This week we will return to Weaverham and have a look at Forest Street, or rather two buildings at the top of it.

The first one is the old Grammar school building, once the Abbot of Vale Royal’s courthouse, which was damaged by Royalists during the English Civil War and is now a dwelling house.

Some say that this (not Rain tub Cottage) may be the oldest house in the village.

For 200 years before the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Abbots of Vale Royal ruled Weaverham with a rod of iron.

Offenders were taken across the road to Gibbet Hill (now the High School playing field).

There was a prison that served the court, and that was at the rear in what is now Chapel Street.

In 1638 the Grammar School was founded by William Barker of Sandiway, and it closed in 1916 having been a grammar school for hundreds of years catering for the children of farmers in the area.

Continuing past the grammar school, we come to a very attractive thatched cottage.

The building is smaller than it was before the last war.

In the course of that war, cousins lived in the cottage and took in children evacuated from Liverpool.

The children managed to set fire to the thatched roof at one end causing damage and a short while later in 1940, the Germans made it worse.

They were aiming to blow up the railway viaduct at Dutton, but a landmine was dropped on Nook Farm nearby, the area that now houses the roundabout on the Weaverham Bypass.

The end of the cottage was so badly damaged that it had to be demolished, leaving the small one that we see in the picture.

This then had to be had to be upgraded, resulting in the very pretty cottage in the modern photographs.