Place:High Legh, Cheshire, England

Watchers
NameHigh Legh
Alt namesHalliwell Browsource: hamlet in parish
Mowpen Browsource: hamlet in parish
Rawlinson's Greensource: hamlet in parish
Sworton Heathsource: hamlet in parish
Legesource: Domesday Book (1985) p 53
TypeTownship, Civil parish
Coordinates53.35°N 2.45°W
Located inCheshire, England
See alsoRostherne, Cheshire, Englandancient parish of which it was a township
Bucklow Hundred, Cheshire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Bucklow Rural, Cheshire, Englandrural district in which it was located 1895-1974
Macclesfield District, Cheshire, Englanddistrict municipality covering the area 1974-2009
Cheshire East, Cheshire, Englandunitary authority covering the area since 2009
the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

High Legh (#11 on map) is a village and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England.

It is located 6 miles (10 km) northwest of Knutsford, 7 miles (11 km) east of Warrington and 12 miles (19 km) south west of Manchester city centre. According to the 2001 UK census, the population of the entire civil parish was 69,410, increasing slightly to 69,420 at the 2011 UK census.

History

Unusually, this village was the seat of two ancient landed gentry families for generations, namely: Leigh of West Hall and Cornwall-Legh of East Hall. Both halls have now been demolished, but both families are still represented today, the head of the "West Hall" family being Sir Edward Leigh MP (b. 1950) who is no longer associated with or living within the parish, and that of the "East Hall" family headed by Richard, 6th Baron Grey of Codnor.

Image:Map Bucklow 1900 50 percent.png

A member of a cadet branch of the Leigh of West Hall family, Sir Egerton Leigh, was created a baronet in 1773, but this title is now dormant and other cadet branches were the Leigh-Traffords of nearby Oughtrington Hall as well as the Barons Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire and the Barons Newton of Lyme Park in Newton in Makerfield, Lancashire, England. The third lordship of the manor was held by the Egerton family of Tatton and all three landed families swapped and consolidated their estates throughout the 18th and 19th centuries until the Egerton Leighs sold their High Legh estate to the Cornwall-Leghs just before World War I. When Maurice, 4th and last Lord Egerton of Tatton, sold off the remaining farms and land in High Legh in the 1930s, a connection dating back to the 13th century ended.

West Hall was demolished in the 1950s and East Hall met the same fate in the early 1970s. The debris was used as foundations for the first Thelwall Viaduct bridge of the M6 motorway.

For more information, see the EN Wikipedia article High Legh.

GENUKI provides the following details:

"High Legh was a township in Rostherne ancient parish in Bucklow Hundred which became a civil parish in 1866. It includes the hamlets of Halliwell Brow, Mowpen Brow,Rawlinson's Green, Sworton Heath. Other hamlets located on the edges of the parish have been redirected to neighbouring parishes. The population was 787 in 1801, 1024 in 1851, 794 in 1901, and 1,184 in 1951.

Research Tips

Definitions

  • See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes (known as ancient parishes) were ecclesiastical, under the jurisdiction of the local priest and his bishop. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets that never became independent civil parishes, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
  • Rural districts were groups of geographically close civil parishes in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish. Inspecting the archives of a rural district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
  • Registration districts were responsible for civil registration or vital statistics and census records. The boundaries of these districts were revised from time to time depending on population density and local government organization. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belonged in the timeframe in question, see Registration Districts in Cheshire, part of the UK_BMD website.

Helpful Sources

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies are the local keepers of historical material for the county. But archives for places that were absorbed into Greater Manchester and Merseyside in 1974 may have been moved to the archive centres for the metropolitan county concerned.
  • FamilySearch Cheshire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
  • The GENUKI pages on Cheshire and its parishes point to many other sources of information on places within the county. The many small parishes and townships that existed before 1866 are treated individually as well as the larger towns and conurbations. The GENUKI pages for individual parishes now include a map of the parish and its surrounding area.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time also has summaries and lists of statistics for each parish, but its organization is not for the beginning family historian in a hurry.
  • The pay websites Ancestry and FindMyPast have a number of county-wide collections of censuses, Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials (some from the 1500s), and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. An international subscription is necessary to access Ancestry's UK holdings.
  • A book entitled The history of the county palatine and city of Chester with the subtitle "compiled from original evidences in public offices, the Harleian and Cottonian mss., parochial registers, private muniments, unpublished ms. collections of successive Cheshire antiquaries, and a personal survey of every township in the county, incorporated with a re-publication of King's Vale royal and Leycester's Cheshire antiquities" by George Ormerod and others was published in 1819. It has been quoted by WR users interested in families traced before 1600. It is available online as images of the original pages at the Open Library (Google Books) as Vol I, Vol II and Vol III.
  • Unfortunately, the Institute of Historical Research only includes two volumes of the Victoria County History for Cheshire on their website and these only cover the City of Chester. There may be other volumes to this series in print, but a Google Search does not indicate any further volumes online.

Maps

  • Cheshire Archives and Local Studies have organized a facility to compare tithe maps circa 1830 and 19th century Ordnance Survey maps with the modern Ordnance Survey. These are available for every civil parish. A knob in the centre of the screen allows the user to move back and forth between the old and the new view. Use the key on the left to show other possibilities including land ownership.
  • The diagrammatical map of Sanitary Districts in Cheshire showing Civil Parishes 1888 produced by the Ordnance Survey and provided by A Vision of Britain through Time is helpful. "Sanitary Districts" were the predecessors of rural districts and usually followed the same boundaries.
  • The Ordnance Survey map of Cheshire circa 1900 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time shows invidual settlements as well as parishes. There were significant administrative changes in the decade 1890-1900 that have led to some civil parishes absorbed into adjacent urban districts being omitted from this map.
  • A Vision of Britain through Time provides a series of maps from the Ordnance Survey illustrating the towns and villages of Cheshire and also the borders between parishes. The following group of maps provide views of the county at various dates, illustrating the changes in administrative structure.
  • For a close-up view of an area as it looked in the 19th century, try the National Library of Scotland provision. The maps include the Ordnance Survey (OS) 25-inch to the mile series for England and Wales for the period 1841-1952. Country estates and factory buildings on the edge of towns are labelled; roads, railways, rivers and canals are shown.
This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at High Legh. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.