Part 4 – Dinting, Chisworth and Chunal
If Leofing, in 1066 lord of Padfield, Glossop and Whitfield, had come back 700 years later he would still have been able to find his way around. Although self-contained farms and hamlets, like The Heath and Blackshaw, had sprung up on former common, the old village centres were still there with recognisable names; the tracks linking them were yet to be replaced by turnpikes; and the outlines of the former open fields could still be traced. The townships, the boundaries of which can be seen on the 1857 Poor Law Map, were also probably close to the areas of the original villages with their fields and commons.
Whether, though, he would have recognised any of the families is less certain – Domesday suggests that the original Anglo-Saxon inhabitants had almost all been killed or driven out in the Harrying of the North, and after 1157 Basingwerk Abbey may have repopulated its new manor from elsewhere.
In 1766, though, great changes were imminent. Almost everyone was still involved in farming, but also in domestic textiles, and in 1784 the first mill arrived. In the next 200 years there would be more change than in the previous 1000, and the old villages would be surrounded by new houses.
Dinting, Chisworth and Chunal, up on the hillsides at respectively 600, 750 and 900 feet, were the least affected. Dinting (now Higher Dinting) – Dentinc in Domesday – appears to have a Celtic name, the din- or den- prefix being associated with Iron Age hillforts such as the one on Mouselow, so it may go back much further than the Anglo-Saxons. It spawned five satellite hamlets – Lower Dinting, Ashes, Hilltop, Mouselow, Shaw – and perhaps because of that, the original village never grew.
What we now think of as Chisworth runs along the road to Marple Bridge, but that was constructed only in 1804, followed by the mills in the valley below; the old village, Chiseuudre in Domesday, now Higher Chisworth, a third of a mile away up narrow lanes, has been little touched by progress since. Both Dinting and Chisworth – see maps, mid-19th century – probably sit on pretty much their original footprints, and when first founded would have been surrounded by a palisade to keep the livestock off the crops and the wolves off the livestock. In winter, cows and people lived under one roof, separated only by a low fence; the smell must have been awful, but the cows just had to put up with it.
Many of the buildings, too, are probably on original sites. Most now date from the late 17th to the early 19th century, the period of the Great Rebuilding, when rising income from the wool trade and domestic textiles funded replacement of the mediaeval wood-framed, wattle-and-daub, single-storey thatched houses with ones built in stone (and with separate living quarters for the cows). However, many were not entirely new, being just re-skins of earlier buildings with an upper storey added, the wood frames hidden beneath the plaster.
In neither Dinting nor Chisworth is there any evidence of open fields. At Chunal (Ceonal) there certainly is (see Part 2) although it’s astonishing that in the highest village in the area, and on north-facing slopes, they were ever able to grow cereal crops on any scale. The early Middle Ages, though, were warmer than now; when, at the end of the 13th century, it started to become colder and wetter, it’s likely that they walled their fields, went over to sheep, and bought their grain from elsewhere.
Dinting and Chisworth were always off the beaten track. Chunal, though, was on the main way north into Yorkshire, the houses and fields being laid out along it, and “passing trade” was no doubt a significant source of income even in the Anglo-Saxon era. Next time, we will look at two other villages with a similar linear plan.
NEXT – Part 5 Hadfield and Padfield
PREVIOUS – Part 3 All Is Waste