Goostrey Parish Archive

We’re just about getting used to the huge variety of work here at The Blackden Trust.   It’s a real eye-opener of how much goes into running the Trust, and it’s become our weekly highlight.   

Over the last few weeks we’ve been market researching everything from rare books to creative writing lessons, and prices for future courses, trying our hand at blogging, drinking a lot of hot chocolate and helping to create something very exciting: the Goostrey Parish Archive.

Goostrey is a village with a long and fascinating history, but that history’s survival depends on local people.   So, a group of volunteers (including us) are aiming to create an archive of documents, photographs, oral history and any other kinds of artefacts from local people, so that we can make Goostrey’s history available to the public.  This is great news and we can’t wait to get started, especially because we’ve already seen a glimpse of the wonderful things that there are in the village...

... like this brilliant, but faded, photograph of St Luke’s Church, taken in the late nineteenth century.

And this engraving made before the graveyard was extended in about 1860.

Bethan and Phil





Labyrinth

Tucked in at the northeast facing gable of the Old Medicine House, enclosed by the glass window of the link and the retaining brick wall in front of Toad Hall is an enclosed space: the Labyrinth.   Easily missed by the casual visitor to the garden, but once found and walked, it hums in the mind: it is a journey along a blue brick path set into a square of cobbles to find wisdom.  The wisdom that in folktales is found at the well. 

“What can you see in the well?”

“Ferns on the wall and a dead frog in the water.”

“What else?”

The child leans over the parapet and looks into the water.

“I can see myself.”

Then the walk back along the outward ripple of the path, through the big stones of the constellation of Orion and the cobbles that echo the sun’s shadow at the equinox.

The Labyrinth shows a different face every time you are there.   A special and a private place.