Qualla: Sandbach Crosses

Sandbach Crosses: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bob Harvey, CC BY-SA 2.0. There are two of them, and they have been thrown down and put back together. The Sandbach Crosses stand in the centre of the cobbled market square, their carved faces worn smooth in places and crisp in others, with the soot of centuries lodged in the deeper cuts. They are made of sandstone and they are not all that survives of Anglo-Saxon Mercia, but they are among its most ambitious sculptures, raised here when most of the buildings around them would have been timber and thatch.

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Image: Bob Harvey | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sandbach Crosses: Dated and Re-dated

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martyn Kilbryde from United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0. Older theories, repeated for centuries by guidebooks and parish histories, held that the Sandbach Crosses were erected to commemorate the conversion of Peada of Mercia to Christianity in about 653. That date had a satisfying narrative weight: Peada, the son of the pagan king Pend...

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Image: Martyn Kilbryde from United Kingdom | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sandbach Crosses: Thrown Down

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. At some point the crosses came down. Sources disagree about when. Some attribute the destruction to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII's commissioners and later Edwardian Protestants targeted religious imagery and pulled down crosses, statues and...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sandbach Crosses: Recorded in Watercolour

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the 1816 restoration, one of the crosses was painted by William Alexander, the watercolourist who had travelled to China with Lord Macartney's embassy in 1792 and produced some of the first detailed European images of Beijing. His Sandbach watercolour was engraved by John ...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Sandbach Crosses: From Stone to Brass Band

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roger Cornfoot, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 2011, Foden's Band, the championship-section brass band founded in Sandbach in 1900 and named for the local truck-maker Edwin Foden, commissioned its composer-in-residence Andy Scott to write a piece for brass band called To the Ancient Crosses. Scott described the work as a v...

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Image: Roger Cornfoot | CC BY-SA 2.0

Sandbach Crosses: Grade I and Scheduled

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Poliphilo, CC0. The Sandbach Crosses are recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a Grade I listed building and as a scheduled monument, the two highest levels of protection in the English heritage system. They are unusually large and elaborate examples of their type. Comparable Ang...

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Image: Poliphilo | CC0