Whitegate

"WHITEGATE, otherwise NEWCHURCH, a parish in the first division of the hundred of EDDISBURY, county palatine of CHESTER, 3¼ miles (S. W.) from Northwich, comprising the townships of Darnhall and Marton, and containing 789 inhabitants. The living is a vicarage,in the archdeaconry and diocese of Chester, endowed with £400 private benefaction, £1000 royal bounty, and £200 parliamentary grant, and in the patronage of Lord Delamere. The church, dedicated to St. Mary has lately received an addition of four hundred and fifty-three sittings, of which two hundred and twenty-seven are free, the Incorporated Society for the enlargement of churches and chapels having granted £300 towards defraying the expense. Whitegate, which once formed part of the parish of Over, was separated from it, and made a distinct parish, in 1541: it is bounded and partly intersected by the river Weaver. During the confinement at Hereford of Prince Edward, afterwards Edward I., while a prisoner in the hands of the barons, the monks of the neighbouring monastery of Dore visited and consoled him: he afterwards removed them, about the year 1273, to Dernhall, in this parish; a few years subsequently the king having resolved to build them a new abbey on a neighbouring spot, gave it the name of Vale-Royal, and laid the first stone of the new monastery, in August 1277, wherein the monks took up their abode in 1330, at which period £32,000 had been issued from the royal treasury, for defraying the expense: the solemnity of the removal was observed with much magnificence, being attended by a great concourse of prelates, nobility, and gentry; at the dissolution the revenue was estimated at £518. There are still some small remains of this house in the doorways of the modern mansion, that now occupies its site, which, in the great civil war, was plundered and partly destroyed." [From Samuel Lewis A Topographical Dictionary of England  (1831) ©Mel Lockie]