The Wallaces of Little Wyrley Hall may strike a cord with readers. Image from ‘A portrait of Cannock Chase’.
You all know how much I adore Cannock Chase, and everything about it, from the wildlife and botany to the landscape and flora; so when the young David Evans sent me full scans of a guide to the place from 1957 last year, I was very pleased.
Sadly, it’s taken me a while to prepare it for the blog – at over 100 pages, it took some intensive work to split back into ordered pages and make a decent-looking PDF file with searchable text – but I spent quite a bit of yesterday working on it and I can now share it with you.
I trailed this a few weeks ago with the remarkable map the book contains, which had an excellent response.
‘A Portrait of Cannock Chase’ was published in 1957 by The Friends of Cannock Chase, and I don’t know why, but I have a feeling it may have had some peripheral connection to the Express & Star. Costing three shillings and sixpence, it’s a remarkable piece of work containing a huge amount of disparate stuff – from history to botany, from walking tips to mining information, all presented in a chatty, readable style.
The Wolseley Arms hasn’t changed much, either. Staggered out of here once or twice. Image from ‘A Portrait of Cannock Chase’.
The drawings are excellent, particularly the diorama from Spring Hill at Milford.
Thanks as ever to David for putting in a huge amount of work, and my apologies for not getting it on here sooner – having scanned a fair few books myself I know what a ball ache it is, and hopefully those offended by Adolf’s problems in Pendeford can console themselves with this remarkable English celebration off a pretty much unchanged place.
You can download the whole work as a PDF file below – it’s huge at 56 megabytes, so could take a while, but it’s totally worth it.
Cannock Chase Guide 1957 – PDF version 56 Megabytes
I include a gallery of the first 20 pages below to give you a taste – click on any one for a larger version.
If you have anything to add, please do: BrownhillsBob at Googlemail dot com or comment here. Cheers.
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Thank you Bob.
Ta B B
I’m not a great fan of the Chase itself but anything to do with South Staffordshire immediately takes my interest. Perhaps it comes from when I used to write my address as Walsall, South Staffs. I collect old photographs of South Staffs but I have a particular liking for line drawings of which these are particularly fine examples. They somehow seem to be able to capture things (and leave out things) that the camera can’t. Thank you very much for this posting.
I have had this book for many years,but each time i look at it seems I find something that I missed.