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Cheshire

County of northwest England, which has contained the unitary authorities Halton and Warrington since April 1998.

Area

2,320 sq km/896 sq mi.

Towns and cities

Chester (administrative headquarters), Crewe, Congleton, Macclesfield

Physical

chiefly a fertile plain, with the Pennines in the east; rivers: Mersey, Dee, Weaver; a sandstone ridge extending south through central Cheshire together with Delamere Forest constitute a woodland and heath landscape

Features

salt mines and geologically rich former copper workings at Alderley Edge (in use from Roman times until the 1920s); Little Moreton Hall (15th century); Tatton Park Mansion (1790); Old Hall (1520); Chester Roman Amphitheatre (the largest in the UK); Chester Cathedral (1092), Chester Zoo (1930), Chester Races (16th-century; the oldest in the UK); discovery of Lindow Man, the first ‘bogman’ to be found in mainland Britain, dating from around 500 BC; Museum of the Chemical Industry on Spike Island; Quarry Bank Mill (1784) at Styal is a cotton-industry museum

Agriculture

arable farming in the north; cheese (at one time produced entirely in farmhouses) and dairy products in the centre and south of the county

Industries

aerospace industry, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, salt, textiles, vehicles, oil, financial services, tourism

Famous people

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), Elizabeth Gaskell

Population

(2001) 673,800

Boundaries Cheshire is bounded on the north by Merseyside and Greater Manchester; on the east by Derbyshire and Staffordshire; on the south by Shropshire; and on the west by Wrexham and Flintshire. The new unitary authority of Halton consists principally of the former Cheshire towns Widnes and Runcorn.

History Chester was a major Roman fortress. Many Cheshire towns were market centres serving large rural areas in which there were comparatively few villages. In Nantwich there is a splendid 14th-century church, and also many houses from the Tudor and Georgian periods. Sandbach has two Saxon crosses and many villages have handsome churches, almost all built in the local red sandstone. From the Norman Conquest to the Tudor period Cheshire was a county palatine (an area under an overlord that did not send representatives to Parliament).

Cheshire

Town in New Haven County, south-central Connecticut, USA, 23 km/14 mi north of New Haven; population (1990) 25,700. Founded in 1700, it is a suburban residential community situated in a farming area, with some manufacturing, including machinery and brass and wood products.

In the first half of the 19th century, Cheshire was a copper and baryte mining centre. It is also home to the Cheshire Academy, a preparatory school founded in 1794, and to a four-prison Connecticut correctional centre

Alderley Edge Alyn

Cheshire, (Geoffrey) Leonard Delamere Forest

Lovell, (Alfred Charles) Bernard Lyme Park

Mersey