Where does the grinning 'Cheshire Cat' come from? We go on the hunt across the county

 CheshireLive’s reporter solves the mystery of the Cheshire Cat, and comes face to face with the original grinning feline

The Cheshire Cat as depicted by John Tenniel, Lewis Carroll's first illustrator.

The Cheshire Cat has existed in this county’s popular imagination since long before Daresbury’s Lewis Carroll and his Alice made the supernatural character familiar to the world.

The phrase ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’ appears in print almost a century before Carroll’s novel, and the cat’s association with the county may predate written history itself.

CheshireLive’s reporter Jonny Blackburn sets out to investigate the origins of the strange creature, and comes face to face with the grinning cat itself.

Jeffrey Pearson records in his book, Cheshire Tales of Mystery & Murder, that he stumbled across the notebook of the broadcaster and local historian Richard Leatham at an attic sale in 1983. Within the pages of the old notebook, he found the details of a journey Leatham had made in the spring and summer of 1949 from his home in Hooton to the furthest reaches of the county.

As is recorded in Pearson’s book, Leatham was in search of the perhaps ancient origins of the mystical beast.

Legend holds that in medieval times, Cheshire cheese was sold in cat-shaped pieces. Further back, the tribal symbol of the Cornovii, who lived in Cheshire in ancient times, was a cat. But what of Carroll’s own Cheshire Cat, and its own special characteristics, the signature grin and its disappearing act?

Carroll was born Charles Dodgson in Daresbury, the son of the local vicar. Pearson records that the "devout Dodgsons" had relatives all over the county, a discovery which led Leatham to scour churches all over Cheshire that the Dodgsons may have visited for signs of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.

We set out to trace Leatham’s steps, and perhaps solve the mystery once and for all.

At Grappenhall, just four miles from Carroll’s birthplace, cobbled streets lead to a large sandstone church that eclipses the two handsome country pubs that it neighbours. In the churchyard, a group of bellringers point out a snarling sandstone cat set high on the tower above an arched window that they, and many others in the village, believe to be the inspiration for Carroll’s cat.

The cat at St. Wilfrid's, Grappenhall.

One bellringer tells me that the cat is the mark of one of the stonemasons who built the church. Excitedly, I see that the cat, which is carved from sandstone blackened with age, appears and disappears in the shadows cast by the rolling clouds. But there is no hint of a grin, and, infact, there isn’t much that is cat-like about it. It looks more like an eroded sculpture of a lion. Somewhat disappointed, I press on to Daresbury to scour the church where Carroll’s father was once vicar.

But the only cat here is a recent addition, set in a window commemorating Carroll in the chapel.

Both Leatham and Pearson conclude that the most likely candidate for Carroll’s original Cheshire Cat stands inside the church at Pott Shrigley in the hills above Macclesfield.

St. Christopher's, Pott Shrigley.

I enter the church expecting to scour the walls for hours in search of the medieval cat grotesque that Pearson writes of - and find it immediately. It is the most prominent feature in the church by far, aided greatly by the novelty of the thing.

The stone cat, with its head around two foot wide, grins unmistakably from above the pulpit.

The medieval cat grotesque at St. Christopher's church, Pott Shrigley.

Pearson writes that Leatham met the then vicar of the church, Reverend Carl Waldemar Aslachsen, who offered a theory on the origin of the Cat’s penchant for appearing and disappearing at will:

“Standing to the south of Macclesfield,” Pearson writes, “a hill known as ‘The Cloud’ incorporates a sheer rock face known as the ‘Cat Stones’. Seen from a certain point, the feature has a natural image of a giant cat’s face … If the observer takes a pace to the left or right, the cat disappears; a pace back again, and it reappears.”

It was an effect that I could not recreate upon viewing the Cat Stones, but the light was low as the evening drew in. I was satisfied with Pott Shrigley’s cat, just as Leatham and Pearson were before me; until I discovered an entry in Lewis Carroll’s own memoirs:

Carroll writes that he "saw a Cheshire cat with a gigantic smile at Brimstage carved into the wall".

With haste I came to Brimstage Hall, in the lost Cheshire borough of Wirral, only to find that it had been demolished. Only the stables and a small chapel are left of the Hall, mainly populated by shops.

I scoured the walls of the buildings, but saw no cat. Just before giving up, a woman emerged from the chapel, Nicky Boughey, who uses part of the building as a classroom.

The cat that Carroll writes of in his memoirs at Brimstage Hall, Wirral.

I asked her about the cat, and she brought me inside, through her classroom and into the small chapel. There, at the base of the arch, eroded by time and covered in thick white paint, but unmistakably, was Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, complete with a gigantic grin that spread from the cat’s face to mine.

It may not be the most impressive grinning cat of the day, but it is the only one that we can be sure that Carroll saw; and therefore it is the most plausible contender for the title of the real Cheshire Cat.

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