Visiting Daresbury, the birthplace of author Lewis Carroll in Cheshire

West Australian

18 hours ago

Travel stories about Lewis Carroll often take readers to Oxford, where the writer lived, studied, taught, and penned Alice's Adventures In Wonderland.
It was in that esteemed university city where Carroll took a 10-year-old Alice Liddell — the daughter of his friend, the dean of Oxford's Christ Church College — for a much-mythologised boat ride on the River Isis.
As he rowed, he entertained her with tales of fantastical characters and whimsical encounters he would later braid into his legendary 1865 novel.
But it was a few decades earlier, in another bucolic, waterway-sliced part of England, where Carroll's imagination and creativity flourished.
I am in Daresbury, a tiny, sleepy village in the county of Cheshire in the north-west of England. Carroll was born here, as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, in 1832, and lived here until the age of 11.
He was one of 11 children of mother Frances and father the Reverend Charles Dodgson, the Scottish-born, Oxford-educated vicar of the village's All Saints' Church.
Today, walking through the tree-shaded graveyard, I step into the church, which was largely rebuilt in the 1870s, after the Dodgsons' departure from Daresbury.
The interior is cool and handsome, all neat sandstone and carved wood. The sun is streaking through the stained-glass windows, which include a special memorial one honouring Carroll.
By the entrance, you can buy jars of Cheshire honey and various gifts — books, tea towels, fridge magnets — illustrated with Wonderland's protagonist and anthropomorphic creatures.
Attached to the church is a small modern annex that houses the admission-free Lewis Carroll Centre. Information panels and archive pictures detail the writer's Cheshire upbringing and how it sowed the seeds for his future endeavours.
Fond of playing in the Daresbury countryside, where he would invent games and stories involving toads, earthworms and snails, young Charles was initially expected to follow in his father's footsteps and devote himself to the Anglican Church.
He was, in 1861, ordained a deacon, but never became a priest and instead followed his passions for mathematics and literature.
Besides writing stories, he was a prolific correspondent, penning more than 50,000 letters in his lifetime. His pseudonym was a play on the Latin versions of Charles (Carolus, spawning Carroll) and Lutwidge (Ludovicus, resulting in Lewis).
He was also keen on those new-fangled cameras that were coming into fashion, and is thought to have snapped more than 3000 developed photographs over his lifetime.
Some have become contentious with age, especially the ones he took of children. His collection ranged from shots of young Alice Liddell in different costumes — including one of her dressed up as a beggar maid — to portraits of Victorian-era celebrities like the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson and pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
Though he gave up his hobby in 1880, remarking that 'it had become a very tiring amusement', Carroll also took photographs of people and places in Daresbury when he returned as an adult.
It was a time of great change for the area, with the Industrial Revolution bringing railways, mills and factories to a county that had long been dominated by farming.
Carroll's birthplace, the Daresbury village parsonage, burned down in a fire in 1883. Its former location is on one of the local walking trails, and is now under the care of the National Trust, with the site marked with floor outlines and wrought-iron sculptures.
Carroll died a bachelor in 1898, aged 65. Daresbury has obviously changed since his day — there's a near-constant faint hum of motorised traffic, with the busy A56 road bringing cars and trucks right by the village — yet it still retains its rural essence.
There's a tinge of manure in the breeze as I wander beyond the church and watch sheep, lambs and ponies grazing in the verdant fields. In the other direction, by the village hall, there's Daresbury's sole pub, the Ring O' Bells, which has a rustic-cosy interior behind its mock-Tudor facade and provides tempting options for food and drink.
You won't find much else in the immediate vicinity, although you're not too far from larger settlements: Warrington (15 minutes up the road), Chester (half-hour south) or Liverpool (45 minutes to the west).
Walking up Daresbury's gently rising main street, I see quaint stone cottages and new housing estates with red-brick houses built to look older than they are.
About 250 people live in the village now and it remains desirable, particularly for young families.
I pass Daresbury's primary school and can hear children playing loudly on their lunch break.
Glancing up at the building's roof, I see the village's famously quirky weathervane. It was donated by the local blacksmith upon his retirement in 1968 but had fallen into a sorry state before fund-raising by the school and the wider community restored it to its former glory.
Looking at the weathervane, I see its painted figures of Alice, the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter. And I find myself grinning, a bit like the Cheshire Cat.
+ The Lewis Carroll Centre is open daily from 10am, apart from Sunday when, it's 2pm. It closes at 6pm in the northern summer, with earlier closing times in the darker months. For more information, see
lewiscarrollcentre.org.uk
+ For more information on visiting Cheshire, see
visitcheshire.com
+ To help plan a trip to Britain, see
visitbritain.com