Alderley Edge rears high above the flat Cheshire countryside beyond Manchester鈥檚 southern suburbs. It鈥檚 a popular beauty spot, but there鈥檚 more to the Edge than its dramatic views. Look beneath the thin cloak of trees and you鈥檒l find layer upon layer of ancient desert dunes, which have been tilted and twisted and pushed upward to create a steep escarpment of reddish sandstone. With time, water laden with metals forced its way up through cracks in the ruptured rocks, leaving rippling veins of green malachite, bright blue azurite, sea-green chrysocolla and a whole assortment of minerals rich in copper, lead, zinc, iron and cobalt.
There鈥檚 more. Alderley is a place of both history and mystery. People sometimes hear music coming from below ground. Local legend tells of a wizard, guardian of a king and his knights who lie sleeping inside the Earth waiting for the call to fight the final battle. And then there鈥檚 a short-handled shovel. It may look like nothing more than a battered lump of old oak, yet it is central to a story as romantic as any local legend. Except for one thing: this story is true.
IT WAS the summer of 1953. Alan Garner, in his last few weeks at school, had been sent to the library to study Aeschylus鈥檚 Agamemnon. Soon he was absorbed in something more compelling: to a lad from Alderley Edge, the 鈥渏ottings鈥� of Dr J. D. Sainter were more gripping than ancient Greek. There, among the Victorian doctor鈥檚 notes published in 1878, were his observations of some archaeological finds in Garner鈥檚 backyard-the cliffs of the Edge.
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In 1874, workmen from the Alderley Edge Mining Company were clearing the ground for a new shaft. Miners had been extracting low-grade copper ore from the escarpment for much of the century, but the mines were about to give out. As they dug at the new spot, the workmen were surprised to find signs that someone had been there before them. Local expert William Boyd-Dawkins was summoned to check out the discoveries-and Sainter was there to record it in his jottings. 鈥淎s some of the miners were at work on the Edge they came upon a large collection of stone implements, consisting of celts or adzes, hammerheads or axes, mauls etc from one or two feet below the surface . . .; and others were left in some old diggings of the copper ore . . . along with an oak shovel that had been very roughly used.鈥�
Boyd-Dawkins decided the heavy stone hammers were probably Bronze Age, mainly because they were so crudely shaped. As the shovel was lying alongside the discarded hammers, he reasoned that it too must be Bronze Age. Garner flipped a few more pages, and there was the shovel again-this time neatly drawn from both sides. Now he was certain. He had definitely seen that shovel before.
Garner was fascinated. His family had lived in Alderley Edge for generations. Stone hammers were so common on the Edge that people used them as doorstops. But the shovel was one of a kind-and after Sainter had so carefully described it, it had vanished.
A few days later, Garner realised why it seemed so familiar. A decade earlier, confined in a dismal classroom with the other six-year-olds of Alderley Edge, he had seen the shovel every day, hanging on a nail on the wall. He rushed back to his old school. The nail was still there. The shovel had gone.
Fortunately, a search unearthed it under a pile of junk beneath the school stage. And as Garner was the only person who had ever shown any interest in the shovel, the headmistress told him to take it. For the next half century he hardly let it out of his sight. Every now and then, he took it to the experts, hoping they would confirm that it was the missing prehistoric shovel. The Manchester Museum showed no interest at all. The British Museum wasn鈥檛 too excited either: Tudor, perhaps? The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford was even less encouraging: probably a child鈥檚 spade, it said-and Victorian. Garner put the shovel away and got on with making his name as a writer.
Some 40 years later, and by now a well-known author, he tried again. This time the Manchester Museum, in the person of archaeologist John Prag, was more enthusiastic. The notion that Bronze Age people mined the Edge was highly controversial. The first record of any mining dates from the 1690s when men with iron picks hacked at the colourful veins. The evidence for prehistoric mining was flimsy. The stone 鈥渉ammers鈥� were impossible to date. Some archaeologists dismissed them as weights which 19th-century miners used to hold down the roofs of their makeshift huts. Maybe the long-lost shovel could provide the answer.
In 1993, Garner鈥檚 persistence finally paid off. Radiocarbon dating placed the shovel in the middle Bronze Age, around 1750 BC. This would make the Alderley mines the oldest metal mines in England. Some experts remained doubtful. The shovel was in such good shape, how could it possibly be 4000 years old? One sceptic suggested it was Victorian-but made from bog oak, ancient wood preserved by the chemistry of a Cheshire swamp.
Two years later, members of the Derbyshire Caving Club, which maintains some of the tunnels, discovered a hoard of 4th-century Roman coins. Timbers from the bottom of the same shaft dated from 75 AD-just a few years after the legions arrived in Britain. Here was proof that people had been mining on the Edge for a very long time. And if the Romans were mining this far north so soon after they arrived in England, they were unlikely to have discovered the site themselves. They probably commandeered diggings that were already being worked by the local people. If Iron Age Britons had been battering green minerals out of these rocks then the notion of Bronze Age mines seemed increasingly plausible.
In 1997, archaeologists from the Manchester Museum began looking for evidence. It didn鈥檛 take long to find the distinctive 鈥減eck鈥� marks made by stone tools. Sometimes they came across small hollowed-out 鈥渆yes鈥�, where someone had scraped out knobs of malachite. Things were beginning to fall into place.
People have lived on the Edge for around 8000 years. From the start they probably made pigments from the coloured flecks and stripes they found underfoot. Later they learned how to turn the green stones into bright copper. Bronze Age miners dug with picks made of antlers and stone tools. To break up the rock, they set fires-leaving traces of charcoal-then smashed the lumps into smaller pieces with stone hammers before smelting the ore to extract the metal.
Excavation of one likely Bronze Age mine uncovered charcoal that gave a radiocarbon date of 1900 BC, pushing the earliest date for mining at Alderley back still further. Once dismissed as a Victorian toy, Garner鈥檚 schoolroom relic turned out to be the vital clue that fixed the age of England鈥檚 earliest metal mines.