Historicaleigh - A Grand Old Maid

May 8, 2017 by Carole Mulroney

There cannot be many of us who have passed the ‘Cutlass Stone’ in Leigh Churchyard and marvelled at the age of Mary Ellis, dying at 109.

But did you believe it? Sadly the parish registers do not survive that far back, but here is the nearest to 1609 we can get, a small snippet in the London Chronicle of 15 May 1794. Even then it is 185 years after the event.

If it's all true, Mary was born in 1490 just 4 years after the Battle of Bosworth in the reign of Henry VII, the same year that Perkin Warbeck claimed to be the son of Edward IV. She shared her year of death with Galileo demonstrating his first telescope and had lived through the reigns of every Tudor monarch.

After its inception in the 1970s the restoration of the brickwork of the Stone and a newly carved inscription was the first project of work in the Conservation Area undertaken by the Leigh Society.

This article is by Carole Mulroney of Leigh Lives.

Website: https://www.leighlives.co.uk/my-leigh-lives

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