Mow Cop Castle

Mow Cop Castle is a folly at Mow Cop in the civil parish of Odd Rode, Cheshire, England. It is designated as a Grade II listed building on the National Heritage List for England.^[1] The ridge, upon which the castle sits, forms the boundary between the counties of Cheshire and Staffordshire, the dioceses of Chester and Lichfield and the ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York.

History

Traces of a prehistoric camp have been found here. In 1754, Randle Wilbraham of nearby Rode Hall built an elaborate summerhouse looking like a medieval fortress and round tower.

The area around the castle was nationally famous for the quarrying of high-quality millstones ('querns') for use in water mills. Excavations at Mow Cop have found querns dating back to the Iron Age.

The Castle was given to the National Trust in 1937.^[2] That same year over ten thousand Methodists met on the hill to commemorate the first Primitive Methodist camp which met there in 1807.^[3]

Though visitors were originally allowed inside the folly, the area surrounding it has been fenced off due to several suicide attempts and one suicide on the ledge. At the turn of the millennium, on New Year's Eve 1999, Mow Cop was a location for one of the hundreds of flaming beacons across the UK that were lit to welcome the new century.^[4]

Mow Cop and its folly are central images in Alan Garner's novel Red Shift.