Macclesfield

Nestling below the hills of the High Peak, Macclesfield was once an important silk manufacturing town. Charles Roe built the first silk mill here, beside the River Bollin, in 1743 and for more than a century and a half, Macclesfield was known as the silk town. It’s appropriate then that Macclesfield can boast the country’s only Silk Museum where visitors are given a lively introduction to all aspects of the silk industry, from cocoon to loom. The museum, which covers three sites, has an award-winning audio-visual presentation, there are fascinating exhibitions on the Silk Road across Asia, on silk cultivation, fashion and other uses of silk. A shop dedicated to silk offers a range of attractive and unusual gifts – scarves, ties, silk cards and woven pictures along with inexpensive gifts for children.

  Paradise Mill, built in the 1820s, is a working museum demonstrating silk weaving on 26 jacquard hand looms. Exhibitions and restored workshops and living rooms capture the working conditions and lives of mill workers in the 1930s. It is also possible to buy locally-made silk products here. The Silk Museum is housed in what used to be the Macclesfield Sunday School, erected in 1813. The school finally closed in 1970 and the Silk Museum now shares this rather grand building with the town’s Heritage Centre which has some interesting displays on Macclesfield’s rich and exciting past, (the town was occupied for five days by Scottish troops during the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, for example), and on the Sunday School itself.

In pre-Saxon times, Macclesfield was known as “Hameston” – the homestead on the rock, and on that rock is set the church founded by King Edward I and Queen Eleanor. From the modern town, a walk to the church involves climbing a gruelling flight of 108 steps. St Michael and All Angels was extended in the 1890s but its 14th century core remains, notably the Legh Chapel built in 1422 to receive the body of Piers Legh who had fought at Agincourt and died at the Siege of Meaux. Another chapel contains the famous Legh Pardon brass, which recalls the medieval practice of selling pardons for sins past, and even for those not yet committed. The inscription on the brass records that, in return for saying five Paternosters and five Aves, the Legh family received a pardon for 26,000 years and 26 days.

One of the Macclesfield area’s most famous sons is Charles Frederick Tunnicliffe, the celebrated bird and wild-life artist, who was born at the nearby village of Langley in 1901. He studied at the Macclesfield School of Art and first came to public attention with his illustrations for Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter in 1927. A collection of Tunnicliffe’s striking paintings can be seen at the West Park Museum on the northwest edge of the town. This purpose-built museum, founded in 1898 by the Brocklehurst family, also includes exhibits of ancient Egyptian artefacts, fine and decorative arts, and further exhibits relating to the silk industry.

Much less well-known than Tunnicliffe is William Buckley who was born in Macclesfield around 1780 and later became a soldier. He took part in a mutiny at Gibraltar against the Rock’s commanding officer, the Duke of York, father-to-be of Queen Victoria. The mutiny failed and Buckley was transported to Australia. There he escaped into the outback and became the leader of an aboriginal tribe who took this giant of a man, some 6 feet 6 inches tall, as the reincarnation of a dead chief. For 32 years Buckley never saw a white man or heard a word of English. When the explorer John Bateman, on his way to found what is now Melbourne, discovered him, Buckley had virtually forgotten his mother tongue. He was pardoned, given a pension and died at Hobart at the age of 76.