Finding the extraordinary in the area you live

The view from Stormy Point at Alderley Edge

FIVE or six summers ago I was on the trail of wizards, goblin men and the forces of darkness in the North West of England.

It was my love of the fantasy writer Alan Garner which brought me to the author's old stomping ground of Alderley Edge, in Cheshire.

It's not just that this landscape inspired his works, it is at the very centre of them; so much so that you can actually walk you way through entire chapters of books like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen.

In an interview last year the author, now 88, stressed how pivotal places he'd first walked as a child were to his stories.

The heritage training I've recently been running through with Historic England has got me thinking all the more about Garner's relationship with place and how perhaps all of us could benefit from the way he's rooted himself in the tales and features of a particular area.

On one hand it is easy to think that the writer was inordinately lucky growing up where he did; The Edge is an imposing escarpment, honeycombed with ancient mines. Even the names of its local landmarks seem almost tailor made for genre fiction.

Scan the map that's included in the inside cover of Weirdstone and you can find Thieves' Hole, The Golden Stone and Stormy Point - all very real locations that can be discovered in a walk of half an hour or so.

But was Garner uniquely blessed or simply sharp enough to notice and make use of what was around him?

I starting thinking about all the areas in shouting distance of where I live that somehow, over time, I've allowed to become mundane,

Familiarity finesses out the fantastical and after a while we simply stop believing that extraordinary things could happen in our part of the world.

In reality history survives in place names and stories even when physical reminders may have disappeared. I might not have the views of the Peak District that The Edge enjoys, but no small number of curiosities surround my interwar suburb.

One of the Yorkswood griffins

The common where I used to take my daily exercise during lockdown was, as recently as the 19th century, the site of ancient tumuli. There was once a grand old estate, later an asylum, whose name lingers in nearby Stechford Hall Park.

Slightly further afield a Tudor manor turned pub between Tile Cross and Kingshurst was still referred to by classmates as Baldy's Mansion - perhaps a half-remembered reference to a previous owner or a callback to a relatively recent past, when the building had been empty and reputedly haunted.

A short distance away from there, on a council estate still in the shadow of local woods, there is a startling parade of stone griffins. The crumbling statues have, for decades, stood watch over a local pathway. While widely believed to have been relocated from a former city centre department store, there is also speculation that before that they had been a gift from Russia's ruling Tsars.

And it goes on: the supermarket car park built on the bones of a bona-fide elephant, the Iron Age fortification that gave Castle Bromwich its name, the Jacobean mansion - still standing - where one of our most famous Victorian Prime Ministers would visit...

That doesn't necessarily mean I would attempt to construct a tale of sorcery and intrigue in East Birmingham, although the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that - should I wish to - I could.

Even outside the realms of fiction, I think that there's a certain advantage to unearthing the stories that almost every parish and every suburb has some of - whether they're immediately obvious or not.

Progressives tend to be wary of "myth-making" because at national level it's a popular pastime of invariably dark forces; I'm reminded of the rather insidious vision of Britannia conjured by political con-men like Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Britain of Trafalgar and Agincourt and conspicuous pink covering the world map no doubt existed but it isn't perhaps a pleasing route to a positive future.

At local level however there is arguably something empowering for ordinary people to rediscover their identity at a time when centres appear increasingly similar (and increasingly shuttered), no-one knows their neighbours' names and so much power seems to be held by other people in more "important" places.

Indeed, the social value of heritage is often overlooked. Something else I've taken from my Historic England training is the importance that can be attached a sense of shared memory. 

Consider how some places have been market squares or high streets, places of worship or pubs for generation after generation. Sometimes, admittedly, there's no blue plaque or a fine old building which makes the point plain, but even when there's not there's no reason to think there's no history.

I give the example of Chelmsley Wood - one of the country's largest post-war developments and a classic case of an area where people have tended to feel overlooked and unlistened to.

Around a decade ago one group of residents embarked on a valiant attempt to assert their identity when they made it known that they would like a revamped shopping parade to be known as Chelmund's Cross.

Chelmund - or Ceolmund - is the Anglo Saxon landowner for whom the area is named. Precious little is known of him and certainly the idea that he was a one-eyed warrior owes far more to the imagination of a local artist than any concrete chronicle to survive from pre-Norman times.

Nonetheless his even hazy presence is a reminder that there was a community and sense of tradition stretching back centuries before the tower blocks went up in the 1960s.

Perhaps inevitably authorities were rather less than impressed with the Chelmund idea and there was a view that the best new name for the new centre was the old one - Craig Croft. Although as one of Chelmund's backers remarked rather pointedly, why was that anymore legitimate? Who, after all, was Craig when he was at home?

Something of a public outcry was sufficient to get Chelmund's Cross on a public ballot of options and after a ringing endorsement from locals it was chosen. The stone marker (pictured above) installed outside the row of shops was even decorated with some Dark Age-inspired interlacement.

Perhaps all of us then could gain from being more Garner about our surroundings. There are stories or hints of stories in every corner of the country if we choose to look. They speak of old battles, strange deeds, half-remembered myths and circuses who suddenly needed somewhere to bury their newly-deceased star attraction.

And as the people of Chelmsley Wood showed so brilliantly there's always the chance to make use of these assets. If not in epic tales of good versus evil then simple campaigns to find a more meaningful name for a local shopping area.

This summer I'll be doing some walking closer to home, perhaps newly appreciative of the fact that history is never just something that happens elsewhere.