Shaw’s Park as it is shown on some modern maps, is said to have been a deer park or forest and the name Shaw itself is of ancient origin, thought to derive from the Old English ‘Scaga’ meaning a small wood or grove. Shaw’s Park was originally part of the ancient Knoll Estate and the two names are combined on older maps as Knollshaw.
Today the area is a pleasant native woodland with several interesting and craggy streams including the River Douglas. The rock strata around the woodland streams seems fairly weak and many interesting geological features including examples of ‘ripple’ or ‘current’ beddding.
There are several interesting ‘carvings’ around Shaw’s Park and further down the clough including a strangle basin-like stone that is both too basin-like to be natural and too badly carved to be man-made. There is a much better carved stone basin at Carl Wark hillfort in Derbyshire so it was possible to make in olden times. Perhaps the basin in Shaw’s Park was carved quickly at in the times of the nearby small quarries or bleachworks.
How Knollshaw got its name and a look into a Medieval document describing the old boundary of the area with some interesting place-names lost to us today.
