The road to Chatcull
By Reg Crawford. Twitter: @regcrawford3
Many thanks to Ian Pearsall for giving me the opportunity to contribute to the book and the concept of the #TERRA exhibition. The road here has been both interesting and frustrating as the pandemic intervened in the process of Ian’s paintings reaching a wider audience with planned shows in Scotland and elsewhere cancelled. Despite that interruption, it is good to hear that there is a rapidly growing international market developing for his bold and dynamic paintings. This show is an opportunity for the local community, and hopefully many others from further afield, to see a comprehensive showcase of Ian’s latest work.
With the move to Maer, a very different, exciting new chapter has begun for Ian. The fantastic new subject matter provided by the North West Staffordshire landscape. The paintings in this exhibition show his eye for intriguing sight lines coupled to the dynamic light & shade that reveals the contours of this landscape of low hills, richly corrugated ploughed fields and isolated buildings.
I first had dialogue with Ian and Lindsay via Twitter, finally meeting up at the #SCAR From the Rich Earth Exhibition which was held in the stylish new Valentine Clays building in Fenton. Since then, I have written a few articles about Ian’s work and how its dynamic focus inspires so many people. Like most who come into contact with his paintings, I believe Ian’s work is a powerful, individual and poetic interpretation of landscape – rural as well as urban. This statement, in my personal view, applies pretty much to his entire oeuvre; from the bright, African Fish Eagle screaming works showing the hot colours of his childhood home in Malawi, to the dark streets, terraces and industry of The Potteries, the high drama of the big skies of the Rhinns of Galloway and now the dynamic perspectives of the land around Maer.
Given the unfathomable vastness of Terra / Earth as a subject and my predilection and indeed preference for the smaller localish scale when it comes to landscapes, I have, with Ian’s blessing put together what is essentially a riff, a very personal, whimsical piece, specifically about this fascinating corner of North West Staffordshire. It is not an academic document nor is it, in any sense, written from an expert’s point of view on any of the subjects discussed. I wrote it because I am intrigued by this humble corner of Staffordshire and have tried to find out a bit more about it. Please note that any mistakes contained herein are mine and mine alone. If you can add stories, facts or corrections to this article, please contact me via Twitter @regcrawford3
The title, ‘The Road to Chatcull’ came to me when I was researching the etymology and history of the place names of this part of the world. To me, it is such an interesting and poetic name. It is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086) where it is described as ‘waste’ having ‘land for one plough.’ The prefix Chat probably comes from the pre Norman Conquest, Old English personal name ‘Ceadd’ or its variant ‘Ceadda’ – pronounced ‘Chad’. It’s a name that could possibly have been used in this region anytime between the mid-5th to mid-7th Century and up to the mid-11th. Likewise, the suffix ‘cull’ possibly derives from the Old English word ‘culne’ – meaning a kiln. Given the use of burnt lime as a fertiliser applied to the land during the Anglo Saxon period, this could possibly be a lime kiln. That is by no means certain and the kiln or kilns may have been for the firing of pots. It would be interesting to investigate this further, both via documents in the County Records and in the field to see if there is any extant, surviving archaeology in the area, associated with lime / chalk burning.
Walking the road from Maer to Chatcull you sense that it is paved with the stories of thousands of years of impact made by people on the rich red soil in the surrounding fields. None can tell who those, now shadowy people were. Some, from the recent past, we know from documents and even photographs, left buildings, churches, field systems and woodland that we are still living with. As we get further back in time, the veil between us and the past becomes ever more opaque. Documents are few and far between, eventually tailing away into nonexistence. What were once the bodies of real people become soil shadows, their remains dissolved in the acidic clayey soils of the area. Even their household pottery together with bronze, iron and stone tools, lie buried, unseen and broken, sometimes deliberately, beyond recognition. There are no written records from prehistory, a few Iron Age coins, pot sherds and Mesolithic flint tools are found. There will be more, somewhere for sure.
Before Ian and Lindsay moved to Maer from The Potteries, and despite living for seven decades only a few miles away in South Cheshire, I had never been to the area I am writing about. The nearest I got was, during several summers in the mid-1960s, when I worked during the school holidays for a forestry contractor who had planted conifers on the Maer Hills. The firm had a maintenance contract for the young woodland and I spent days every summer with a workmate, knocking down dense bracken with a brushing hook and running away from angry wasps whose nests we had disturbed. I also helped plant 65 acres of trees in what is now Whitmore Wood.
At the time, the land, which is by the side of the railway line immediately south of Whitmore village, was owned by the Mainwaring family, whose patrician elders occasionally dropped in to provide advice to us youngsters on the best drinks to have in your flask to quench your thirst during the interminably long hot working days of those 60s summers. Cold tea is the thing apparently. A more interesting diversion was provided by the pest controller who was contracted to rid the plantation of the rabbits that had burrowed under the wire netting fence and set up vast warrens. Breeding colonies fuelled by the calorific and tasty Lodgepole and Corsican pine saplings which we had planted on the deep ploughed red soil. He used to arrive for work on his Royal Enfield motor bike, on the petrol tank of which sat a savage Jack Russell who was not much bigger than a rabbit himself. How the dog remained in place as the old bike thundered across the Staffordshire countryside remains a mystery. Like the Lone Ranger, where he came from no one knew. There was little traffic in that area in those days and the ‘millionaire’s row’ of large houses in the woods were only just starting to appear as the land agent sold off the plots for building at what was rumoured to be £1,000 an acre. A price at the time thought to be only affordable by wealthy industrialists and stockbrokers from the distant cities. The presence of the pest controller brightened up our days considerably. Dressed not in the mode du jour of military camouflage and netting over the face, he wore an old jacket and flat cap, as crash helmets were not compulsory in those days. To be fair, from a distance he looked like Steve McQueen in the Great Escape, except he didn’t have a Triumph. His MO was to gun the low slung 500cc Enfield up the little lane from Whitmore, over the cattle grid and on a bit, parking behind my boss’s Vauxhall Cresta estate. In addition to the dog, he came armed to the teeth. On his back he carried a .410 shotgun. In the bags on the parcel rack were nets and we also had a big tin of Cymag, a presumably now illegal, cyanide gas producing powder. Cymag was used as a last resort. It was administered using a table spoon lashed with binder twine to a 5 foot long bamboo cane. The powder was left at the entrance to the burrows. When it got damp, the deadly gas was produced and bye bye bunnies.
So much for the memories. My first visit to Maer, over 50 years later, was in June 2021. It turned out to be something of a revelation. I drove in off the A51 at Stableford and set about exploring the lanes. I criss crossed the area bounded by the Maer Hills and the Millmeece valley to Chatcull. One thing that struck me that day was that the approach to Maer village from the A51 through the ‘tunnel’ is as dramatic and picturesque as any I have seen here or abroad. I eventually stopped by the side of Chapel Chorlton Common and its enigmatic Oak tree planted in the middle of the green to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897.
Since that initial visit in June, I’ve been able to spend some time on the patch, soaking up its atmosphere and looking for the stories buried beneath the topsoil and enjoying the lines on the land, the result of centuries of human intervention, but still largely dependent on the bedrock and geology of the vanished landscapes buried beneath the fertile red soil.
To get to the core, the heart of all landscapes, demands that time is spent immersed in them, physically visiting and experiencing their light and shade, their flora and fauna, day and night. Ideally, visits need to be made through the year and in all seasons and weathers. Unfortunately, that has not, so far, been possible to achieve. However, here are my thoughts of what I have found so far.
Landscapes around the world pretty much comprise a thin top layer on a vastly older layer cake of the remains of past cultures, vegetation and farming methods. In most cases, these layers have been remorselessly and relentlessly crushed, dissolved and ploughed out of existence. The Maer area is no exception. Officially designated as sandstone hills and heaths overtopped by slightly acid loamy soils with impeded drainage, bounded to the east, in the valley of the Meece Brook, by loamy and clayey floodplain soils with naturally high groundwater. Predominantly an agricultural landscape, the area features, for the most part, medium sized fields used for rearing dairy and beef cattle. The hedgerows form prominent boundaries to the narrow lanes which are often sunk into the landscape. In July, the verges were covered with lush, mile long displays of Fireweed, golden yellow Meadowsweet and the tall white lacy heads of Cow Parsley and other umbellifers.
So far, so good. We are in a typically English pastoral landscape of medium sized fields, stag headed hedgerow oaks and small copses, nucleated settlements and outlier farms. There are many old houses in this varied patchwork landscape of narrow lanes, some of the latter still have grass growing in their middles, fields of cereals grown for livestock fodder and hedges which have probably been in place since the last enclosures were made in the 19th century.
During the late 20th century and the arrival of mass mobility, a move to the countryside became popular with the affluent middle class as a way of escaping the noise, bustle and crime of the cities. This return to the land reversed the process where our 19th century ancestors left the farms for the better pay, security and convenience of the towns. It is par for the course of today’s economic model that the picturesque villages of this area, many of which have roots going back to before the Norman Conquest, some all the way back to Saxon times, have, it seems, mainly become dormers for commuters.
One beautiful old house I came across is made from sandstone blocks with an upper story from local soft red brick and a timber framed, presumably much older section to its eastern end. In such houses, families have lived out their lives for centuries. Going back only 150 years, the residents would have known a dark under the stars which we can now only see by travelling to Dark Sky Parks like Dumfries and Galloway, the Forest of Kielder and the far north and west of Scotland. Because of the enforced closeness of their living conditions and the lack in those days of electric light, this darkness shaped their thoughts and the very way they lived their lives for much of the year. In fact, the powers of darkness were regarded as a real and ever present threat to their physical and spiritual health. As a result, they took practical steps to ward off evil, the evil eye and the unseen fingers of malice that could sour the milk of their cows or make a horse lame, let alone kill their children or ruin their health without even any physical contact.
As they were not generally openly written about by ordinary people, there are few easily accessible archives describing the measures taken by individuals in the provinces to keep their families, goods, chattels and properties safe from attack by ‘Old Nick’ as well as maleficent persons, known and unknown. As a result, these warding off, or apotropaic, practises took several forms that we are only just beginning to identify and research, let alone understand. They included the careful deposition in secret, hidden places in houses, of personal items and even animals (from cats to horse skulls), mostly dead (we assume), together with certain marks made on wood and stone, the former by careful and sustained burning with a taper, the latter with scratched signs, symbols and words.
These depositions or caches, are now known as spiritual as well as physical middens – collections of deliberately secreted items, ringed about with the power to protect the possible places that evil could, indeed would, given half a chance, enter the house. Where it could cause chaos, material and spiritual disruption and even death. Popular objects in these caches generally have a personal element, clothes and particularly shoes. These items have in common the ability to retain something of the form of their wearer’s feet. Sometimes the objects belonged to someone who was dead. Presumably the thinking was that the shoe/ glove / hat contained or represented the dead person’s spirit which would remain at the place of deposition, guarding against evil and protecting the occupants from harm. There is a certain amount of commonality to the objects chosen for this purpose. Dead cats and pottery or glass bottles containing bodily fluids and pins, fossil echinoderms (fossilised sea urchins – which look somewhat like old fashioned bed knobs)), flint nodules (flint is not found in Staffordshire so must have reached here by being traded from somewhere else in the country – possibly hundreds of years before) known as thunderstones placed up chimneys to protect against lightning strikes. The same flint nodules would also be held by women in childbirth as protection from post parturition haemorrhage. Objects deliberately placed under thresholds and hearths, over windows, chimneys, fireplaces and doors. All performing an apotropaic or warding off function. Keeping the house residents safe from assaults by the powers of darkness. For darkness was and is a frightening state where dark forces operate with impunity. Few now know how true darkness looks and feels. For it is a palpable, softly deceptive state where the smallest sound is amplified as our senses adjust to dealing with the potential for physical and spiritual threats. Imagine how alert someone five thousand years ago would feel if they had to walk the road from Maer to Chatcull or Bowers in the dead of night. Perhaps their senses were sharper, more refined than ours which are dulled by daily hours of phone screen blue light and street lights. I suspect some of the hollow ways in this area may still provide a degree of darkness that replicates what it feels like to walk out on a moonless, overcast winter’s night. It is also highly likely that some of the houses, particularly the large manor houses and farms, but also any timber framed house of any date before 1900, may contain examples of these apotropaic marks. If anyone would like a survey, I would be happy to oblige.
Scrape away the layers from this man made landscape and it’s as thin as a pie crust. Thin in the same way as the atmosphere is, a delicate protecting veil separating us from the absolute zero temperature, cosmic rays and vacuum of deep space. It’s also a wet landscape that was even wetter several thousand years ago. Nowadays that equates to a few small marshes, some springs and wells, all of which are marked on the OS map. Today there are several watercourses flowing through the area. The Meece Brook on its eastern edge is the most prominent. Its name survives in documents from the 13th century and probably derives from the Old English word meos or moss – a bog or wet place. There is also conjecture that meece refers to a medieval fish trap built or placed in the flowing water of the brook. Others include the Bromley Brook, which flows out of Bromley Pool, the mill pond at Gerrard’s Bromley, before meeting up with the Chatcull Brook. It was here on a hot July afternoon I saw the biggest pike I have ever seen, jump clear of the water not ten yards out, before slamming back in with a crash. Unusual behaviour for a pike, which are usually ambush predators. Perhaps there is an even bigger pike in there which has turned cannibal? I like to think so. Sorry fisher folk.
Place, road and field names can provide clues to how a place used to look and how the land was used. Names like Western Meres, the incredibly handsome Tudorbethan farm and its associated outbuildings on the outskirts of Maer. Others wet places named on the map include The Bogs, Lower Bogs, Maer Moss, the Wellings (source of a spring), Blackbrook, Butthouse Lane, Meece Brook, and Swinchurch Brook. Hatton Bogs, Marlpit Plantation, Swinchurch rough (marshy ground unusable for cultivation or pasture). From what I hear, the second ever British site for the very rare black marshland spider Gnaphosa nigerrima was recently found on Cranberry Bog.
About 12,000 years ago, following the Last Glacial Maximum which began 32,000 years ago, when the ice sheets reached their furthest extent south, temperatures increased and the ice began to melt. This resulted in the formation of a huge post glacial lake north of the area we are discussing. At its southern end, just across the county border in Cheshire, there was a massive terminal moraine which held back the waters for many years. The moraine was composed of rocks, rubble and the ‘rock flour’ ground out from massive sheets of rock, pulverised by the enormous weight of the mile high glacier and carried for hundreds of miles under the ice in its remorseless creep south. According to geologists, the moraine covered 80 square miles and was 71 miles in length. In fact, it was so massive that it has been classified as an area in its own right. In addition to the main lake, there was another large sheet of icy water in the north of our area. Its southern shore covered what is now Hill Chorlton. It is designated Lake Madeley and stretched north and east with its northern shores where Madeley Heath stands today – narrowly missing the site of where Keele University stands today. This was a time when the meers and mosses of this area were all formed. Some of them, called kettle holes, came about from the water released by slowly melting giant blocks of ice. If you walk over Hatton Bogs or The Wellings, you are walking through 12,000 years of more or less continuous landscape history. It is entirely possible that your footprints are contiguous with those of families of Mesolithic hunter groups who walked this way 8,000 to 10,000 years ago. How exciting is that? What would they have seen? What were their lives like? Unfortunately, we will never know.
However, what we do know is that this was a very watery and wet part of the world for thousands of years – right up until people the time people came and cut down the trees, fenced in the fields and laid drains to run the water away from what eventually became privately owned farm land. A relic of this wealth of water is that the main aquifer for the region still lies underneath Maer and tracks across the northern limits, reaching all the way down the valley of the Meece Brook, beyond Cranberry and Standon. Witness to this are the two, now redundant, Staffordshire Potteries Waterworks Company’s artesian well pumping engine houses built at Mill Meece and Lower Hatton in the 19th and early 20th century to exploit this essential resource.
In time, it became clear that the huge post glacial lake held within itself its own weakness, which eventually brought a major disaster to the area. This was the second most important phase of post glacial landscape creation following the retreat of the ice. Hydrostatic pressure built up behind the loosely compressed rocky rubble of the moraine to the point that one day it burst. Millions of tons of cold water crashed into the land to the north. It was so powerful that it gouged a number of gorges and channels. Geological records of similar meltwater events further north, in the Macclesfield area, reveal that this all happened in a matter of hours! The remains of the channels it cut, now filled with thousands of years of soil accumulation and vegetation, are still with us today. Three main meltwater channels in the area of Maer have been identified by geologists. As you would expect, all three flow approximately north to south. The first created the valley in which the Swinchurch Brook now flows. The other cut the valley which contains the Meece Brook. The third cut the flow channel which is now the Chatcull Brook.
I would love to go back to this landscape 10,000 years ago, to the Mesolithic. What would someone walking across the marshy ground have heard? What were the sounds of the Mesolithic – what have we lost? Among many other animals no longer seen or heard in this region today, we might have seen and heard Aurochs, the long extinct precursor of modern cattle. It is thought they browsed on the margins of lakes, moving between open grassland, woodland and reed beds. Aurochs’ habitat appears to have crossed over with that of Elk, which would also have been around then. Like the aurochs, the Elk would have come to the lakes to feed on aquatic vegetation and browse on the thickets of willow and aspen along the shore. Roe deer on the other hand, would have browsed on leaves and grasses in the woodlands. It’s worth noting that all these animals’ behaviour and probably the human families too, would have been affected by interactions with predators – wolves perhaps, and like other browsers and grazers, they would have avoided areas that impeded their mobility and visibility, focusing instead on places with clear lines of sight and unimpeded escape routes. These would be found on the contours just below the tops of the hills – going down to the spring line or lakes and brooks for water and to kill fish for food only when necessary.
If we could go back in time 10,000 years to the area around Chatcull or the line of the Swinchurch Brook, we might have heard something like this? Take away all the sounds you can hear now. Now add back the clanging, bell like warning calls of a group of cranes, the howl of a distant wolf pack, the deep hoo hooo calls of long eared owls and the rhythmic click of a group of people shaping stone tools from flint nodules. These they would probably have acquired from a trading group on the move, perhaps several months ago. They will still use stone tools and wooden hafted stone axes, maybe antler picks to dig up plants. Archaeologists believe they would have travelled between seasonal camps. Perhaps following animal migration routes or travelling along river valleys. It’s an enticing prospect and it is thought that a watery place like our subject landscape might have been seen as a liminal space, possibly a sacred area in which they could carry out rituals to call for good hunting and safe passage. They may have also carried out burial rites here, possibly leaving the bodies of the dead for excarnation or even placing them in the shallow water of the meres, together with votive offerings of specially made stone tools and wooden objects to aid their journey into the world of the afterlife and their ancestors. Although science is providing more and more factual information about how the people of the past 10,000 years lived, it is still mostly conjecture. How will we be perceived in 10,000 years’ time? We who have destroyed, polluted and disrupted the natural world in a way never seen before. Perhaps North West Staffordshire will be a barren desert by then? Perhaps it will become a water filled landscape once again? All we know is that, thanks to the relentless actions of plate tectonics, every landscape under our feet, the remains of everything we own, love and hold dear, will one day be subsumed and destroyed in a subduction zone, slowly becoming part of the magma flowing under the earth’s crust – slower even than the glaciers, the land is being pulled under by forces so titanic that we will never be able to change their course. That really is the meaning, the purpose and the endgame of terra. Life goes on, but change is constant. With that rather dark thought, I hope you enjoy this wonderful exhibition of Ian Pearsall’s paintings as much as I know I will.
Reg Crawford. Writer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/reg-crawford-758a161a1
