Roads into the past

Our regular columnist Alan Crosby takes a historical journey across the moors of Cheshire and Derbyshire

Wednesday 21 July 2010
Alan Crosby, editor of The Local Historian
Read more from Alan's blog

A couple of weeks ago I was doing some field work, investigating the 18th-century turnpike roads which cross the high moors between Cheshire and Derbyshire, east of Macclesfield and across to Buxton. I’m giving a talk on the subject next year and it was a good opportunity to take some pictures, as I was on my way to Derby and had a few hours to spend en route.

Everybody with local connections (including me) describes a journey along the main road as ‘going over the Cat and Fiddle’, because at the summit, at 1690 feet above sea level (that’s a less impressive 515 metres to our younger readers) is the pub of that name, standing exposed to the four winds in the bleak dark moorland.

The views are superb (when the sun shines, as it did for me) – you can see far across the Cheshire plain to the long line of Welsh mountains, southwards to the Wrekin and the Shropshire hills, and northwards on a good day you can see the Lake District. Turn the other way, and the Peak District lies before you.

The old road across these hills, the ancient saltway from the brine springs of Cheshire over to the East Midlands, was turnpiked in 1759, at the end of the reign of George II. The route climbed up steep and arduous hills and down deep dales, with fearsome gradients, very sharp bends, and narrow rocky stretches. Though it was resurfaced by the turnpike trust, and provided with milestones and drainage ditches, it was never ideal.

By 1821 traffic on the road was greater than could possibly have been imagined 60 years earlier (the Industrial Revolution had transformed the local economy), and vehicles were larger and heavier. Those gradients, bends and narrow sections were a real problem.

The turnpike trustees therefore built a completely new replacement road almost the whole way across the hills and moors, longer in distance but with much easier gradients to ease the burden of teams of horses hauling laden waggons the eight miles to the summit. The older road was bypassed and became a quiet backwater, sometimes only a few yards from its replacement which is now busy with traffic (including the huge heavy lorries laden with lime from the quarries around Buxton).

Other stretches have been abandoned completely and remains as rough tracks across the moorland. I wandered along one of those sections, away from the fumes and noise of the 1820s road, and was delighted to come across one of those milestones of the early 1760s. It stands some distance from the present track, but next to the ditch which marked the edge of the maintained turnpike 250 years ago. A miniature monument to the original promoters of the road, it’s been redundant for nearly two centuries but still stands proud amid the moorland grass and heather.

Standing next to it, I imagined those sweating horses, the jangling of harness and rumbling of great iron-shod wheels, the creaking of waggon axles and shouting of men, as the HGVs of the reign of George III was driven ‘over the Cat and Fiddle’ heading for Derbyshire.