Manchester is said to have been founded by the arrival of the Roman legions in AD 79 but it is quite likely that there was a settlement already established at the junction of the two rivers in Manchester, the Irwell and the Irk where the Cathedral now stands by a tribe known as the Brigante,Celtic invaders from mainland Europe.
It’s probable that the name of the place was a forerunner of the later Welsh name Maen Ceinion, meaning something like Beautiful Rock, the Romans would record dozens of different spellings for their own name of the fortress they built on the Medlock/Irwell – the most common ones being Mamucio and Mamucium.
But that is for the future-We left the last installment of the story but for the second part we turn to Mellor on the edge of the Greater Manchester conurbation and one hot summer’s day in 1995
The Old Vicarage next to the church in the village sits on the middle of three ridges.One day during the hot summer of 1995, the ground in the field behind the house of which parts date back to the fiveteenth century had dried out and Anne Hearle and her husband John, hitherto whose interest in local history had been confined to the mills of the early industrial revolution who had flooded to the area to make use of the fast flowing waters of the Goyt and the Ethrow noticed a broad green outline.
She thought initially it could be the outline of a middle aged dwelling but over the next fourteen years it turned out that the vicarage and the church were standing on 10,000 years of history going back to the hunter gatherers of the Mesolithic era, through the bronze and Iron Age and to the Romano Briton period and possibly beyond.
The settlers had chosen well, the centre of three ridges, though not the highest standing at seven hundred and twenty feet drops down in a series of steps.It would have made it easier to defend says John Hearle,and on a clear day those obese one can see across the Lancashire plains and to Liverpool and sometimes further.
What they uncovered on the site was an Iron Age ditch and evidence of roundhouses,two ditches in fact, speculation is that the outer one may date to the Bronze Age but the inner one belongs to the Iron Age, the people’s who populated this part of the country prior to the coming of the Romans.The ditch was probably built around 300BC and the settlement was certainly populated to the Roman period with evidence of beyond into Anglo Saxon times.
The archeologists left in 2009, they certainly weren’t gardners says John, pointing to his unnaturally flattened lawn through which the ditch ran, but they did do me a favour in digging up the drive which needed replacing.
