Mike Smith finds himself on home turf as he makes his way around the High Peak town of Chapel-en-le-Frith. Here, he discovers an unusual memorial and a curious woodcutter’s grave.
Chapel-en-le-Frith War Memorial following its restoration in 2011 Photo: Mike Smith All those who served
A committee, formed at a Parish Meeting held in Chapel-en-le-Frith in July 1917, met on several occasions to consider the most appropriate way for the town to honour the local men who had served in the Great War.
After agreeing that a war memorial should be erected in the Market Place, the committee members launched an appeal for donations to help pay for its construction: ‘The larger the number of subscribers, the more completely shall we show our gratitude to those who have risked, and alas, in too many cases lost, their lives for their country. It is therefore hoped that every family in the parish will contribute in order that the memorial may be parochial in the fullest sense.’
Thanks to the generous response of local people, it was possible for the committee to fulfil their wish to commission a memorial that would express the town’s gratitude in the ‘most complete way possible’.
The War Memorial that resulted is very unusual, because it lists all the names of the 598 local men who served in World War I, with the names of the 78 men who died in the conflict being marked with crosses.
In 2011, when the memorial was beginning to show signs of wear, the Parish Council embarked on a restoration project.
As well as funding the cleaning of the monument and paying for necessary repairs, the councillors commissioned the renovation of the four wrought-iron corner columns and the replacement of the original gas-powered ornamental globe-lights they had supported with replica electric lights.
They also decided to add to the memorial the names of the 38 local men who had been killed during active service in World War II. Unfortunately, there was insufficient room this time to include the names of everyone who had served.
One of the added names was that of Flight Lieutenant Bill Astell D.F.C. who was a member of 617 Squadron, which carried out the famous bombing raid on the Möhne and Edersee dams, in May 1943.
In response to a request made by Chapel resident Edmund Bradbury and the local branch of the British Legion, a Lancaster bomber was flown over the town on the 70th anniversary of the raid as a tribute to Astell, one of the 53 airmen who lost their lives in the riskiest mission the R.A.F. had ever undertaken.
An estimated 1,600 civilians died in the floods that resulted from the bursting of the dams. Under the terms of an amendment made to the Rules of War in 1977, the bombing of dams is now outlawed.
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A short walk from the War Memorial takes you to the graveyard of St Thomas Becket’s Parish Church, where you will come across a curious stone slab carved with the initials P.L. and an outline depiction of an axe.
In his history of the church, published in 1925, William Braylesford Bunting described this small, irregularly shaped slab as ‘probably the oldest inscribed stone in the churchyard’.
Many locals believe that the unusual stone marks the burial plot of a woodcutter who worked in the Royal Forest of the Peak – a vast area of the Peak District, bordered by the rivers Goyt, Etherow, Derwent and Wye, which was reserved as a hunting ground for the Norman kings.
However, there are no clearly dated ancient graves in the churchyard that would help to give some credence to this conjecture.
The oldest legible inscriptions that Bunting could find were on two headstones located a short distance from the eastern end of the chancel. These were marked respectively as ‘A.L.1631’ and ‘John Lingard 1634’.
Nevertheless, claims that the ‘Woodcutter’s Grave’ dates from the days of the Royal Forest might well surface again this year, because 2025 marks the 800th anniversary of the church and the settlement that developed alongside it – a Norman new town that came to be known as Chapel-en-le-Frith, meaning ‘Chapel in the Forest’.
Another mystery that is even more baffling is the complete absence of any marked graves in the churchyard containing the bodies of the men who perished in a terrible episode that took place in 1648.
According to parish records, 1,500 Scottish soldiers who had been taken prisoner by Cromwell’s forces after the Battle of Ribbleton Moor, near Preston, were locked in St Thomas Becket’s Church for two weeks before they were due to resume their forced march to Chester. When the doors of the building were opened, 44 men were found to be dead.
Some believe that the bodies of the captives who died in the church were buried locally in an unmarked mass grave. Curiously, no physical evidence has been found to support this claim.
When the decision was taken to erect a War Memorial in the Market Place, this part of the town already contained a horse trough constructed in 1897 to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, a set of stocks, an ancient Market Cross and a tall lamp standard.
To make way for the memorial, the lamp standard was removed, but all the other ancient structures were preserved. They remain as fascinating points of interest on the Heritage Trail, a town-centre walking route described on a leaflet available from the Town Hall.
Another highlight of the trail is picturesque Church Brow, a steep cobbled street, which is Chapel’s version of Shaftesbury’s Gold Hill, known for its role in a famous TV commercial for Hovis.
And when you seek respite after this healthy exercise, you will be able to choose from a large selection of welcoming restaurants, cafés, bars and pubs in the town and nearby hamlets.
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