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Nantwich

Set beside the River Weaver, Nantwich is an attractive market town with some striking half-timbered Tudor buildings, winding medieval streets, specialty food shops and a number of high profile events including the Jazz and Blues Festival.

The most disastrous event in the long history of the town was the Great Fire of 1583 which consumed some 600 of its thatched and timber-framed buildings. The blaze raged for 20 days and the townspeople’s terror was compounded when some bears kept behind the Crown Hotel escaped. (Four bears from Nantwich are mentioned in Shakespeare’s comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor). Queen Elizabeth contributed the huge sum of £2000 and also donated quantities of timber from Delamere Forest to assist in the town’s rebuilding. A grateful citizen, Thomas Cleese, commemorated this royal largesse with a plaque on his new house at No. 41, High Street. The plaque is still in place and reads:

“God grant our ryal Queen in
England longe to raign
For she hath put her helping hand to
bild this towne again”.

The most striking of the buildings to survive the conflagration, probably because it was surrounded by a moat, is the lovely black and white house in Hospital Street known as Churche’s Mansion after the merchant Richard Churche who built it in 1577. Astonishingly, when the house was up for sale in 1930, no buyer showed any interest and the building was on the point of being transported brick by brick to America when a public-spirited local doctor stepped in and rescued it. The ground floor is now a restaurant, but the upper floor has been furnished in Elizabethan style and is open to the public during the summer.

The Great Fire also spared the stone-built 14th century church. This fine building, with an unusual octagonal tower, is sometimes called the Cathedral of South Cheshire and dates from the period of the town’s greatest prosperity as a salt town and trading centre. Of exceptional interest is the magnificent chancel and the wonderful carvings in the choir. On the misericords (tip-up seats) are mermaids, foxes (some dressed as monks in a sharp dig at priests), pigs, and the legendary Wyvern, half-dragon, half-bird, whose name is linked with the River Weaver, ‘wyvern’ being an old pronunciation of Weaver. An old tale about the building of the church tells of an elderly woman who brought ale and food each day from a local inn to the masons working on the site. The masons discovered that the woman was cheating them by keeping back some of the money they put “in the pot” for their refreshment. They dismissed her and took revenge by making a stone carving showing the old woman being carried away by Old Nick himself, her hand still stuck in a pot.

During the Civil War, Nantwich was the only town in Cheshire to support Cromwell’s Parliamentary army. After several weeks of fighting, the Royalist forces were finally defeated on 25th January, 1644 and the people of Nantwich celebrated by wearing sprigs of holly in their hair. As a result, the day became known as “Holly Holy Day” and every year, on the Saturday closest to January 25th, the town welcomes Cromwellian pikemen and battle scenes are re-enacted by members of the Sealed Knot. There are records of the Civil War in the Nantwich Museum, housed in the former Public Library in Pillory Street which also has exhibitions about Roman salt making, the town’s Great Fire and its dairy, cheese-making, shoemakning and clothing industries.

But it was salt that had once made Nantwich second only in importance to Chester in the county. The Romans had mined salt here for their garrisons at Chester and Stoke where the soldiers received part of their wages in “sal”, or salt. The payment was called a “salarium”, hence the modern word “salary”. Nantwich remained a salt producing town right up to the 1700s but then it was overtaken by towns like Northwich which enjoyed better communications on the canal system. But a brine spring still supplies Nantwich’s outdoor swimming pool.

Within a few miles of the town are two notable gardens. A major attraction, a mile south of the town off the A51, is Stapeley Water Gardens which attracts nearly 1.5 million visitors each year. The 64-acre site includes the National Collection of Nymphaea – more than 350 varieties of water lilies - a Tropical Oasis with exotic flowers and pools stocked with piranhas and huge catfish, and a comprehensively equipped garden centre. Other attractions within the attractively landscaped grounds include a restaurant, two cafes and a gift shop. Bridgemere Garden World, 6 miles south of Nantwich, has more than 20 display gardens with 5,000 varieties of plants of all kinds.