Tish Farrell Writer

Bears In Central Park: Who Knew?

Group of Bears by Paul Manship (1889-1966)

There was wall to wall sun when we visited New York in early June a few years ago. In fact it was so hot we spent most of our week there in Central Park trying not to melt. But the full-on sun certainly lit up these magnificent bronze bears. They are affectionately known as ‘The Three Bears’, and may be found at the Pat Hoffman Friedman Playground at Fifth Avenue and 79th Street. The work was gifted to the Park by Samuel N. Friedman in memory of his wife – a fine dedication all round.

You can find out more about Paul Manship (1885–1966) at this link.

Daily Post: Shine

Thinking Pink Over Wenlock Edge: Thursday’s Special

All right. All right. Call it art theft if you like. I’ve captured one of the Wenlock Edge Sky Painter’s quirkier pieces and am passing it off as my own. But then who could resist stealing that rose petal cloud? We all of us need one now and then. So please, be my guest. Cast off in the blue. Drift and dream. Who knows where it will take you.

Thursday’s Special This week Paula asks us to think pink. Please waft over there for more pink thoughts.

Derbyshire’s Arbor Low ~ They Call It The Stonehenge Of The North

Unlike Stonehenge a visit to Arbor Low does not include accompanying hosts of fellow enthusiasts, tacky gifts and bad coffee, nor the parting with large sums of money to go in (adult ticket £16.50). In consequence there are absolutely no facilities, no opening or closing times, and thus no need to pre-book to avoid the rush.

There is, however, an honesty box by the farm gate, and a requested fee of £1 per person. This is fine by me. The monument, though scheduled, is on private land. The farmer has to put up with the repeated nuisance of standing stones devotees, although on the September afternoon of our visit, takings suggested that scarcely a couple of dozen others had preceded us that day, and as we set off from the car there were only three people ahead of us on the track.

The only problem with Arbor Low is that once you’ve trekked through the farmyard and across the field to visit Derbyshire’s most important Neolithic henge (one’s head inevitably full of Stonehenge images, and lots of anticipation) it all looks decidedly flat when you get there, and so quite lacking in the upstanding drama of its more famous southern analogue. And while Arbor Low surely has considerable edge when it comes to setting (a thousand feet up on a limestone crest of the White Peak) one wonders why the comparison has been implied at all. Isn’t Arbor Low its own special place?

I suppose, then, that mentioning the two sites in the same breath is really more about emphasising their prehistoric importance than suggesting any correspondence in physical scale or appearance. Arbor Low is anyway a much smaller circle. But it does have its own unique features, apart from the recumbent stones that is. These include a very impressive encircling ditch and an outer rampart with the added extra of a later Bronze Age round barrow built across its southerly bank. You can see it on the right of the next photograph.

So now that I’ve raised the vision of Stonehenge with its great sarsen lintels, I want you to forget it, and think about digging. The time is some four and half thousand years ago. I am the foreman, and I am handing you an antler pick, and maybe a cattle bone shoulder-blade to use as a shovel. We have marked out a circle some 70 metres across, and now you have to start digging 3 metres down into the limestone bedrock, while shovelling up your spoil to create the outer bank.

After many, many, many man-, woman-, and child-hours you can step back and regard the massive earthwork thus created. The freshly dug limestone of the rampart will doubtless have an unearthly white-grey glow. It will be visible from miles around, despite a more wooded landscape than today. At sunrise and sunset it will look spectacular against the skyline, the bank much taller and with a sharper profile that the present remains. In other words, it cannot be mistaken for anything other than a highly prestigious, and momentous man-made structure – the visual shock equivalent of coming upon a designer high-rise in the middle of a wilderness. Or maybe Starship Enterprise.

After all the digging you are left with a central oval platform around 50 metres across. Perhaps the limestone slabs are already located there, set up on end, and bedded, after much hefting and shunting, in the rocky ground. They could have been worked during the making of the ditch, or sourced from somewhere nearby. In any event, they would have involved considerable effort given your limited toolkit of stone, wood and bone.

From outside the earthwork – and because of the height of the outer bank, you cannot see either the stone circle, or to observe anything that is going on within. Stepping through the entrance to view the newly built monument is thus perhaps a deliberately contrived catch-your-breath moment: the scene before you covert, unnerving, awe-inspiring, drama-filled. If some ceremony is in progress – a narrative declaimed or sung, the outer bank will amplify the sounds in mysterious ways – echoing, resonant, other-worldly; it may be a place of loud whispers.

There will perhaps be no grass cover, just an exposed limestone arena. Around the oval platform you will see some forty standing stones.

In the centre there is also some kind of sanctuary, a rectangular configuration of more standing stones. The barrow on the southern bank is not yet there. It will be another thousand years before this spot is used as a burial site – perhaps by strangers, perhaps by the distant descendants of you henge builders. These newcomers have also built another barrow, Gib Hill, just across the field from Arbor Low. Here they raised their own tomb atop the long barrow built by your forebears, a monument that possibly long preceded the stone circle. And so although you can no longer remember the rites and customs of these ancestors, you do know that, like the great mediaeval cathedrals of Europe with their roots in Roman and Saxon times, this place was considered ‘sacred space’ for a millennium and more…

And so back to reality and the flattened circle we see today. No one knows when the stones were laid low or why. There are other so-called recumbent stone circles in Britain. Sometimes some of the stones have also been buried. Superstitious dread could have much to do with it: an attempt to neutralise the stones’ power perhaps. There is also archaeological evidence in other contexts that suggests that the prehistoric occupants themselves have ritually ‘closed’ particular sites, perhaps prior to moving to a new centre of operations. There are other more practical reasons too: later farmers came along and simply re-used or moved the stones because they were ‘in the way’.

I also seem to remember from my student field-trip days to Avebury stone circle in Wiltshire that one of the stones had been buried in mediaeval times to cover up a murder. When the stone was being restored to its upright position, beneath it was found the grisly remains of a surgeon-barber, identifiable by the tools of his trade that were still with him. More fanciful interpretations of this find could of course suggest the presumed continuing practice in pagan sacrificial offerings, i.e. the kind of activity that we modern folk so very much like to associate with all ancient stones.

I suppose one of the most surprising things I discovered about Arbor Low is that there has been no archaeological exploration of this site since early Victorian times when the local antiquarian Thomas Bateman of Lomerdale Hall, and serial excavator of prehistoric barrows, tackled the place. It was he who discovered a human burial in the stone circle barrow and, during his Gib Hill excavation, uncovered a stone cist (a slab built tomb) in which the cremated human remains were placed along with an urn and offerings of meat and flint tools. And this, it seems, is all that is known.

So many mysteries then, and no likely answers. Instead I’ll leave you with the words of Thomas Bateman and his description of Arbor Low from his Vestiges of the Antiquities of Derbyshire 1848:

…the solitude of the place and the boundless view of uncultivated country are such as to carry the observer back through a multitude of centuries, and make him believe that he sees the same view and the same state of things as existed in the days of the architects of this once holy fane.

Be-eautiful Borlotti

Well I simply couldn’t miss taking part in Yvette’s inaugural Friday food challenge over at Powerhouse Blog. So here you have them, my favourite beans, caught at the allotment in a sunset glow. Not that they need external aids to enhance their beanificent beauty. Not for nothing do the Italians call them: Borlotto Lingua di Fuoco – Fire Tongue.

I love everything about them. I love growing them. I love the way their pods change colour through the summer – from green to deep claret. Then, as picking time draws near, the leaves turn yellow, and start to fall, revealing hanging rows of glowing pods.

But the best bit is shelling them. You never know what colour they will turn out – pea green, cream with pink speckles or claret with creamy streaks. Every bean is different.

I usually freeze them freshly podded, or you can dry them. Freezing means they are quick to cook, and you don’t need to do the overnight soaking necessary for dried beans. They are highly nutritious, mineral and fibre-rich, and can be used in soups, or to make baked beans. I use them mostly in re-fried bean dishes. This simply involves mashing up a batch of cooked beans with fried onion, garlic, and a few chopped tomatoes, then adding seasoning, chopped parsley or coriander, plus spices of choice (I use chilli and cumin), turning all into a shallow, heatproof dish, topping with cheese, and putting under the grill for 10 or 15 minutes. We eat this by itself with a salad, or as a side dish with just about anything savoury. A poached egg on top would also be good.

You can find out how to grow borlotti beans HERE. Then pop over to Yvette’s for more vegetable offerings:

Maintaining A Web Presence Despite The Big Windows 10 Update Ambush

The blogging schedule, and life as I knew it went haywire last week after Microsoft (welcome to the totalitarian state of cyberworld) inflicted on us the apparently much vaunted (though I actually didn’t know a thing about it until it happened) anniversary update of Windows 10, so sending thousands of worldwide users into a state of serial rebooting frenzy.

While it is true that my newish laptop made it through unscathed, my older PC, on which I do all my writing and blogging, was completely banjaxed web-wise. And not only could I no longer access the internet or my email for more than five minutes together, and then finally not at all, the update transformed my printer into a fax machine. Now that is clever. I do not own, nor have ever owned a fax machine. Needless to say, my virtual fax gadget would not print off Marilyn Armstrong’s corn bread recipe that I had downloaded from her blog. Rats and double rats.

I should have known that things were not going well for the PC when it took hours and hours and hours to complete the update. The temper was thus well frayed before I discovered what Microsoft had done to my settings. I mean, how dare they? HOW DARE THEY!

I was well into a second day of cursing and fretting and attempting all sorts of unnecessary and time-consuming procedures (defragmenting, dis-installing Google Chrome, rebooting, removing all weighty files from the PC to an external hard drive, re-setting the router, disconnecting from internet provider) when I finally went to the laptop and googled ‘Windows 10 update problems’. And low and behold, there revealed was the worldwide extent of the Microsoft mess-up.

In an article in Forbes Magazine lovely, lovely Gordon Kelly addressed the problem of those inflicted with rebooting-itis, and in so doing revealed that it was possible to go into computer SETTINGS and find the option to revert to pre-update settings.

Select and press enter.

Well, for goodness sake!

It sounded too simple for words. But, by Lucifer, it worked. Astonishing. One click, and my little corner of the internet universe was restored. The printer stopped masquerading as a fax machine and printed the corn bread recipe. The only problem is, will this work the next time Microsoft inflicts an unwanted all-system update on us? What settings might my machine revert to next time? Should I not risk it? Should I try to go back to Windows 7, which was perfectly adequate for my purposes? Is it even possible to do that now I’m infested with Windows 10, or will everything be screwed up?

Mr. Kelly says Microsoft really needs to unhook security updates from general operations, AND more importantly, give people an option. I should think so too. Mr. Kelly also informs us that Microsoft mean to instigate charges for the use of their wretched system with its overblown advertising and unnecessary apps and gizmos which take ages to clear out of one’s machine.

He says that to start with the $7 per month fee will only be charged to commercial users, but one can see where this is heading. Frankly, I would like a bit of compensation for two days of wasted time and utter fraughtness. Apart from which, what if I had been running a small business that was dependent on internet function; what if the laptop had been afflicted too, and I hadn’t found a solution that avoided calling in a computer expert and cost me money?

Mostly though I would like to be assured that Microsoft is NEVER, EVER going to do this again. No organisation should have this kind of power – to have total control of my machine on my desk in my own home, and without a by or leave. I mean, what have we let in here? A cyber version of Pandora’s Box?

And now I’ve wound myself up again, I’ll go back to where I started with a soothing image of an untainted kind of a web, as seen yesterday in the corner of the kitchen door. This version even comes with its own rainbow and strangely displaced hydrangea reflections from across the garden. Looking at it now, the Luddite lifestyle option suddenly seems appealing – out with the hi-tech machines, back to the solitary writer’s garret and a quill pen? Hm. Maybe not. But perhaps I’ll log off and go and make Marilyn’s corn bread. Far more wholesome.

JANE EYRE WAS HERE? Or was she?

I struck straight into the heath; I held on to a hollow I saw deeply furrowing the brown moorside; I waded knee-deep in its dark growth; I turned with its turnings, and finding a moss-blackened granite crag in a hidden angle, I sat down under it. High banks of moor were about me; the crag protected my head: the sky was over that.

Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847

Most people, who know anything about the Brontë family, will know that they lived in a gloomy vicarage in Hawarth, West Yorkshire, on the edge of the rugged Pennine uplands. Most of us, too, will have seen the windswept ‘Cathy come home’ film clip renditions of scenes from Emily Brontë’s dark romance Wuthering Heights. And so, if we think of it all, we probably imagine that Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is set in her home county too.

And we’d probably be wrong. Circumstances and too many clues suggest that it was Hathersage and its environs in Derbyshire’s Dark Peak that informed the landscape of Charlotte Brontë’s imagination as she wrote Jane Eyre.

If you read my last post on the Seven Stones Bronze Age circle on Hordron Edge you will have seen the above vista – Stanage Edge above Moscar Moor. The path to this part of the moor begins at Cutthroat Bridge on the Glossop – Sheffield road just south-west of the old boundary stone at Moscar Cross. From here the hills fall away to the Derwent Valley and the vast Ladybower Reservoir built in the 1930s. You can just see a glimpse of the reservoir in the next photo taken from Hordron Edge. It would have been a steep river valley in Brontë’s time. At the reservoir the road divides – west for Glossop and Manchester, and south for Bamford and Hathersage.

This next quotation is one of the possible ‘real location’ clues. It describes Whitcross, the place that many now identify as Moscar Cross. This isolated spot is where Jane Eyre is dropped by the coachman because she hasn’t enough money to pay for the onward journey. So begins her desperate wandering and lonely night out on the moors. She has just run away from Thornfield Hall and her thwarted marriage plans. Husband to be, Edward Rochester, has been exposed. He is already married to a lunatic wife whom he keeps locked in the attic. Jane’s sense of shock, loss and emotional distress are heightened as she loses herself physically, choosing to walk away from all identifiable landmarks and into the wild unknown:

Whitcross is no town, nor even a hamlet; it is but a stone pillar set up where four roads meet: whitewashed, I suppose, to be more obvious at a distance and in darkness. Four arms spring from its summit: the nearest town to which these point is, according to the inscription, distant ten miles; the farthest, above twenty. From the well-known names of these towns I learn in what county I have lighted; a north-midland shire, dusk with moorland, ridged with mountain: this I see. There are great moors behind and on each hand of me; there are waves of mountains far beyond that deep valley at my feet.

And why, you might ask, are people so keen to think that Whitcross is Moscar Cross? Does it even matter?

Of course it doesn’t. That a writer was drawing on what they knew of actual places when creating their fictional settings doesn’t necessarily add to our enjoyment of the story. On the other hand, to know that they had a definite somewhere in their mind’s eye may offer a few insights into the nature of the creative process.

I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of PLACE in fiction, and that SETTING is more than just a location. In the best stories the evocation of place can be as crucial as the conjuring of believable characters to occupy it.

Writers need to do their world-building homework very carefully – the outcome of which is likely to be more successful if they are summoning places and situations that have already stirred their creative impulses. When they come to write, they are already firing on all senses: can walk in their character’s shoes; feel through their skin; see through their eyes. And if the narrative warrants something more complex, there can be, by way of dramatic or comic irony, further interplay between what the reader may ‘know’ of the place and what the protagonists are seen to experience.

Of course all creative people make up things, but they also start their imagining from what they know: from people, places, things that have struck or affected them.

But to return to the Hathersage connections and Jane Eyre and the real reason why I’m indulging in this piece of literary tourism. For those of you who have read my recent posts you’ll know that the small Peak District town of Hathersage has personal family connections. My ancestors farmed on its outskirts from at least the late 1600s to 1892 (see Stepping Stones Through Time and Ancestor Sleuthing in Derbyshire ).

My great great Fox uncles and aunts of Callow Farm were exact contemporaries of Charlotte Brontë, and some of them would have been around in 1845 when the writer spent three weeks in Hathersage, staying with her very close friend from school days, Ellen Nussey.

Ellen was the vicar’s sister, and he, Henry Nussey had just got married and was away visiting his mother with his new bride. At some stage Charlotte had apparently refused a marriage proposal from Henry (he who apparently liked to draw up lists of attributes for any potential wife) and so his absence was perhaps taken advantage of by Ellen. In any event, the two women spent this time going out and about and visiting local notables.

And while I don’t for a moment think that these outings included afternoon tea at Callow, I am quite enjoying the notion of them sharing the ‘same air’. In fact Callow may well have been a sad place in the summer of 1845. In March of that year, my 3 x Great Grandmother, Mary Ann Fox nee Williamson, had died of ‘general dropsy’ at the age of 57. She is a bit of mystery, possibly ‘a London lady’ who in circumstances unknown became engaged to local bruiser and fist-fighter, Robert Fox of Callow. They were wed by marriage bond in Southwell Minster in 1812. She was anyway survived by four daughters and three sons, and although some of the girls look to have been employed in households outside the area around this time, I’m thinking there may have been Fox family members at Hathersage church on those Sundays in July when Charlotte and Ellen doubtless attended.

One of the places the two women definitely did visit on several occasions was North Lees Hall, below Stanage Edge, near Hathersage. It was lived in at the time by members of the very populous Eyre dynasty whose antecedents had built it in the 1500s.

Photo credit: BBC

The Eyres had occupied many such houses in the area over the previous several hundred years. In fact my Fox family legend (totally unsubstantiated) has it that the first ancestral Derbyshire Fox was the steward of the vanquishing Eyre who came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066, and that this relationship continued down the ages – from which you may also surmise that some of my ancestors told rather good, if dodgy tales. In fact they were still telling this one when Great Great Grandfather George sold up at Callow in 1892. I know, because it was picked up at the time and featured by several local and regional newspapers.

Nor was Charlotte apparently averse to recycling tales. North Lees came with its own legend that told of one Agnes Ashurst, a mad woman who was confined to a room on the second floor. This room had padded walls to stop her injuring herself, but like Rochester’s wife, Bertha, she also died in a fire.

Definitely it was too good a yarn not to re-use and develop then. It also well illustrates another aspect of the on-going writerly process – the jackdaw syndrome of gathering in every shiny fragment and titillating curiosity just in case such treasured little nuggets may one day serve some plot.

Anyway, I will finish this present ramble with the Jane Eyre description of Thornfield Hall. Take a look again at the photo of North Lees. What do you think – a convincing source for Rochester’s domain of dark secrets and the scene of Bertha Rochester’s shocking demise?

I stepped over the threshold. It was a fine autumn morning; the early sun shone serenely on embrowned groves and still green fields; advancing on to the lawn, I looked up and surveyed the front of the mansion. It was three storeys high, of proportions not vast, though considerable: a gentleman’s manor-house, not a nobleman’s seat: battlements round the top gave it a picturesque look.

Thursday’s Special: Double Trouble?

I was in the formal garden of Erddig stately home, thinking of photographing the avenue of shapely yews when these two young men walked into the frame. They lingered, clearly wanting to be photographed in their costumes as 1900s serving lads. Then the kitchen maids arrived to send them back to their duties, and they were gone. On the other hand I could have captured a time slip: a pair of fleeting Edwardian ghosts?

Now here’s the yew avenue I was aiming to snap.

Thursday’s Special: Double

#ThursdaysSpecial

Changing Seasons: September And The Rook Ballet

No one quite knows why they do it. Or they didn’t the last time I pursued the matter. But as summer ends so the rooks begin their twilight dancing. There is a large rookery in the wood behind the house. Many scores of birds. Jackdaws live there too. Now each evening, as the sun slips behind Wenlock Edge we watch the rook and jackdaw ballet. Flock after flock flies in, flies out, sweeps up, round, back, spirals, dives in sequences so swift and coordinated that there must surely be some corvid dance-master somewhere orchestrating the moves. The show may last for many minutes, subside into the treetops, then burst out and start all over again. Finally, as the light goes, every bird finds its perch, and the wood subsides into companionable darkness and gentle rook chatter.

To join in this challenge please visit Changing Seasons Monthly Challenge over at Cardinal Guzman’s

TheChangingSeasons_6367

Clandestine Capture & Ancestor Sleuthing In Derbyshire: Thursday’s Special

This was where I was last Thursday morning – not posting on Thursday’s Special, but trying to find a good spot on a field path outside Hathersage so I could photograph Callow Farm. This was the place where four generations of my Fox family ancestors were tenant farmers from around 1700 to 1892. Before that, during the late 1600s, they rented another Duke of Devonshire farm, The Oaks, up on the wilder heights of Offerton Moor, not far from Callow.

As you can see, the house (centre) is covertly situated, in the lee of the hill beside the wood. I had to use a lot of zoom, hence the hazy look, though such haziness is perhaps fitting for this piece of ancestral snooping. The more readily visible buildings on the right are the farm’s barns, now an upscale holiday let.

If you go to the previous post Stepping Stones Through Time you’ll find more of the story behind this photo. This was the reason why I had hoped to cross the stepping stones, to achieve a closer view than this one. Ah well. Maybe next time.

There’s still time to take part in last week’s Thursday’s Special. Paula says ‘Pick a word in September’. Choose from: populated, time-sensitive, companionable, burgeoning, clandestine, but first go and see her gallery of photos and be inspired.

#thursdaysspecial

Stepping Stones Through Time

This photo may serve better as an idea than an actuality. It’s the layers that attract me – not only of light and shadow, surface reflections and leafy river bed, but also of present and past: the stones that,for two and more centuries, my maternal ancestors used to cross the River Derwent.

Or at least so goes the family tale, the one my great grandmother, Mary Ann Fox, passed on to my grandmother, Lilian Hickling, who passed it on to her daughter, my aunt, Miriam Wilkinson, who passed it on to me. The photo, then, could be taken as a physical rendition of Chinese Whispers. Well, aren’t all family histories like this, word of mouth down the generations? There are bound to be omissions, distortions, total fabrications even.

But there are some certainties too.

Great grandmother Mary Ann was a Derbyshire lass, born and raised at Callow Farm, the child of tenant farmer George Brayley Fox and lead miner’s daugher Mary Ann Bennett. The land all around belonged, as it does still, to the Dukes of Devonshire. The stone-built farmhouse was (is) tucked high into the hillside below Highlow Hall and Offerton Moor. From Callow’s garden wall, the fields fall steeply down to the River Derwent. The stepping stones crossing was the quickest route from the farm into the Peak District village of Hathersage across the river, and the path there, across Callow’s meadows, still survives on OS maps. And so we have a scene, relayed to me by aunt via grandmother, of a young wife and mother living in the close and gloomy streets of industrial Farnworth. There she conjures her girlhood life, telling her four town-born children how, if she needed to buy the slightest thing she would have to traipse across many a field before reaching the stepping stones to Hathersage.

Other scraps have reached me. There is one that now lurks in my memory like a small haunting. For it seems my grandmother often told my aunt that Mary Ann was ‘a sad woman’. Nor is this surprising. She was widowed twice: at 30 and at 41. After the first loss, and with four young children to raise, she took up inn keeping beside the Manchester Ship Canal at Hollinfare. Grandmother said that as Mary Ann moved about the inn, she recalls the waft of her black silk dress always carried the scent of lily of the valley; a touching image until you learn the scent was dabbed on to cover the smell of gin.

But before the sorrow, I have a sense that, as a young woman, Mary Ann was headstrong and passionate. Though it may well be that those very characteristics were precisely the source of some poor decision-making. In 1886, aged twenty two she went against family wishes and married Thomas Shorrocks, a spindle and flyer manufacturer, who worked with two brothers and a widowed mother in the family firm in Farnworth, Bolton, part of Greater Manchester. His first wife, Mary Ann Wright, had died around the time their first child was born, leaving Thomas with a young son. How Mary Ann Fox in Derbyshire met Thomas Shorrocks of Farnworth, Lancashire is still a mystery. Grandmother’s only surviving comment on the matter was that her mother fell for the first man she saw wearing a stove-pipe hat, that she was a country girl swept off her feet by a townie. Grandmother also said she scarcely knew her father. He had no time for children and kept away from home until they were asleep, staying on at the works or at his club. And then too, he died very young. Around 1891-2 the family firm of Robert Shorrocks & Co was in grave financial difficulties. The machinations to keep the business afloat involved a high profile court case, but then all was lost anyway. By 1893 Thomas Shorrocks was dead. He was only 39.

But how did Mary Ann adapt to life in industrial Farnworth?

Her first married home, 8 Kildare Street, Farnworth, was not far from the Shorrocks works on Bridgewater Street. It was a modest terraced villa with a small front garden and a back yard – a far cry from the sweeping high-moors vistas around Callow. And if she did not see much of Thomas during daylight hours, was she abandoned to her own devices? We know from the 1891 census that she did at least have the company of Lucy Stubbs, a young Derbyshire girl from Grindleford Bridge employed as a domestic servant. There were also other Shorrocks households along Kildare Street, including mother-in-law at number 23. Mary Ann also formed a close friendship with her husband’s younger sister Mary, though it was in every way subversive. Mary was being wooed by one John Hamer (later to become an wealthy mill owner), but Thomas and the Shorrocks family in general disapproved of him. It was Mary Ann who allowed the couple to meet in secret at Kildare Street, a kindness that was long remembered; for in the end John Hamer did marry Mary Shorrocks, and after Mary Ann died it seems they did much to support her children.

It also seems Mary Ann did not fall over herself to fit in with Farnworth mores either. There’s a clue in another of Grandmother’s snippets. She told my aunt that the traditionally dark clad women of Bolton and Farnworth looked askance when Mary Ann went abroad in her bright print country frocks. Did she ever back down, I wonder. Or did she flaunt? In my mind’s eye I see the flash of free-spirited obstinacy that brought her to that place. Much like the light flickering through the riverbank trees and onto the Derwent stepping stones.

The collapse of Shorrocks’ fortunes coincided in 1892 with Mary Ann’s father’s decision to leave Callow Farm where his family had been tenant farmers for four generations. Derbyshire farmers were having a hard time in the early 1890s: prices for crops were low, and rents were high, and landowners unwilling to compromise on the rents. It seems likely that some of the proceeds of the farm sale of stock, crops, horses and household belongings were used to secure the licence for the inn in Hollinfare, Cheshire, where Mary Ann began a new life as innkeeper.

My aunt said the Fox family had decided that taking the inn was the best means of securing a home and living for her with three young children and an adolescent stepson. It stood on the south bank of the great Manchester Ship Canal, which linked the vast industrial heartland of northwest England with the port of Liverpool. It had only recently opened in 1895 when she took over the inn. In every way the Foxes must have thought it a shrewd decision, anticipating plenty of passing trade.

Mostly what it brought, and pretty rapidly too in January 1895, was another marriage to another widower – one Charles Rowles, a ship’s pilot on the canal and a former sea captain. My grandmother disliked him, although she adored her young stepbrother, Giles, born in 1896. She said it was only once her mother had married him, that Charles Rowles produced two teenage daughters from his first marriage. These young women apparently moved into the inn and tried to rule the roost which, I know for sure, would not have gone down well with my grandmother. If any roosts were to be ruled, she would be doing it.

When I tried to discover more about these interloping young women, I found a hint of scandal. It very much looks as if Mary Ann’s younger brother, George Fox, then aged 26, eloped with one of his sister’s new stepdaughters. Hannah Louisa Rowles was probably only 15 when she married George, although she claimed to be 18 on the marriage licence. At the time, November 1895, there were both living on York Street, Manchester. The following August their daughter Dorothy was baptised although she does not survive. In 1901 the census indicates that George was running ‘on his own account’ a large public house on Oldham Street, Manchester. By 1908 he had died, and in the 1911 census his young widow is listed as a servant, working in another Manchester pub. What happened to her remains to be discovered.

As for Mary Ann, in 1905 after ten years of marriage, Charles Rowles died. She survived him only by another four years, dying in the Manchester household of her stepson, Robert Shorrocks. She was 46. Her youngest child Giles was about 12 years old at the time. The 1911 has him living with a widowed Rowles aunt in Cardiff and employed as an apprentice shipping agent. He was to die at Gallipoli in 1915. Nineteen years old and buried at sea somewhere off Lemnos.

Now as I look at the stepping stones photograph, these are the thoughts that run through my mind. It is all too easy to look back to Mary Ann’s growing up at Callow Farm and see a rosy past. It’s how we tend to view things: the glamour of an imagined rural idyll – the stepping stones back to happier days. I had hoped to cross here too. I badly wanted a closer view of the farmhouse. But on the day of my visit there had been heavy rain, making the Derwent far too active to attempt to cross without rubber boots and a stout stick for support. A quest then, for another time? Perhaps.

Mary Ann Fox (1863-1909) sometime before her marriage, and before her father sold her pony. He had threatened to do this if she persisted in jumping the farm gate on horseback. She did not listen. You can tell that she would not just by looking at her.