At the Southern end of the Cheshire Plain, between Buerton and Woore rises Birchall Brook which flows Northwest to Birchall Moss before reaching the River Weaver on its course from Audlem. Here the flow turns Northwards passing to the West of Wybunbury, Willaston and Wistaston on its way to Nantwich, then onward to Church Minshull, past Over and Winsford then Whitegate to Northwich where it turns Northwest eventually to join the Mersey estuary south of Halton and Runcorn. In that flow and in those villages can be written much of the recent history of the Birchall family of Cheshire who farmed that land for generations. For Farmers, this is cow country.
The Cheshire Plain is a relatively flat expanse of lowland that extends from the Mersey Valley in the north to the Shropshire Hills in the south, from the hills of North Wales to the west to the foothills of the Pennines to the north-east, while to the southeast lies Wolverhampton and the Black Country. The Wirral Peninsular lies in the north-west of this area whilst to the North the plain merges with the South Lancashire Plain separated only by what is now the Liverpool/Manchester conurbation. The whole is a deep sedimentary basin that assumed its current form as the ice-sheets of the last glacial period melted away between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago leaving behind a thick cover of glacial till and extensive tracts of glacio-fluvial sand and gravel. Bronze and Iron Age settlements were hill camps like Eddisbury on the central sandstones. Clearance of the ancient woodland was begun by the early Celts, and was extended by the Anglo-Saxons and Normans, and this has continued through to modern times. Celtic settlements in the Welsh hills tended to spread Eastward to the fertile lowlands. The Romans recognised the strategic importance of the ancient Saltway trading routes that cross the region with important river crossings at Warrington, Northwich, Nantwich and Chester. They mined salt in Middlewich, Northwich and Nantwich and thus began a significant chemical industry today centred round Runcorn and Ellesmere Port. Anglo-Saxons spread northwards mixing with old Celtic settlements. The Danes landed at the Wirral and spread southwards more by mutual settlement rather than any conquest. It was the Normans who “invaded” the North of England conducting ferocious campaigns to quell continuing resistance to their rule and Cheshire was their route to North Wales. Subsequently it was the inhabitants of the monasteries and manors who developed the land around the extensive Delamere and Macclesfield forests. In the 18th century the enclosure movement reached Cheshire resulting in the general landscape of hedgerow fields and dairy farming of today. The meadows and dales and the comparatively damp conditions in the Cheshire Plain in the lee of the Welsh hills favoured the cultivation of livestock over the cultivation of grain. This was cow country. And where there are cows, there is milk and cheese, and meat and related activities in leather, tanning and shoemaking.
Even today Cheshire is a mainly rural area with few towns and a high concentration of villages. The major Roman town was of course Chester, but since then the history of Western Cheshire came to lie in Northwich, Winsford and Nantwich. Then from 1840 Crewe became the centre of the British railway industry. Northwich provides an important crossing point of ancient saltways, lying as it does at the junction of the rivers Dane and Weaver. It was this and the presence of the local salt-brines that drew the Romans to establish a settlement and mining continued for centuries. The salt beds beneath the town were rediscovered in the 1670s by the Smith-Barry family who were looking for coal but instead discovered rock-salt. During the 1800s it became uneconomic any longer to mine for salt. Instead hot water was pumped through the mines dissolving the salt, which was then extracted from the resultant brine when it was pumped out.
However this technique weakened the mineshafts and resulted in significant subsidence in the town and surrounding areas, whilst at the same time creating wetland “flashes” and meres in the rivers. Whitegate is a small village lying between Northwich and Winsford. The parish of Whitegate and Marton includes the small hamlet of Nova Scotia. Nearby is an old Cistercian Abbey destroyed by Henry VIII in the Reformation. From 1600 for the next 300 years this was the home of the Cholmondeley family.
Winsford lies six miles South of Northwich, also on the River Weaver. Nearby Over was granted a Wednesday Market and an Annual Fair by Edward I in 1280. In 1721 permission was given to canalise the River Weaver to allow large barges to reach Winsford from Liverpool. Initially this was for the transport of China Clay from Cornwall to the Potteries at Stoke on Trent. From Winsford it was then taken the remaining 30 miles overland by pack-horse. Salt was also transported for use in salt-glazed stoneware and finished ceramics were brought back to Winsford for transport to Liverpool. But this trade cease with the opening of the Trent and Mersey Canal when the route was opened through Middlewich, by-passing Winsford. New sources of salt were discovered in Winsford in the 1830s and as the new salt industry developed along the River Weaver, so too did Winsford expand, slowly swallowing up the historic Over, Salterswall and surrounding villages.
Nantwich lies twelve miles further south of Winsford. The Romans sourced salt from here for their garrisons at Chester and Stoke, and salt is also important for the production of Cheshire Cheese and the local tanning industry. A “town” is first recorded by the Normans who burned the whole place to the ground leaving only one building standing before building a castle. By 1350 Nantwich was second only to Chester in the County, and was the most important salt-town in Cheshire. It held a weekly cattle-market and had a successful tanning industry. Much of the town was destroyed by fire in 1583. During the Civil War Nantwich declared for Parliament and was several times besieged by Royalist forces until victory for Sir Thomas Fairfax in the 1644 Battle of Nantwich finally won the Town its freedom. The Chester Canal to Nantwich was completed in 1779 but the route all the way to Birmingham was not opened until 1835. The last salt-house closed around 1850. The location of Nantwich on the main London to Chester Road had made it a regular stopping place for travellers in Medieval times but this trade declined with the opening of Telford’s London to Holyhead railway route in 1826 when Nantwich was by-passed by the main-line railway.
Between Crewe and Nantwich lie the villages of Wistaston, Willaston and Wybunbury. In 1086 this was a sparsely populated area made up mostly of farmsteads. Their official boundaries have hardly changed over the centuries. The Sneyd family of Staffordshire were the major landowners for 300 years from 1553 when Queen Mary executed Robert Dudley and confiscated his lands. Enclosure during the 1700s and 1800s brought more and more land into private ownership and as individual plots were fenced off they were used for arable farming, and the grazing of livestock.
Crewe today is a modern invention some six miles to the East of Nantwich. Creu is marked in the Domesday Book (1086), and is an old Welsh name meaning a crossing place – in this case of Valley Brook which flows into the River Weaver just to the West of the current township. For the next 800 years Creu was a minor hamlet, a collection of houses very much subsidiary to two townships lying north of the brook – Church Coppenhall to the West, and Monks Coppenhall to the East. It was only the coming of the railways that made Crewe into the town it is today. In the 1830s the Grand Junction Railway Company was looking for a site for a railway station and a major junction where the line from Birmingham was to split between the lines to Stockport and then Manchester, separated from that to Runcorn and then Liverpool. The proposal to build this junction had been turned down by both Winsford and Nantwich and so the new locomotive works and railway station were sited at Crewe, a hamlet with a population of just 70. The GJR Chief Engineer Joseph Lock helped lay out the new town incorporating the Coppenhalls neither of which now have separate identities.
But Came They All to Birmingham 