Heaton is a small village and

civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government below districts and counties, or their combined form, the unitary authority ...

Staffordshire Staffordshire (; postal abbreviation Staffs.) is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. It borders Cheshire to the northwest, Derbyshire and Leicestershire to the east, Warwickshire to the southeast, the West Midlands Cou ...

, England. It is about north of

Leek The leek is a vegetable, a cultivar of ''Allium ampeloprasum'', the broadleaf wild leek ( syn. ''Allium porrum''). The edible part of the plant is a bundle of leaf sheaths that is sometimes erroneously called a stem or stalk. The genus ''Alli ...

and about south of

Macclesfield Macclesfield is a market town and civil parish in the unitary authority of Cheshire East in Cheshire, England. It is located on the River Bollin in the east of the county, on the edge of the Cheshire Plain, with Macclesfield Forest to its east ...

. The village of Heaton is situated near the centre of the civil parish. The

River Dane The River Dane is a tributary of the River Weaver that originates in the Peak District area of England. The name of the river (earlier ''Daven'') is probably from the Old Welsh ''dafn'', meaning a "drop or trickle", implying a slow-moving river. ...

is the northern boundary with

Cheshire Cheshire ( ) is a ceremonial and historic county in North West England, bordered by Wales to the west, Merseyside and Greater Manchester to the north, Derbyshire to the east, and Staffordshire and Shropshire to the south. Cheshire's county t ...

; the civil parishes of Rushton and Leekfrith are to the west and east. A hill named

Gun A gun is a ranged weapon designed to use a shooting tube (gun barrel) to launch projectiles. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns/cannons, spray guns for painting or pressure washing, pr ...

is at the eastern boundary, and in the north-east is Swythamley Hall. The ground is of

boulder clay Boulder clay is an unsorted agglomeration of clastic sediment that is unstratified and structureless and contains gravel of various sizes, shapes, and compositions distributed at random in a fine-grained matrix. The fine-grained matrix consists ...

, and the underlying rock is millstone grit. The soil is

loam Loam (in geology and soil science) is soil composed mostly of sand (particle size > ), silt (particle size > ), and a smaller amount of clay (particle size < ). By weight, its mineral composition is about 40–40–20% concentration of sand–sil ...

and clay. The land is used mostly as

pasture Pasture (from the Latin ''pastus'', past participle of ''pascere'', "to feed") is land used for grazing. Pasture lands in the narrow sense are enclosed tracts of farmland, grazed by domesticated livestock, such as horses, cattle, sheep, or swine ...

History

Medieval

The

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

name Heaton means a high settlement.

Ranulf de Blondeville, 6th Earl of Chester Ranulf de Blondeville, 6th Earl of Chester and 1st Earl of Lincoln (1170–26 October 1232), known in some references as the 4th Earl of Chester (in the second lineage of the title after the original family line was broken after the 2nd Earl), w ...

, who had established

Dieulacres Abbey Dieulacres Abbey was a Cistercian monastery established by Ranulf, Earl of Chester at Poulton in Cheshire. It moved to the present site at Abbey Green near Leek, Staffordshire in 1214, possibly in part as a result from raids at the former site ...

near Leek, granted Leek manor to the abbey in 1232 and this probably included Heaton. By 1291 there were

monastic grange Monastic granges were outlying landholdings held by monasteries independent of the manorial system. The first granges were owned by the Cistercians and other orders followed. Wealthy monastic houses had many granges, most of which were largely a ...

s in Heaton at Fairboroughs and Swythamley; the abbey also owned other land in Heaton. After the dissolution of the monasteries in the early 16th century, these estates were sold.Heaton
www.rushtonspncer.info, accessed 15 May 2015. A medieval route between Leek and Macclesfield passed through the eastern side of the Heaton area over Gun and crossed the River Dane at Danebridge. The bridge here was known in medieval times as ''Scliderford'' (slippery ford).Dane Bridge
Historical Gazetteer of England's Place-Names, accessed 14 May 2015.

Enclosures

South and east of the village was formerly

common land Common land is land owned by a person or collectively by a number of persons, over which other persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect Wood fuel, wood, or to cut turf for fuel. A person ...

. It was enclosed by

Enclosures Act The Inclosure Acts, which use an archaic spelling of the word now usually spelt "enclosure", cover enclosure of open field system, open fields and common land in England and Wales, creating legal property rights to land previously held in common. ...

s in the 17th century, and later in the 1820s when a new road was laid out which bypassed the village.

Chapelry

There is no church; since at least the 18th century the area has been served by St Lawrence's Church, Rushton Spencer. Until 1865 Heaton was part of the Rushton

chapelry A chapelry was a subdivision of an ecclesiastical parish in England and parts of Lowland Scotland up to the mid 19th century. Status It had a similar status to a township but was so named as it had a chapel of ease (chapel) which was the communi ...

, dependent on Leek parish church; in that year the chapelry became a parish.A P Baggs, M F Cleverdon, D A Johnston and N J Tringham, 'Leek: Heaton', in ''A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 7, Leek and the Moorlands'', ed. C R J Currie and M W Greenslade (London, 1996), pp. 186-191
British History Online, accessed 18 May 2015.White's Trade Directory 1834
www.rushtonspencer.info, accessed 18 May 2015.A P Baggs, M F Cleverdon, D A Johnston and N J Tringham, 'Leek: Rushton Spencer', in ''A History of the County of Stafford: Volume 7, Leek and the Moorlands'', ed. C R J Currie and M W Greenslade (London, 1996), pp. 223-229
British History Online, accessed 18 May 2015.

References

{{authority control Villages in Staffordshire Staffordshire Moorlands Civil parishes in Staffordshire

History

Medieval

Enclosures

Chapelry

See also

References