Historic hall fired my imagination
IN my book, ‘The Waterman’s Tale’, I take special pleasure in imagining what Crowden was like in days of old, take this from Chapter 9 as I imagine the view from the long gone Crowden Hall, built in the 17th Century and demolished in the 1930s by Manchester Corporation.
‘When I look at the place where the Hall stood, I can still see it in my mind’s eye, sometimes so clearly that, I wonder if it’s my imagination or that, it is actually still there.’
What I would have given for a mooch through that house. Standing one hundred yards back from the turnpike, now the A628 road, the Hall faced Bleaklow and my room would have been the one which was just above the imposing studded oak front door, with cut sandstone surrounds, two perfectly symmetrical mullion windows sitting halfway up and either side of the door.
Handsome and substantial quoins, nine masonry blocks holding up each elevated corner of the wall.
In some houses they were used to provide actual strength for a wall made with inferior stone or rubble, whereas at Crowden Hall they made a feature of a corner, a display, creating an impression of permanence and strength, and reinforcing the onlookers’ sense of a structure’s presence and then, just to finish off with an architectural flourish, six beautifully-carved stone finials, which are basically ornamental terminal features at the top of a gable, sometimes referred to as hip-knobs.
Above the door, one more piece of stone, a date-stone, inscribed 1692, and the initials THED.
You would have to have some sympathy with the original Thomas Hadfield who died in 1697 as he only had five years to enjoy the building.
The jury is out on what the ED stand for on the carving, although his will says he married Helen and, as local writer and historian Glynis Greenman told me, in the later 17th Century the H was often replaced with an E and vice versa.
The D may have been her surname, which was not recorded.
If I had chance to live there, the room which would have been my eyrie, my lookout on the valley, boasted a triple mullion and although the vista would have been impeded slightly by the leaded lights, this was the place to watch, just to watch.
In the lee of the hill, the slopes were clothed in a close knit and crouching forest of native sessile oak, a hill-hugger species designed especially to survive the Woodhead winds, tight together, safety in numbers, by staying almost prone and, Hobbit-like, close to the ground.
Even their acorns have adapted to windy environments, emerging directly from a twig, unlike their cousins the pedunculate which flap about on the end of an even smaller extension which, come the autumn, then makes them easier to fall as the life slips out of the tree.
Closer to the fast running River Etherow, now disguised by the Victorians with the Reservoirs for Manchester, grew reeds and willow and the sallows and island eddies in the margins splashed with life’.
Ever since the book was published readers have continued to furnish me with more information and recently a good friend of mine, Pete Jones, a Tinsle Lad (Tintwistle), has found some wonderful and historically important Crowden artefacts, including the copper beer tap from the Commercial Inn at Crowden which was pulled down in 1903, shame I know, and the 17th Century ‘boss’ from a draught horse’s bridle.
There would be one of these either side of the ‘bit’ and originally they would have been gilted.
A draft horse is a horse which has been bred to be extremely strong, allowing the horse to handle heavy labour such as pulling a plough or a fully-laden dray, a type of large open cart used to transport things like casks of beer and wine.
So, there I am back in my Crowden Hall window, say, in the middle of the 19th Century and look, here comes old Brocklehurst with his draught horse pulling his flat bed waggon with ale for the pub. I like that picture. Copies of The Waterman’s Tale are available for £15 including P&P from sean.wood@ talk21.com or 07736 175 866.