Description:Cotton Dell is an area of woodland, 160 acres of which was purchased by the Staffordshire Wildlife Trust in late 1999. The most notable rock feature in the Dell is Bill's Rock. It is part of local legend having been the
scene of a tragedy in the sixteenth century. The daughter of a local landowner, who had been promised in marriage to a local squire, fell in love with a farm worker. The girl's father and the squire accompanied by hounds chased the couple into the Dell. When the lovers reached Bill's Rock they jumped off to their deaths, while the hounds supposedly attacked their pursuers. Another version talks of a certain "Colonel Bill" who, after a night of excess at the local Star Inn in Cotton, chased a fox to his death over rocks into the brook below.
This image is a glass negative photograph of an earlier cabinet card. Alfred McCann probably took it to re-use an older image as one of his range of postcards.
Photographer: Alfred McCann, photographers of High Street, Uttoxeter.