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46. Stone wall at Springs Farm
This is a good length of wall about 5 feet high in the farmyard
of Springs Farm. It was
built wholly of decorative stone blocks each entirely faced with a deeply
chiselled highly
elaborate design and all-round chamfered edges. (It seems more fitting for
some great
house or public building than a farmyard.) Mr. Frank Freeman is reputed to
have said in
1979, when he was aged nearly 80 and the then farmer, that he had carted
the stones
from Ingestre.
47. Old Canal Basin Armitage
Road
The dried-up basin, among trees at the bottom of
Thompson Road is what remains of a once busy
site where barges were loaded with coal brought by 'ginnie
wagons' on a narrow gauge railway
from the Brereton pits between about 1811 and 1924,
first by horses but latterly lowered some
three quarters of a mile across fields and under Main Road
Brereton by St Michael's Church by
gravity on a single wire rope attached to a
steam-driven winch at the Brereton Levels. The old
basin has been dry since the removal in the late 1920s
of a hump-backed bridge on the Armitage
Road that crossed its link to the canal. The site was
purchased by Cannock Chase District
Council in 1984 by 'unknown ownership procedure' for
use as public open space.
48. “Brereton Sidings” Railway Signal Box
This is of wooden upper construction, fully glazed on 3 sides, with a
slate
roof, brick base and external stairway. It is of the traditional London
and North Western Railway style for manual lever-operated railway
semaphore signals and points. Its name derives from its location near to
where the railway from the old Brereton Colliery, which closed in 1960,
and its sidings joined the Cannock to Rugeley Trent Valley railway
line.
Based on similar LNWR units of known date, local railway enthusiast
Mr. D. Bradbury suggests the signal box dates from the 1890s. In more
than a century of use its external appearance has changed little
apart
from the removal of a chimney in its rear roof and the replacement of its
external staircase.
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