BETWEEN RIVERS is a quarterly series edited by Alan Horne. It is focused on the area bounded by the rivers Alyn, Dee and Gowy, on the border between England and Wales in Flintshire and Cheshire. You can read about the background to Between Rivers in the Introduction.
This edition shifts the focus to some new locations in the Between Rivers area. First we have two short contemporary poems by Helen Hill about the Deeside strip. Then, from the 1960s, we have the historian R. N. Dore writing on the English Civil War in the area between the rivers Dee and Gowy.
Poems by Helen Hill
Helen Hill is a member of Crossborder Poets. She has also had an involvement with Chester Poets, and the featured poems have previously been published under the Chester Poets’ imprint, Cestrian Press. In these poems she pays attention to the modern Deeside scene. The emphasis is less on the history of heavy industry, which can become rather mythologised, and more on the present-day experience of post-industrial regeneration. She picks up on elements which will be familiar to locals, though often unremarked.
The Bridge to Nowhere
Meditation on the Flintshire Bridge
Arching , silver as salmon
over the river,
standing tall, white as heron,
wings spanning the Dee.
From all points of the compass,
Flint heights to Quay hill,
from Shotton over to Ness,
this bridge surprises.
A huge fishbone picked clean,
I love its empty space,
its silent, windswept air,
its sense of place,
the freedom of a road
leading nowhere,
its elegance, its art,
jewel of Flintshire.
Author’s note: Built in 1998, this wonderful bridge was meant to relieve the traffic in Deeside, but few locals use it and call it jokingly the road to nowhere!
Deeside Strip
They travel together,
the rough strip of coast road
where neon lights shudder,
the soft silver river
where seabirds hover.
Through blue bridge, new bridge they ride
leading parallel lives, the road and the river,
in slow ebb and flow, the Deeside divide.
Excerpts from The Civil Wars in Cheshire by R. N. Dore
After the First World War a network of rural community councils was set up to help small towns and villages deal with the impact of the interwar depression. Cheshire Community Council was one such. The role expanded, and in the 1960s and 70s the Council published books and periodicals relating to the county, notably A History Of Cheshire in twelve volumes. These are short books written by well-established historians who aim to synthesise knowledge about historical Cheshire for the general reader. They vary a little in readability, but there are no duds. Production values were high, and the books have stood up well to the passage of time. Looking back from our present perspective this seems a heroic investment in public education, and it is pleasing to find that the Council has not been consigned to history, a supposed dinosaur, but lives on as Cheshire Community Action.
Possibly the most impressive volume of the series in terms of historiography is The Civil Wars in Cheshire by R. N. Dore. Robert Dore (1906-97) was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and wrote extensively about the northwest of England in the seventeenth century. Scholarship moves on, but what lasts is Dore’s ability to write history in a clear and pithy style. Here are two brief excerpts from the book. The first describes the battle of Rowton Moor on 24 September 1645. This was the only major battle fought in relation to the siege of Chester which persisted on and off from September 1644 to February 1646 and, while not the most significant battle of the war, it represented King Charles’ best opportunity to win control of the Dee ports, to which Royalist and possibly Catholic armies could have sailed in from Ireland. The modern village of Rowton is two miles south of Chester, and Miller’s Heath (modern day Milner’s Heath) is a little farther out. Dore’s map, and his helpful guide to the commanders on either side, is reproduced below.
Here is Dore’s account of the battle. Much hinged on the arrival of Colonel General Sydnam Poyntz with the parliamentary cavalry.
Next day the King arrived, riding himself with his lifeguards and Lord Gerard’s troop of horse over the Dee bridge into the city, while the main body – almost all cavalry – under Sir Marmaduke Langdale crossed the Dee at Holt and encamped on Miller’s Heath to the south-east. They hoped the next day to block the retreat of the parliamentarians to Tarvin and trap them in the suburbs they had just captured. This possibility had already occurred to [parliamentarians] Jones and Lothian who had sent off a messenger to hunt for Poyntz the night before. On the day after the King’s arrival they had no news of him but the royalists had. The messenger found him at Whitchurch but his prompt reply – that he was marching through the night to their assistance – fell into Langdale’s hands. So when at dawn on 24th September Poyntz too arrived on Miller’s Heath he found Langdale’s force barring the way. An attempt to break through it by a charge of his advance guard failed. Therefore, he drew back and the two sides stood to arms throughout the morning while their messengers sought aid in Chester. Despite the brilliant improvisation of Colonel Geoffrey Shakerley who paddled across the Dee in a tub, parliamentarian reinforcements were sooner in the field. They had a much shorter route through the East Gate and were in any case preparing to evacuate the suburbs on an early rumour – afterwards corrected – that Poyntz had been utterly routed. The royalists on the other hand were busy removing earth and dung from the East Gate preparatory to a joint attack with Langdale on the suburbs. They had a great deal of reorganization to do and a long journey via the North Gate and the unoccupied suburbs. Early in the afternoon Jones and Colonel John Booth led out about 1,000 horse and foot heralded by two cannon shot whch caused huge enthusiasm in Poyntz’ slightly apprehensive ranks. The two forces joined late in the afternoon and Langdale, who had drawn westwards a little to avoid being caught between them accepted battle. Both armies were largely composed of cavalry and the ground was open and suitable for their operations, but Colonel Booth’s musketeers were cunningly disposed in two detachments on the inside of their wings, where they could fire into the flanks of the royalist horse. This and Poyntz’ superiority in numbers gave him the advantage and after a stiff little combat Langdale’s men fell back in some confusion. Just at this moment Gerard, with about 1,000 men from the garrison and the royal guards, was rounding the eastern suburbs to come to their aid. Seeing them pass, the ever-resourceful Lothian, although he had some men posted on the mud walls and others watching the East Gate for a sally, scraped together a little force of Cheshire foot and Salop horse under Chidley Coote and sent them out. They fell on the backs of Gerard’s men just as the latter’s van became entangled with Langdale’s fliers, and soon the whole wide heathy expanse south-east of the city, known collectively as Rowton Moor, was covered with disorderly flights and confused resistance. In one instance the advancing cavalry of Jones and Poyntz drove a mixed body of Langdale’s fliers and Gerard’s reinforcements into Coote’s men and thrust them all up against the mud walls, where Lothian’s guards fired indiscriminately upon the human sandwich. As night fell the royalists fled in all directions: some doubled back and got away over Holt bridge into Wales; others were driven over the Gowy deeper into Cheshire; others again, though with great difficulty, struggled back into Chester through the North Gate.
Dore is not just a chronicler of battles. Much of the book is devoted to explaining the social and religious conflicts driving the war and how they had local effects. One aspect was the controversy about church government. Royalists generally supported traditional church government by bishops and could therefore be accused of covert Roman Catholicism. They faced Presbyterians who wanted a less hierarchical version with councils of church elders. But once the old traditions were challenged, a myriad of voices were liberated who felt that no intermediary was needed between man and God, and the Presbyterians faced their own rebels, an upsurge of sects and religious individuals who have tended to be known as the Independents, or Dissenters. As religious freedom without political freedom was merely tolerance, which could be (and sometimes was) arbitrarily withdrawn, some of the Independents made political demands which were unprecedented at the time. This was of heightened importance as Independents were numerous in the New Model Army and enjoyed Cromwell’s sympathy: the Putney Debates were an attempt to address the resulting conflicts within the Parliamentary side. One group which emerged at the time was that of the Quakers. In our final excerpt, Dore tells of the arrival of Quakers at Malpas – between Chester and Whitchurch – and elsewhere in Cheshire.
This was the period of the wanderings of George Fox throughout the length and breadth of England, preaching the doctrine of the individual soul’s immediate contact with its maker without the necessity of church or priest. Although early Quakers, in reaction from the religio-military enthusiasm of other Puritans, were pacifists and uninterested in economic or social change, they were by no means the peaceful and co-operative members of the community that they have later become. They sought out the professional parson to bring him into confusion and disrepute, and the best opportunity for this was when the ‘hireling’, as they called him, was conducting his empty ceremonial in his ‘steeple-house’. ‘Ministers… they despised and counted as Dung of the Earth; making it their ordinary practice to disturb them in their sermons’, said Edward Burghall who several times suffered their intrusions in Acton church. To Cromwell’s soldier-administrators and magistrates they were a great problem because although they never created a disturbance themselves, their conduct in church and market place almost always provoked one. When in 1652-3 they first appeared in Cheshire, John Lawson ‘beare a public testimony against the public ministry in the public place’ in Malpas and was soon thrust out. Thomas Yarwood ‘declaring the truth’ in his birthplace, Knutsford, had violent hands laid upon him and was afterwards pursued into a private house by a man with a weapon. Major-General Worsley was obviously unsure what his attitude ought to be: he wrote to Cromwell, ‘The Quakers abound much in these countryes to the great disturbance of the best people. I have done and shall what I can but crave your Highness further orders and instructions how to deal with them’. Colonel Daniell with his Cheshire regiment in garrison in Perth was more certain as to his duty. They were ‘a canker’, and he thought it very unwise of those in charge of the army to regard them as harmless. His bitter views were partly due to the conversion of his captain-lieutenant Davenport, who had been with him fourteen years as a most reliable soldier, but ‘now the man is growne so besotted with his notions one may as well speak to the walls as him’. When he returned from leave and his soldiers saluted him, ‘the men doeing their duty by holding of their hats, he bade them put them on, he expected noe such thing from them’. As Davenport showed no sign of resigning, Daniell began to fear proselytes, which was indeed the reason why many Quaker soldiers prolonged their stay in a profession totally opposed to all their principles.
©Alan Horne 2023
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By David Selzer