Barrow

Great Barrow is situated about 4.5 miles (7 kilometres) east-north-east of Chester, 6 miles (10 kilometres) north-west of Tarporley and 6 miles (10 kilometres) south of Frodsham. The name Barrow derives from the Old English bearu (a grove, or small wooded area) and has no direct connection to a "barrow" in the burial mound sense.

What is said to be the first recorded mention of Barrow (“Barue”) is in a charter of Edgar the Pacific in the year 958, at which time it was a village on the outskirts of Delamere Forest, then known as the Forest of Mara.

Barrow is noted for the Barrowmore estate. Barrowmore Hall (initially Barrow Court by John Douglas) was occupied in 1920 by a charity known as the "The East Lancashire Tuberculosis Colony " and eventually became a sanatorium for servicemen suffering from tuberculosis. It was largely destroyed on the night of the 28th November 1940 by an aerial landmine dropped by a German bomber. In all, eighteen patients and two staff were killed including 25 year old Sheila Gillen, a native of North Sligo. Parts of the estate had been given over to the war effort and was being used to build aeroplane parts. According to reports at the time an air raid had begun in Chester at 7.30pm that evening and continued to about 4.30am. Between 2 and 2.30am in the morning of the 29th November two parachute landmines fell on the village near Barrowmore Hall, one landed on a local farm the other landed just in front of the hospital, blowing up the ground floor and collapsing the front of the building. This was a particularly destructive raid for Chester: a fireman named Cyril George Dutton from the Auxilary Fire Service was killed when a wall collapsed on him while tackling a fire following a raid, He was in fact the first casualty of the war in Chester and like Sheila was only 25 years old. Parachute "landmines" are actually intended for use agaist naval targets. It was rumoured that Hermann Göring had ordered parachute mines to be dropped on London in a fit of temper, but it is more likely that they were originally intended to disrupt shipping in the London Docks, where the mines would sit on the bottom until activated by the magnetic or acoustic detection of a ship. From October 1940, mines were also dropped in raids on other British cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Coventry. It can be assumed that the mines dropped on Barrow were from a Liverpool raid.

A gasometer was present on adjacent to the 1898-1910 OS maps, located north of Barrowmore Hall, indicative of a private gasworks.

Sources and Links

 * A history of the church;