Raw Head Out And About

Take a stroll around Bickerton Hill and onto Raw Head this month, and imagine what life was like for local folk here in harsher times

- Paul Taylor

The clue’s in the name. Our walk this month begins in Coppermine Lane, a reminder of the industrial history of what now seems a very rural, unspoilt part of the world.

Through the 18th, and much of the 19th, centuries, men went to work in a string of mine shafts - the deepest of them reaching down 156 feet - running just north of what we now know as the A534.

Copper was first mined here, it is thought, in the Bronze Age, and then by the Romans. But the earliest documentary evidence of mining here dates back to 1697, in the form of a report prepared for landowner Sir Philip Egerton.

Anyone familiar with Alderley Edge will be right at home on Bickerton Hill, as the two share not just weather-smoothed sandstone outcrops, woodland and views over the Cheshire Plain, but also that long history of copper mining.

In Bickerton’s case, the action petered in the mid-19th century, the shafts were sealed long ago and, apart from the odd chimney, there is little to see today of this mining heritage.