Tattenhall & District Parish Council
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Tattenhall & District Parish Council |
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Village History 
The Romans built a network of roads radiating from Chester, but Tattenhall cannot claim to be of Roman origin. However, an excellently preserved Roman coin was discovered on the site being excavated for the foundations of the Park Primary School in 1970. When the Romans left Britain there remained a primitive Celtic society that focused upon the remaining infrastructure. It is likely that during this period, the origins of settlement in Tattenhall were laid and although the area was sparsely populated, it appears that the village was taxed far more highly than other villages in the surrounding area by Danish invaders who had originally landed along the Wirral coast before moving inland during the late 10th Century.
During the 15th and 16th Centuries
Tattenhall was a quiet self-sustained village, growing its own food and
weaving its own cloth. Social life was centred on the church,
which was the source of official information. The only holidays
celebrated were church festivals.
During this time, Tattenhall sustained its prosperity, developing its economy and infrastructure, thus achieving a degree of affluence and respectability. Agricultural holdings had become larger and the first commuters journeyed to Chester and beyond via the London & North Western Railway (LNWR) which had reached the parish by the middle of the century. The railway, like the canal before it, opened up new and more distant markets for the farming community and attracted light industries to the village and other parts of the parish. The railway line between Chester and Crewe was opened in 1840, and when the line to Whitchurch was opened in 1872, Tattenhall became a station of local importance with transport from the village sent to meet each train.
By the mid 19th century the improved transport facilities saw the development of a thriving industrial centre adjacent to the canal and railway at Newton. A slaughterhouse was established in 1857 and became known as the Tattenhall Road Boneworks. Bones, hooves and horns were delivered by rail and were processed into glues, gelatine, fats and bone meal fertiliser by a workforce of some eighty employees. In 1860 extensive works on the opposite side of the road from the boneworks saw the manufacture of bricks and field drainpipes, a practice that continued until 1975 when the site was sold. Such industries relied heavily on the canal and the railway for both the import of raw materials and for the export of finished products throughout North West England and North Wales. |
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By
the time of the Domesday Survey (1086) the settlement
of Tatenale was recorded. Some historians believe the name is of
Celtic origin being derived from the old Enlgish personal name 'Tata'
and 'halh' meaning 'a meadow'. For the next six hundred years, the
name of the settlement changed, having been variously called Tatenhala
(1280), Tattenhall (1289), Tatnall (1473), Tottenhall (1553) and
Tettenhall (1649). Elsewhere in the parish, the name of the
township of Golborne Bellow was derived from the Belewe family with the
surname of Thomas de Bellow or de Bella Aqua. The second
township's name, Newton, is derived from old English 'niwe' and 'tun'.
All these place names pre-date the Norman Conquest.
The
building of the Chester Canal (now the Shropshire Union Canal) during
the 1770s affected the lives of people in Tattenhall. The poverty
of many prior to this development was alleviated firstly, by providing
work in canal construction and then, secondly, by providing an improved
form of transport for cheese and other dairy products from South
Cheshire to all parts of the country. With the canal development,
Tattenhall was no longer an isolated settlement and as a result small
industries started to locate in the area. These developments were
to result in the doubling of the population by the middle of the 19th
century.
Tattenhall
became an attractive place in which to live and work, evidenced today by
the number of substantial Victorian buildings both in the village and on
the surrounding farmsteads.