Places: Alderley

ALDERLEY

Alderley parish comprised the townships of Over Alderley, Nether Alderley and Great Warford and may have developed from a chapel of ease in Prestbury parish. The escarpment known as Alderley Edge is the site of copper mines, worked from the Bronze Age to the twentieth century, and sandstone was quarried there.

The parish church, built in part from this local sandstone, is situated in the township of Nether Alderley. Little survives of the fourteenth-century building which forms the basis of the present church, the tower was added in 1530 and the Stanley family pew in about 1600.

The Stanleys are historically associated with the parish and their pew is accessible only by a flight of stone steps outside the church. The front of the pew is now decorated with six coats of arms of wives of the Stanleys from 1600 to 1800.

The font, which had been buried, was rediscovered in 1821 and is thought to date from the fourteenth century. The remains of a medieval stone cross survive in the churchyard, where an ancient yew tree also stands.

The grooves in the wall of the porch are said to have been caused by arrows being sharpened.

A sixteenth-century sandstone water mill with a roof of Kerridge slate at Nether Alderley now belongs to the National Trust. This mill was close to the house where the Stanley family lived. The house, having been rebuilt in the late sixteenth century, was rebuilt again in the early eighteenth century but burned down in 1779.

Sources:

J. P. Earwaker, East Cheshire Past and Present, vol. 2 (London, 1880), pp. 594-642 (images from this volume courtesy of HathiTrust)

George Ormerod, The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, (second edition, revised and enlarged by T. Helsby, London, 1882), vol. iii, pp. 565-585