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Brabyn's mounting blocks - Brabyn's Park
Have you ever thought about how our ancestors moved around Marple and Mellor in the days before motor cars and public transport? Of course the rich would be alright. The Isherwoods or the Hudsons had their own coaches and, slightly down the social scale, the wealthy businessmen returning by train from Manchester each day would take a horse-drawn cab.
The vast majority of people would use that reliable vehicle of shanks’ pony. No, it doesn’t have a capital letter as ‘shanks’ does not refer to a person as I first thought. It refers to that part of the leg between the knee and the ankle, the shinbone or tibia if we want to be posh. People would walk extraordinary distances by our standards for quite normal purposes. Three or four miles in the morning to go to work in the mill and a similar distance after work. Walking to St Mary’s in Stockport in order to get married.
In between these two extremes, a surprising number of people were able to use their own horses for moving from place to place. Horses cost money and they needed fields to graze in and some sort of stable. That ruled out people with no land but yeoman farmers, husbandmen and the like often kept a horse and used it for riding and for pulling a light trap. Which raised a problem - how do you mount and dismount gracefully?
Read the full story at:
https://www.marplelocalhistorysociety.org.uk/our-local-heritage/531-mounting-blocks.html (https://www.marplelocalhistorysociety.org.uk/our-local-heritage/531-mounting-blocks.html)