TRADES, TRANSPORT & TRADITIONS

 

 

Not too many villages can point to a heritage exhibit that is possibly 250 million years old.  But that is just what we have at the lower dam. It is labelled "dinosaur's footprint"... More accurately it should perhaps be called a "chirotherium" but let's not quibble over a few million years.

 

Lymm appears as "Limme" in the Domesday Book.

 

But  is really from the mid 18th century that Lymm as a settlement really "takes off" - There are some older buildings still standing, mainly farms or workers' cottages and of course the remains of the slitting mill in Slitten gorge.  However in the 1760s the extension of the Bridgewater Canal dig arrived in Lymm which was to change the village for ever. It is from this time on  - with the birth of the Transport and Industrial Revolutions that three heritage themes emerge. 

 

TRADES  - including Fustian cutting, goldbeating, salt-works, 

 

TRANSPORT - The Bridgewater Canal, the turnpike road that also created Lymm Dam, the railway, the Manchester Ship Canal, The motorway and Thelwall viaduct, The Trans-pennine trail 

 

TRADITIONS Rushbearing, May Queen (originally the Band of Hope Festival), Morris Dancing and in modern times thr  Duck Race, Dickensian and Lymm Ferstival . 

 

 

And of course there are the PEOPLE of Lymm; each with their own story some of which we hope to tell.  

The old families such as the Domvilles who at one time owned huge parts of the village;

 

The "nouveau-riche" gentry like the Dewhurst family who made their money from cotton and lived at Beechwood Hall and were major benefactors in the development of the village 

 

The traders, businesspeople and local personailities like Pel Ardern -  shopkeeper, photographer, tax collector, and local historian.

 

The families who passed thorugh the village working and living on their boats as they carried  goods to and from Manchester from as far as Shropshire. 

 

And the forgotten who toiled from as young as eight in the fustian cutting workshops and often died young half-crippled by the work.