So, after all that Christmas stuff, let’s get back to what Bunking Off is all about: me rambling about my rambles through the British Isles.
When travelling, even if I find myself staying in urban hotels, it is the open green spaces which call to me. If I have some free time, I’ll catch a train to somewhere else, to the countryside, to somewhere like Alderley Edge. The area between here and Wilmslow is where wealthy footballers and the stars of Coronation Street call home. That’s why the village itself is all gentleman’s grooming, pavement cafes and artisan bakers. I wasn’t heading for the high street, though, I was heading for the edge of the Edge.
A winding path takes you ever higher from the village past rounded and eroded sandstone cliffs – laid down 250 million years ago, when this was desert. On my left through the trees are ever-widening views over the Cheshire plain.
I stop for a while at the point where, in 1588, an Armada Beacon stood, passing north the news of the Spanish fleet off the coast at Plymouth. It apparently took twelve hours for word to reach York; WhatsApp it was not. This is, apparently, the highest point in the area but today it’s surrounded by trees, so you can’t really tell and you certainly couldn’t receive a bonfire-relayed message from Plymouth any more.
I somehow manage to leave my camera at the site of the beacon and wander off back into the woods. When I return, I find it being guarded by a multi-national taskforce of indecision. There’s a chap in a baseball cap, shorts and flip-flops who is visiting from New Zealand, a man from Ecuador with a patterned short-sleeve shirt and dreadlocks, they are accompanied by two local ladies. They could not decide whether to leave my camera where it was or hand it in at the local pub. I think the answer is obvious but I’m not trying to decide by committee.
I’m not sure if this group showed that ladies from Alderley Edge are so special that men will travel from the other side of the globe to find them or reveals something about the nature of Ecuadorians and Kiwis but I was grateful to them for being the guardians of my camera.
The Edge is a wide escarpment of red sandstone that starts in Macclesfield and stops dead, 300 feet above the surrounding countryside, just here. The views are quite amazing across wide green fields to distant hills. I’d first visited here as a schoolboy of about eight and thought of the Edge, quite literally, as the point where the escarpment stops; the part actually known as Stormy Point. The vista from this rocky outcrop is mainly of the canopy of woods with small patches of green, the odd white farmhouse with red tiled roof, scatters of brown and black and white cows and the low hills of the Peak District beyond. Everything is green, fields and trees, until the distant slopes which take on a bluish cast and start to merge with the cumulus heavy sky.
When I first reach Stormy Point there is just one other person there, an old guy with a walking stick, gazing out on the truly gorgeous view. I can hear the sound of faraway traffic, presumably from commuters on the Macclesfield road and, every now and then, I catch a rumble of a jet engine carried on the breeze from Manchester airport. They are both faint sounds, though, and birdsong and a child’s laughter are much closer and louder. Soon walking-stick-guy and I are joined by the four guardians of my camera who smile and nod in recognition, as though we are old friends. Then a young boy in wellies and a stripy coat turns up, running round with such energy. He’s swiftly pursued by his dad. I don’t know if either realise that they are making wonderful and important memories of these moments but they are making them anyway. Busy in our lives, we sometimes fail to spot that the small things in life will one day be recognised as the big things.
I move on to Engine Vein, a great crack in the ground, stained green in patches. Here Bronze Age miners had found and followed the veins of copper-rich ore which, with the addition of a little tin, would give a name to an entire age. The Bronze Age began three and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ in Mesopotamia; what is today Iraq, Kuwait, Syria and Turkey. The use of bronze would take around fifteen hundred years to reach us in Britain and would last for almost as long again before the dawn of the use of iron and a new age.
Bronze may also be responsible for the name of Britain itself. The Greek historian Herodotus said that the tin needed to mix with copper to make bronze came from the Cassiterides, he didn’t say where that was but suggested that it was a group of islands beyond Gaul. It may be that he didn’t know where the tin came from because it tended to be transported by the great sailors, the Phoenicians, who came from the coast of modern Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. They may have kept the exact location of the “tin islands”, which they called Baratanac, a secret. Maybe we are Baratanac, the tin islands, certainly the south-west of England is one of the richest sources of tin on the planet.
From the Engine Vein, I wander down across rolling green fields, past scurrying rabbits, to the road and the Wizard public house. The pub takes its name from an old legend; one told to us as schoolchildren when we visited in the 1970s. Apparently, it’s been told since 1805 and is still being told today.
A farmer from Mobberley on his way to market in Macclesfield was stopped by an old man who offered to buy his horse. The farmer thought he’d get a better deal at market and declined the offer. Even though it was admired as a fine grey mare by those at the market, there were no buyers. On the way home the farmer saw the old man again and, this time, agreed to sell his horse. The old man then, apparently, led him to a part of the rock and struck it with the stick he was carrying. A huge iron gate appeared and the old man led the farmer into the cave beyond; where King Arthur, his knights and an entire army slept; just one of the soldiers without a horse. The farmer was paid and told that the army slept below the Edge until the day that England needed them most when they would rise to fight on the plain below. The old man was the wizard, Merlin.
I have my suspicions that this whole story might just have rather more to do with pubs than wizards. Who knows, though? Maybe the old man with the stick that I met was Merlin but, as I didn’t have a horse with me, I can’t confirm that.
More from the Cheshire countryside next week. Thank you for reading these posts, your support allows me to keep doing this work. If you enjoy Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese, it would mean the world to me if you invited friends to subscribe and read with us. If you refer friends, you will receive benefits that give you special access to Bunking Off.
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If you have enjoyed these posts and you think you might like to read some more of the words that I have re-arranged into a pleasant and faintly humorous order, why not have a read of Above the Law? It’s available direct from the publisher, via all the usual online retailers and from all good bookshops. It’s not available here, though:
