Town in Staffordshire, England
Cannock
Cannock sits beside a patch of Staffordshire heath that was once a royal hunting ground, a Great War army town, and the last resting place of nearly 5,000 German servicemen.
Key information
- County
- Staffordshire
- Nation
- England
- Known for
- Cannock Chase, coal mining, the German military cemetery
About Cannock
The heath that Norman kings kept for themselves
Cannock's name is thought to come from an Old English word for a hill, which suits a town perched on the edge of high, bracken-covered ground. That ground is Cannock Chase, and for centuries it was the main event. After the Normans arrived, the Chase became a royal hunting forest, set aside for deer and for the people allowed to chase them. A 'chase' in the old sense was a hunting ground, which is where the name comes from. Later the land passed to the Bishops of Lichfield and then to local noble families, who kept up the hunting tradition. The result is one of the few big areas of open heathland left in the Midlands. It was designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in 1958, and it is small by the standards of such places but wild enough that walkers regularly lose their bearings.
A hill fort older than the Romans
Castle Ring is the Chase's best-known ancient landmark. It is a ring of banks and ditches on a high point, an Iron Age hillfort that was built long before the Romans came marching along nearby Watling Street, the road now followed by the A5. From the top you can look across a huge sweep of Staffordshire. It is easy to see why someone, more than two thousand years ago, decided this was a good place to keep an eye on the neighbours. The Chase is also known for its deer. Fallow deer still wander through the woods and clearings, and early-morning visitors often see them before they see another person.
The coal town under the pines
For much of its modern life, Cannock was a mining town. The coalfield on the southern edge of the Chase was worked heavily from the nineteenth century, and pit villages grew up around the shafts. Rows of terraced houses appeared where there had once been farmland and heath. The pits shaped everything from the layout of the roads to the local sense of humour. Miners from Cannock and the neighbouring villages went underground within sight of the woods, then walked home across the heath. The last deep mine in the area, Littleton Colliery, closed in 1993. The slag heaps have mostly been landscaped and greened over, but the industrial past still shows in the street names and the old railway lines.
When the Chase became an army town
In the First World War, the quiet heathland was turned into a vast military training ground. Camps at Brocton and Rugeley housed tens of thousands of soldiers who were being prepared for the Western Front. The Chase was an ideal rehearsal space, and recruits dug practice trenches in the sandy soil. Parts of the practice-trench system are still traceable, and a reconstructed First World War trench can be seen at Cannock Chase Visitor Centre at Marquis Drive, on the former Rugeley Camp site. The huts are long gone, but the outline of the camps and their roads is still visible in the woods if you know where to look.
A German war cemetery in the pines
Tucked into the trees on the Chase is something unusual: the German Military Cemetery, opened in 1967. It contains German servicemen from both World Wars. German dead who had been buried in cemeteries across the country were brought here and reburied. The cemetery holds nearly 5,000 graves, including airmen shot down over Britain, sailors washed ashore and prisoners of war who died in captivity. Zeppelin crews from the First World War are among them. The site is calm, shaded by pines and neatly kept, and it shows how a mining town's local woodland ended up carrying a piece of European history that few people expect to find in Staffordshire.