Cheshire Trivia Quiz

Answer: Salt

The area around Northwich was mined for salt from Roman times and although the mines are now closed, brine is still pumped from under the town. The salt industry caused large areas of subsidence, and this is said to account for the many old timber-framed houses in the town, which could withstand the movement of the ground.

Answer: Egerton

William Egerton started building the present Hall in 1790. It contains many beautiful rooms, including the Music and Drawing rooms which are in red and gold with huge chandeliers. The Hall is surrounded by an estate covering an area of almost five square miles.

The last of the family, Maurice Egerton, bequeathed Tatton to the National Trust so that it would continue to be maintained after his death in 1958.

Answer: Deva

The Romans built the fortress of Deva (in a loop of the River Dee) for the 20th Legion. They used it as a port to bring in supplies for their other forts in the North West, and also as a defence against the Celts in Wales.

Answer: Boat Lift

The Boat Lift at Anderton, near Northwich, was constructed in 1875 and was the first of its kind in the world. In the 1760's the Trustees of the River Weaver Navigation had objected when a canal was constructed between the River Trent in the Midlands and the River Mersey in Cheshire as their waterway depended on the pottery traffic to and from the Midlands.

It was therefore decided to link the two waterways and Anderton was the ideal place as at this point the river and canal were only 400 feet apart with a vertical distance of about 50 feet.

Originally the goods were transferred by chutes, dropping the goods from the canal boats to the river boats 50 feet below, while cranes lifted the goods in the other direction. The Boat Lift used a hydraulic system to lift and lower the actual barges and canal boats from one waterway to the other.

In 1983 it had to be closed because of the huge cost of repairing and maintaining it, but due to the demands from the increasingly popular leisure traffic, it was overhauled and re-opened in 2002.

Answer: Port Sunlight

It was built by Lord Leverhulme in the later 19th century for the employees of the Lever Brothers' soap factory (now part of Unilever). The name comes from their most popular brand of soap called 'Sunlight'. Each block of houses was designed by a different architect and today the village contains 900 Grade II listed buildings. Until the 1980's all residents were Unilever employees, but the houses are now sold privately.

Answer: Railways

In the early 1830s Crewe was a small hamlet but in 1837 it became the junction of three railway lines, the Manchester and Birmingham, the Great Junction and the Chester and Crewe. In 1840 the Grand Junction Company bought large areas of land around Crewe and moved its locomotive and carriage works to the town. An average of one locomotive a week was produced at Crewe for the next 150 years.

Answer: An Observatory

Jodrell Bank Observatory is part of the University of Manchester's Department of Physics and Astronomy and is home to the Lovell Radio Telescope. In the 1940's Bernard Lovell, a physicist at the University of Manchester, brought a radar system to the country area in the east of Cheshire in order to escape the radio interference in the centre of the city.

The 250-foot-wide radio telescope was begun in 1952 and completed in 1957. It is the world's second-largest fully steerable radio telescope

Answer: Macclesfield

Macclesfield thrived as a market town in the Middle Ages and button-making was an early cottage industry. In the 17th century this developed into silk-button making and then into actually making the silk itself. Over 120 silk mills were built in the 17th and 18th centuries and for 200 years silk was the major industry of Macclesfield.

The industry started to decline once the duties on the import of foreign silk were removed in 1860.

Answer: Delamere Forest

Delamere Forest, in the midst of the agricultural landscape of the Cheshire Plain, consists of over 950 hectares of mixed deciduous and evergreen woodland, open grasslands and wetlands. It is popular with walkers, cyclists, horse-riders and wildlife lovers.

Answer: Saxon

The two obelisks are thought to be Saxon crosses dating from the eighth or ninth centuries. The larger obelisk shows scenes from the Bible, the smaller shows the events leading up to the conversion of the pagan Paeda, son of the King of Mercia and his marriage to the Christian daughter of the King of Northumbria.