Heritage Trail

Racecourse Road, surrounding Lindow Common, was once a mile length racecourse created by the gypsies who were regular visitors to Lindow. Here, they showed off their horses and traded them;  there was even a wooden stand for spectators at the finishing line. By the 1890’s the local council took a dim view of these activities and wanted to take control: so Alderman John Royle purchased the land and presented it to the people of Wilmslow. The Memorial Stone commemorates this gift, which was timed to coincide with the celebrations for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when 5-6,000 people are reported to have enjoyed brass bands, songs, tea and fireworks.

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(Llyn-Dhu in Welsh) is described in T.A. Coward’s Picturesque Cheshire (1926) as “a breezy, desirable spot, for sooner or later residential Wilmslow will reach here and this lung be appreciated. (It is) …a heathy waste where reptiles and insects sun themselves and where the nightjar churrs and the owl beats his nightly round.” The lake also features in Alan Garner’s Wierdstone of Brisingamen (1960) where Llyn Dhu is described as “garlanded with mosses and mean dwellings” and where “men thought to drain that land and live there, but the spirit of the place entered them, and their houses were built desolate and without cheer”.  When the lake regularly froze over in earlier winters, it was very popular site for skating. 

This glacial boulder is a substantial block of stone, weighing at least 300kg, carried here by ice and resting beside a footpath on Lindow Common. The most recent glaciation of Britain, the Devensian, reached its maximum extent around 18,000 ago. Ice streams from the Lake District and the Irish Sea converged to drive south through the Cheshire gap, reaching as far as the Church Stretton Valley in Shropshire. Boulders carried by ice and deposited far from their place of origin are known as glacial erratics. Erratics carried from the Lake District include granites, Borrowdale volcanic rocks, and ancient green sandstones. The distribution of glacial erratics in Cheshire helps us to identify the vertical extent of the ice which reached up to 365m above current sea level at Chapel en le Frith and 380m at Glossop. The Pennine Hills themselves were ice free but subject to a very harsh climate. It’s likely that there would have been at least 300m of ice above Wilmslow at that time.

Lindow Common is an example of an increasingly rare habitat known as ‘lowland heath’. Lowland heath occurs on sandy soils and is characterised by an open landscape with plants such as heather and gorse. In the past heathlands were maintained by grazing of livestock and periodic cutting or burning. An aerial photograph taken in 1945, at the end of the 2nd World War, shows little tree cover (3%) and faint circular patches where horses had been tethered to graze. After that, in the absence of grazing, tree cover increased greatly to 54% by 1992, whilst heather cover had declined from 39% to 16%. Heathland supports a distinctive mixture of plant and animal communities, hence the designation of Lindow Common as a Site of Special Scientific Interest. It was therefore important to redress the balance and over the last 30 years tree cover, especially Birch, has been reduced and heather is encouraged by periodic cutting and scraping the surface clear to promote regeneration. The Countryside Rangers engaged by Cheshire East Council work hard to manage the landscape, making Lindow Common attractive for wildlife as well as its many human visitors.

At the far end of Lindow Lane the track turns left and heads downhill to a low-lying landscape with ditches, open fields and patches of woodland. This was once an extensive lake which became choked with vegetation and, in time, the partially decayed plant remains formed peat. The peaty basins, surrounded by sandy heathland formed a large area of uncultivated land known as Lindow Common. It is well shown on Burdett’s 1777 map of Cheshire. 

​From early medieval times, local people had ‘commoners rights’ such as turbary- the right to cut peat which was an important source of fuel for heating and cooking. Peat cutting left its mark on the landscape, so that today we can still recognise the original peatland landscape as the Lindow Moss Landscape Character Area which stretches from Morley Green in the north to Lindow End in the south and covers an area of 17.4 km².

A carr is an area of wet woodland characterised by trees such as willow and, in this case, alder as they thrive in poorly drained soils.  The formation of this type of woodland dates to when the glaciers retreated some 12,000 years ago and the correct conditions were created.  Alder wood is easily coppiced and does not rot in water, so has been used since the Bronze Age as rafts or piles for structures to be supported on.  (Venice is built on piles made of Alder trunks).  It also makes excellent charcoal; this was used to forge weapons by the Celts and, centuries later, in the manufacture of gunpowder.  The Alder is excellent at fixing nitrogen in the soil and so has an important relevance as we try to mitigate climate change.

Peat cutting, mainly as a source of fuel, has been important in the Cheshire lowlands for at least 800 years. In the medieval period people who lived alongside Lindow Moss (then known as Lindow Common) had a right to cut peat but they had to work in a defined strip or ‘moss room’. Beginning in the 18th century the peat workings were enclosed for private use for agriculture. The removal of commoners’ rights was often unpopular and here, in 1810, the local land agent wrote to Lord Stamford to say that ‘occupiers of cottages in and about Fulshaw near Wilmslow, collected together in a riotous manner and pulled down and destroyed fences of the new enclosures made by your lordship’s tenants’. By 1842 the tythe maps show many ‘intakes’ from the common lands but the pattern of the long thin moss rooms was captured by the new hedges. That can still be seen today where the former moss rooms make ideal horse paddocks. Lindow Moss has been described as the best example of a moss room landscape in Cheshire.

After the Crimean War 1854-56 the Wilmslow and Alderley Edge 27th Company Volunteer Rifles was formed in 1860 as part of 5th Admin Battalion, 22nd Cheshire Regiment. Lindow rifle range was established at a cost of £200 appearing on the 1872 Crown Ordnance Survey and lasting at least until 1893.  It had a double range of 500 yards and 1000 yds with facing butts (a large sand bank), bullet proof shelters and a tower. The rifleman used Enfield rifles with a much greater range than previous smooth bore guns.

Peat was dug by hand, sliced by a hay knife and dug out with a spade. Each piece was turned on its side and then stacked up to dry to form long banks of peat blocks. The peat was collected by a train pulled by a sideways sitting locomotive and taken to the depot on the corner of Newgate and Rotherwood Road. The diesel engines are still in working order and can be seen at Apedale Museum (www.apedale.co.uk) and examples of the tracks can still be found on the Moss (awaiting Boardwalk from public track into Lindow Moss (Compartment 10). From 2003, peat cutting became mechanised using large diggers, causing considerable environmental damage.

Peat cutting on Lindow Moss became mechanised from 2003, when Croghan Peat were given planning permission by the then local authority, Cheshire County Council, to continue peat harvesting until 2043. Mechanised peat removal strips away the surface vegetation and uses drainage to dry out the surface layers that are then removed in thin layers by milling using large machines.  Over time, the peat is removed over the whole of its depth until only a thin layer remains. This has a major ecological impact exposing the remaining peat to oxidation and loss of carbon, contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. 

In December 2014 the owners of the cutover peat bog submitted two inter-linked planning applications. They proposed that the peat processing building be demolished and that 14 detached houses should be built on that part of the site (1.8ha). Housing development would be conditional upon a second application which would bring an end to peat extraction and bring about a comprehensive ecological restoration of the cutover peat bog (28ha). The old planning consents would fall away, including the requirement to backfill with inert waste and ‘restore to agriculture’ that part of the site in Wilmslow. Both applications were finally approved in February 2019 and tied together by a legally binding agreement. In due course the housing site was acquired by Bowdon Homes and both applications formally commenced in February, 2022. The main objective of moss restoration is to re-establish peat forming vegetation (Cotton Grass and Sphagnum mosses) which will once again begin to capture and lock away carbon from the atmosphere. The key to this is to control drainage and re-establish a high water table across the site. Restoration is still in its early stages but the prospects for re-establishing a raised bog habitat across much of the site are considered to be favourable.

On 1 August 1984, one of the peat cutters pulled a long object off the elevator at the peat depot on Lindow Moss, and realized it was a well preserved human foot with a ragged piece of skin attached. Rick Turner, the Cheshire County Archaeologist at the time, was called to undertake the excavation. He describes it in Lindow Man, The Body in the Bog (Stead, Bourke and Brothwell 1986) and also in a World Service interview in 1984 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p023vg8t

Lindow Man was found in 1984, during peat-cutting on Lindow Moss. Consisting of a torso and head, he is also known as Lindow II and a separate leg, found only 15m away (known as Lindow IV) may be part of the same body, severed by the peat-cutting machinery. Lindow Man was not the only person to have been buried on the bog: a human skull (Lindow I) and parts of a headless body (Lindow II) were also found on separate occasions. Lindow Man has been radiocarbon dated to the 2BCE-AD119, so he may have died during the turbulent events of the arrival of the Romans in the north of Britain. 

He has been analysed by many different archaeologists, including forensic and environmental specialists, led by Dr Ian Stead of the British Museum. We know that he was a well-fed adult male, of average height (around 1.73m tall) and aged between 26-45 years old. His hair and beard had been neatly trimmed and his nails showed no trace of intensive work shortly before his death. He was found naked apart from a small fox-fur armband, and he had eaten a slightly burned barley-based meal, either a griddle cake or thick pottage, along with fragments of hazlenuts and some traces of meat, shortly before his death. A small number of mistletoe grains were also found in his stomach but we do not know if these had been deliberately ingested, either as a medicine or poison. 

We do know that he died violently from a heavy blow to the top and back of the head. He was also garrotted with a tightly turned length of twisted animal sinew, which ultimately broke his neck, but traces of a cut across the throat and another potential stab wound to the chest suggest a number of people were involved and that this traumatic blood-loss was designed to hasten his death. Recent studies of the Lindow landscape suggest he was placed face-down in a shallow pool, at the deepest part of the raised bog, at a time when it was getting wetter. This would have been a challenging and difficult place to access, suggesting he was alive when taken out onto the bog. Yet we still do not know the reasons behind that death: judicial punishment, the offering of a sacrifice or even the deliberate giving up of his life to appeal to the gods at a time of crises, are all possible explanations. 

As the public footpath heads north in the north-west corner of the cutover peat bog the ground rises and conditions underfoot are very different. This is the ‘sand island’, a wedge of deep sand which intrudes into the north west corner of the bog. This was blown into a hollow left by retreating ice as the last glaciation was coming to its end. The sand can be clearly seen in the deep ditch which marks the boundary of the site where it is crossed by a bridge, enroute to Saltersley Hall. The distinct layers which have formed in the upper part of the sand are known as a podzol – this soil type is also found on Lindow Common. In 1987 Rick Turner, the archaeologist who discovered Lindow Man, returned to Lindow Moss with colleagues from the British Museum to investigate the location of further human remains which had been found within the bog and they also investigated the sand island – the remains of a 36.4m excavation trench can still be seen. The archaeologists found no evidence for cultivation or settlement contemporaneous with Lindow Man but in the subsoil they found a scatter of flints including some flint tools from the Mesolithic or early Neolithic period – well before the time of Lindow Man.

Since 1959, Saltersley Hall has been listed with Grade II protection by Historic England as a 17C building, although it is generally considered to have earlier origins with a mediaeval room plan. It stood as a lonely but high-status house on a sand island - described by antiquarian Fletcher Moss in 1903 as “begirt …by the quaking bog”. The sandstone base is thought to have been quarried near Quarry Bank Mill. It may have been a staging post on the ancient salt-way between Cheshire and Derbyshire.

Sitting close to the eastern border of Mobberley Parish & the northern edge of Lindow Moss, Rossmere is a man-made lake.  Towards the end of the last ice-age, around 10,500 years ago, as the ice retreated, it left behind several islands & peninsulas of sand amongst the wetland area that would later become know as Lindow Moss.

Around 1500 A.D. Saltersley Hall was built on one such sand peninsula which was able to support the stone structure which the surrounding peat bog could not.  During the early 1950s, Saltersley Hall & the surrounding land was bought by the Croxall family, who, over the next two decades dug out the sand from the eastern side of their property for the building trade.  This excavation left a large depression which was filled up from an underground spring & rainwater.

Rossmere is now the home of the private Prince Albert Angling Society.

The Animal Sanctuary, Wilmslow, is run by the Humane Education Society (charity number 1159571). Founded by Arthur Thompson, it focused on education in early years, offering talks on how to care for pets. Then in 1970, an old turkey farm here was purchased so that rescued animals could be cared for, the organisation funded by legacies and donations. Many improvements to the original barns have been added over subsequent years. The Victorian drinking trough at the front of the building, originally located on Manchester streets for the benefit of working horses, was moved here over 50 years ago.

Formed from the now closed landfill site, Newgate nature reserve is a fine example of how industrial land can be returned to nature.  The area’s history as a waste centre started during the Second World War, when a plane crashed into the field and was left there for several years.  As it rusted, the field became a popular dumping ground, eventually being designated a council tip. The tip closed in 2000 and has quickly developed into a complex mixture of open grassland, scrub, newly developing woodland and wet areas along drainage ditches, which give the whole site a rich biodiversity.