Guide to Rural England – Cheshire
has received a bad press from
writers such as Jeremy Clarkson and AA Gill
who have portrayed the county as a kind of
Footballer’s Wives territory, packed with
Porsches, bloated with bling and mindlessly
devoted to conspicuous consumption. It’s
certainly true that more millionaires live in
this captivating corner of the country than
anywhere else in England. Britain’s richest
peer, the Duke of Westminster, with an
estimated wealth of £5600 million, lives on a
large estate just south of Chester. And more
champagne is quaffed here than anywhere
else in the UK.
But that’s only a tiny part of the county’s
2000-year-long story, which effectively began
with the arrival of the Romans. But even before
the 20th Legion established the garrison of
Cheshire
Deva in AD70, Cheshire was famous for its salt
mines. By the time of the Domesday Book, the
salt towns, or ‘wiches’ - Nantwich, Northwich
and Middlewich - were firmly established. The
process at that time involved pumping the salt
brine to the surface and boiling it to produce
granular salt. In 1670, huge deposits of rock
salt were discovered and these are still being
mined, mostly for use in keeping Britain’s roads
free from ice.
In the early 1700s, in the course of his Tour
through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel
Defoe came to Chester by the ferry over the
River Dee. He liked the city streets, “very
broad and fair”; admired the “very pleasant
walk round the city, upon the walls”, disliked
its cathedral, “built of red, sandy, ill-looking
stone”, but had nothing except praise for its
“excellent cheese”. Cheshire cheese has been
famous for generations. John Speed, the wellknown
Elizabethan map-maker and a
Cheshire man himself, noted: “The soil is fat
fruitful and rich....the Pastures make the
Kine’s udders to strout to the pail, from
whom the best Cheese of all Europe is
made”. Later, some enthusiasts even
promoted the idea that the name Cheshire
was actually short for cheese-shire.
One thing that visitors don’t get to see is
the county’s best known character, the
grinning Cheshire Cat. The expression ‘to
grin like a Cheshire cat’ was in use long
before Lewis Carroll adopted it in Alice in
Wonderland. Carroll spent his childhood in the
Cheshire village of Daresbury and would
have regularly seen the local cheeses moulded
into various animal shapes, one of which was
a grinning cat.
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