Through town and country

Two for the price of one in this month’s walk: the cosmopolitan town centre of Knutsford and the vast manicured landscape of Tatton Park

- Paul Taylor

The story goes that in 1017 King Canute crossed the River Lily, then stopped to shake the sand from his shoes.

A bridal party passed and the king congratulated the couple, wishing them as many children as there were grains of sand. Hence Knutsford’s name – Canute’s Ford – and the town’s May Day tradition of decorating the streets with coloured sand.

There is a lot worth lingering for in Knutsford, a town with a cosmopolitan retail and leisure offering, yet still recognisably the template for novelist Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford.

But first let’s head out of town, soon entering the vast loveliness of Tatton Park.

You will pass beside Tatton Mere, a genuine lake, and then Melchett Mere, the result of brine pumping in the 1920s, and named, mischievously, after Alfred Lord Melchett, of the chemical firm Brunner Mond – a prime consumer of Cheshire salt.

Across Melchett Mere, in the distance, you will see the ‘new’ hall – built 300 years ago, and extensively re-modelled a century later.