As I intimated in the post about Sheen's lost Staffordshire Knot, this summer's holiday was not exactly what Mrs Bygone Boozer and I had originally planned. We did, however, manage to squeeze in ten days away before returning to the chaos that is Manchester Airport. After waiting fifty minutes for our suitcase to make an appearance we set off for home, allowing Malcolm, our trusty satnav, to route us through the second lot of chaos which was the tourist traffic in the Peak District. Yes, I know we'd just returned from being tourists ourselves, but our presence would hardly have been noticeable in a region where the population density is 3.5 people per square kilometre.
Malcolm, or Selena as he now identifies (I've somehow managed to change the voice settings and haven't managed to work out how to get things back to how they were before Malcolm transitioned), thought it best that we took the A6 down to Bakewell and so we found ourselves passing through Newtown. At least I think it was Newtown. It could've been New Mills or Disley, but I'll stick with Newtown.
Passing through Newtown, New Mills or Disley I spotted this place.
Mr. Google had passed by only last summer and I have to say that it's looking even more distressed now. A couple of decades ago and things were certainly looking brighter, and whiter, for the Swan.
Digging stuff up about this pub hasn't been made easy by the fact that it sits right on the border between Cheshire and Derbyshire and, as the border has shifted back and forth, has found itself in variously one and then the other.
Probably dating from the late 1830s, as I can find no trace of it in the 1835 directories of either Cheshire or Derbyshire, the first landlord could well have been Jordan Bradbury. Shown to be there in 1841 in both the census...
...and Pigot's directory of that year,...
...where he was one of four Bradburys listed as victuallers living within a few miles of each other, he had been at the, still serving, Mason Arms in New Mills in 1829.
First landlord or not, Jordan remained in the Swan for over twenty years...
...until he died in 1867 when his son-in-law took over, supplementing the income from the pub with a bit of wick making.
By 1891 Joseph had moved to Lancashire and mine host at the Swan was Robert Henry Lomas...
...who may have decided that the inn ought to become a hotel.
He was still there two decades later...
..and remained in residence until his death in 1920.
Robert died in 1920, but when did the Swan die? It appears to have been just holding on to life when Mr. Google passed in July 2009, but was certainly dead two years later.
If the Swan's had its swansong I'm hoping that mine is still a while away yet. More blood tests to come on Friday and a meeting with the consultant the following week. As long as I can still pedal a bit and manage the one hundred and twenty paces to the Duke of York where Anthony will be pulling the pints of Aldwark, life can't be too bad.
The Ordnance Survey map extract is copyright and has been reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland under the terms of this CC BY licence.
David Lally's and Jeremy Hinks' images are copyright and are reused under this licence.
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