In the early 1860s Hadfield had two literary visitors, R. B. Robinson and T. Barlow, both of whom saw the “Mouselow Stones” set in a wall. Although they must have spoken to the locals, they appear not to have heard of any connection with Mouselow, Robinson saying that “tradition says they came from Melandra” and Barlow, who then went up to the castle, describing them as “the Melandrian relics”. Nor do they appear to have been told of any connection with the Reverend George Marsden (see pic), who had died in 1858 at his house just a few yards away.
The first reference to such a connection therefore seems to have been by Robert Hamnett in 1901 (see last week’s post). We don’t, however, know where he got this information, given that there’s no earlier mention of it and – as Hamnett himself acknowledged – the local belief was that the stones came from Melandra.
So who was George Marsden? Hamnett just describes him as a retired Wesleyan minister, but he was a good deal more than that. He was “one of the leading ministers of his generation”, twice President of the Methodist Conference and head of the church in Canada, and after a lifetime of travel he retired to Hadfield in 1842 at the age of 70. Why Hadfield? Well, he lost his first wife in 1834, and in 1835 married Betsy, who was a member of the Thornley family of Chisworth and Hadfield, coal merchants and millowners. John Thornley II, probably Betsy’s brother, had built the first chapel in Hadfield, and maybe also the one in Chisworth which was opened by Marsden in 1833.
So they had family here, with resources. And the good Reverend was also not without. From a Derbyshire gentry family engaged in trade in Manchester, he was the only “gentleman” in Hadfield in the 1855 directory, had a manservant cum coachman, and a horse for riding, and in the 1850s paid tax on 14 windows.
And although his in-laws would have known a great deal about building, we can be pretty certain he didn’t – he’d spent his entire adult life as a travelling preacher and this was probably the first house he’d ever owned. Yet Hamnett would have us believe that at the age of 74 he was up on Mouselow grubbing around for stone to build it, and that, despite the hilltop having been thoroughly trashed by stone and treasure hunters, he unearthed a group of eight carved stones.
And then, although they might well have been Celtic, i.e pagan, and one was blatantly phallic, he stuck them up on a wall near his house, where everybody could see.
And not just a wall, but the wall of a pub. We know that for certain, as the visitor Mr Barlow said they were “built into the north-east gable of the Spinners’ Arms.” And Methodists, especially elderly and eminent ones, were not generally in favour of paganism, phallic symbols or pubs.
There was a link, however. In 1847 the Spinners was bought by John Thornley III, probably Betsy’s nephew. It seems most likely that the Thornleys organised the building of the house, and that wherever the stones came from, and however they got into the wall, it had far more to do with them than with George Marsden. If, though, somebody wanted to convince Lord Howard that the stones were very old and valuable, and not just the relatively-recent efforts of an amateur carver as the museum now suspects, the story that they had been dug up, with permission, on a very ancient site nearby, by a very eminent and respectable clergyman, was a very good one. Provided, that is, nobody looked at it very closely.
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