How they ruined my Pontesbury

Is Pontesbury being ruined? Evelyn Corfield lived in the village for 60 years. And in one chapter in her latest book about her beloved Pontesbury - the chapter title is “Pontesbury, what have they done to you?” - she guides, in a sort of “dream walk”, readers around the people and places which were familiar to her as a child growing up there in the 1930s.

But she feels that dream of yesteryear has become a bad dream today.

Gone is Birch Row, the historic cruck-framed building which was once her home. Gone too is the manor house, which no-one knew was coming down until there was a picture in the paper.

“Some of our other beautiful buildings have been destroyed. Our school, which we were so proud to belong to; Brook House; the Deanery; the Britannia; Bridge House; the cottages right down the village; A A Challinor’s Stores; Bennett’s Stores,” she writes.

“Now ‘they’ are talking of destroying the Railway Inn (too late, Mrs Corfield - it’s now gone too), and the Deanery Hall. Mr Higley’s yard is going to have houses built on it.

“Why couldn’t ‘they’ have kept the centre of the village as it’s always been, the shops and the cottages, with St George’s keeping watch over them? Instead we have the centre of Pontesbury torn out.

“Big ‘posh’ anonymous houses built, both there and on the hill as well. The wonderful family atmosphere gone forever, when we all knew each other….

“The great pity is that new residents don’t know Pontesbury, except by research, not at all the same thing, and what they have missed.”

And she adds: “I would be pleased to hear what other people think please, for or against what I have written. It’s not often that I let my feelings be known on issues like these, but I feel so strongly about it.

“One thing I don’t want to hear though, before you even think it, is that I don’t live in Pontesbury now, so I don’t have any right to say how I feel. It will always be my home, after living there for 60 years, and many generations of my family before me.”

Mrs Corfield (nee Challinor) now lives in Whittington and her new book is called “Heritage of Joy”. It is an autobiography, memoir, and reminiscence of the Pontesbury she knew and loved and the people who lived there.

In one chapter she looks at a particular feature of the village - the nicknames which abounded.

Her father George Challinor was, for instance, always known as “Spring”.

“I know that all villages have many nicknames, but I really think that our village of Pontesbury must be high up on the list, from the beginning of the 1900s and even before that, when the lads worked down Hanwood pit.

“They would get down in the ‘colliers cutch’ position, to eat their ‘bait’, and it would be much more natural to them to call each other by their nicknames.

“It made them more like a big family, down in the bowels of the earth. There were so many more, of course, who worked on the farms and in the shops,” she says.

Priced £6.99, Heritage of Joy is available direct from Evelyn Corfield at Tamsin, 10 Walsham Avenue, Whittington, Shropshire, SY11 4DZ. Alternatively it is available from Malcolm Corfield on (01743) 860192; Pengwern Books, Shrewsbury; and the Horsehoe Inn, Pontesbury.