July 19: Leek, Little Moreton Hall and Croxden Abbey

I had hoped to see more of this part of England, and today’s destinations provided wonderful examples of small village life, old preserved manor homes and ancient abbey ruins. What more could one ask?

We visited Leek on market day, so there were vendors selling produce and antiques and off price goods along the High Street. There was the tallest war memorial in Britain and several charming old churches, including one featuring a Saxon cross. The indoor market had some American flags on display, apparently in recognition of the recent July 4th holiday!

On our way to Little Moreton Hall we stopped at Bridgestone Burial Mounds — examples from ancient times of the custom of exhumation — leaving the body out in open air for nature to do it’s work, and then burying the bones and marking the spot with tall erect stones. No one quite knows why, but this is consistent with the burial mounds near Stonehenge too.

Little Moreton Hall is an original Tudor timber-framed moated manor house, dating from 1504! It was owned by the same family until it was donated to the National Trust in the 1980’s. The Moreton family’s fortunes came and went but they held onto the house and the grounds and did what they could over the years in upkeep. The floors are sagging and uneven in places and the open pit toilet ends in the moat, but it’s still standing and open for tours and tea in the garden. So hard to believe how very long this house has stood in that spot.

From there, we went to Croxden Abbey, a Cistercian monastery built in 1179, with additional buildings added between 1242-1268 when as many as 70 monks lived there. Henry VIII enforced suppression in 1538, ordered the dissolution of the monastery and had the roof removed to ensure no further worship took place. The abbey was left to ruin and the area around it became a farm.  What’s left of the buildings what must’ve been an enormous structure. Several tombs still litter the landscape where the original family patrons of the church were buried.

And that was the day as we traversed the Cheshire Plain.