Wilmcote
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wilmcote is a village in Warwickshire in the UK, located about three miles north of Stratford-upon-Avon. Today it has a population of about 1,200 souls. It has a church, a primary school, a village hall, a village club, one small hotel, a shop and a pub.
Wilmcote also has one major tourist attraction - Mary Arden's House - and sees quite a lot of visitors because of this and because it is a popular stop on the Stratford-upon-Avon to Birmingham Canal, and is on a National Cycleway.
Wilmcote is an old village and is listed in the Doomsday Book of 1086, but little is known about it between then and the sixteenth century.
[edit] Mary Arden
In around 1540 Mary Arden was born in Wilmcote, a farmer's daughter. She married one John Shakespeare; moved to Stratford-upon-Avon; and gave birth to William Shakespeare - recognized as the greatest English playwright to live.
Mary Arden's House is now owned by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and is open to the public. It houses a museum of countryside life and is well worth a visit.
William Shakespeare's life and times have been very extensively researched and documented so there is quite a lot known about Wilmcote from the time of Mary Arden onwards. The Shakespeare Records Office which is run by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has a good collection of materials including early maps and photographs.
[edit] Wilmcote Quarries
The geology of the area around Wilmcote contains areas of good limestone, and a significant quarrying industry grew up in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly after the opening of the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal in 1816 which was routed through Wilmcote because of the quarries.
The area today has many small disused quarries, mostly filled in, and the just-visible paths of tramways linking them to the canal for transport. There is one larger quarry which has not been filled in and which is now a nature reserve. There are also remains of lime kilns, built to turn the limestone into cement.
Wilmcote stone splits well into sheets and was used for paving as well as for building. It was used for paving the floors in the Houses of Parliament when these were rebuilt in the nineteenth century.
The last of the quarries closed in the early twentieth century, but they have left a great legacy for the village. There are several rows of former quarry workers cottages, built in Wilmcote stone, and a pub called the Masons' Arms. They are also the reason the canal and railway came to Wilmcote, which add so much to the village today.
[edit] Wilmcote Church and the Oxford movement
The Oxford Movement was a Catholic revival movement in the Church of England in the early nineteenth century, centred in Oxford. Wilmcote was the site they chose to build a church, a school and a retreat house.
Wilmcote in the early nineteenth century had no church (as it was then a part of the adjoining parish of Aston Cantlow). It was a poor working-class village, and the population was growing due to the growth of the Wilmcote quarries. So this was a much-needed mission to a village in great need of both church and school, and they are with us still.
The church, built in 1841, is a very unusual small Anglo-Catholic church, dark, spiritual, and on Sundays filled with the smell of incense. It was designed by the renowned architect William Butterfield, a leader in the Gothic revival.
Some views of Wilmcote in old postcards
