roof. This makes it distinctive though not unique, but what really makes it stand out is the adjacent barn. As with the main house, this has been given a thorough twentieth century ‘makeover’ but it is not difficult to envisage its original function as a barn. Local legend has it that John Wesley preached there on one of his visits though the authentication is not as reliable as Bongs.
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There have been a number of times when county boundaries have been adjusted.
The biggest change locally, came about in 1936 when Furness Vale, most of Whaley Bridge and part of Newtown were transferred from Cheshire to Derbyshire. At the same time Mellor and Ludworth became part of Cheshire, becoming Marple Urban District Council’s responsibility. The original county boundary following the River Goyt had caused numerous administrative anomalies and duplications of offices.
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Mellor and Ludworth were part of the Royal Forest of the Peak but Marple and Wybersley were also in a royal forest, the Forest of Macclesfield. An early development, it was established prior to 1160 and, at its height, it covered about 80 square miles from Chadkirk in the north to just north of Congleton. It was contiguous with the Royal Forest of the Peak with the River Goyt on its northern and western boundary and to the south the River Dane marked its limit. The western boundary followed a series of roadways.
Beginning at Rodegreen, just to the north of Congleton, it passed through Gawsworth, Prestbury and Norbury Low to the “stream of Bosden.” The exact location of Norbury Low is uncertain but presumably it was part of Norbury.
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Goyt Mill at Hawk Green was the last cotton mill to be built in the Marple area, and is the only building of that kind left standing locally today. Set on rising ground on the east bank of the Macclesfield Canal just after Hibbert Lane crosses the canal on Eccles Bridge (Bridge 3), it can be seen from near and far. Once the steam engine was sufficiently developed to provide a reliable source of power for turning machinery, mills no longer had to rely on fast flowing streams to turn water wheels, and canal banks made attractive sites for cotton mills because the canal could be used to transport raw materials and finished goods, and to provide water for the boilers.
A miscellaneous group of businessmen made up the first Board of Directors of the ‘Goyt Mill Spinning Company Ltd.’ under the Chairmanship of William Pearson of Eccles. The other directors were Thomas Hill Lees, a hat manufacturer of Stockport, Joseph Schofield, grocer of Patricroft, George Pollitt, fruit merchant of Stockport, John J.M. Dowzer, doctor of Eccles, John T. Ogden, merchant of Manchester, and Owen Gregory, gentleman of Ashton on Mersey. They bought a plot of land of 4 acres, 3 roods and 37 perches for £996.5s.0d. from Robert Shepley Shepley the owner of the adjacent Shepley Mill, alias Rhode House/Ridge/Marple Mill.
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Just beyond Chadkirk the A627 climbs the long steep hill towards Bredbury and passes through Hatherlow, described by James Butterworth in his 1827 book History and Description of the Towns and Parishes of Stockport as ‘a small hamlet within the Parish of Bredbury’. It may be small but its mix of both old and elegant buildings gives it an aesthetic coherence to justify being designated as a conservation area by Stockport MBC.
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Hawk Green has a ‘Reading Room’. You will have seen it, on the right, as you reach the top of Upper Hibbert Lane, just before the Green comes into view. It is a simple dark red brick building and the plaque above the door tells us that this is Hawk Green Reading Room and Social Club and that it dates from 1906.
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Two bridges on the Macclesfield Canal in High Lane are “listed” by English Heritage. They are both interesting but not particularly noteworthy. Bridge Eleven carries the A6 over the canal so it is wide enough to almost be described as a tunnel. About 150 metres to the south Bridge Twelve curves gently as it carries the towpath over the entrance to High Lane wharf, a much more interesting feature. This is a particularly attractive bridge with a gentle curve taking the towpath over the entrance to the canal arm. The canal itself is important as one of the last narrow canals built.
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For most of the last millennium the basic units of local government were townships. These were divisions within the ecclesiastical parishes which gradually gained civic and administrative responsibilities as society became more sophisticated. Bredbury and Romiley were two separate townships in the Middle Ages but they were brought together in the nineteenth century in order to establish units of local government. First as a Local Board, then as a sanitary district and finally, after 1894, as an urban district council, it was a unified authority. In 1976 it lost its autonomy when it was brought under the control of Stockport MBC at the same time as Marple UDC.
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As a child Rod Thackray from Moor End Mellor was enthralled by stories told by his uncle Ivan Eccles about his exploits working at coal mines around Mellor after WW1. By the time Rod was a teenager he was an accomplished artist and had developed a passion for exploring old coalmine workings. He once fell down the shaft at Picky Wood Pit in Marple only to be saved from serious injury when his fall was broken by a dead cow that had previously fallen down.
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Our local heritage does not have to be old. Nor does it have to be architecturally distinguished. What it does have to do is to play or have played a significant part in the life and culture of the area at some time. One such building is Marple Baths. Right in the centre of Marple, it has been there longer than almost everybody living and it has played a significant part in the community for almost ninety years.
So why is it part of our local heritage? Architecturally it has been described as “a simple industrial building, built to a budget but modified and extended over the years."
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It was 1919. The War to End All Wars was over and demobilisation was beginning. Millions of men were returning, but not all men. Almost 900,000 British soldiers had been killed in Belgium, France and the other battlefields and virtually every community in the country had lost men and some women. There were a few communities where all their sons returned, but Marple was not one of them. One hundred and forty one soldiers and sailors would not be coming home.
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In the last three hundred years Marple has changed from a rural community to an industrial neighbourhood and now to a post-industrial commuter area. However, although gradual, these changes have not been mutually exclusive - there were early signs of industry well before Samuel Oldknow chose Mellor as the site of his new mill and even today, the Romiley Young Farmers Show demonstrates that the agricultural tradition lives on. Even so, it is difficult to believe that Marple had a regular weekly cattle market as recently as 1968.
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