Alderley Edge: the railway’s villa village, with the Edge at its back.

Alderley Edge was built on a season ticket. When the Stockport-to-Crewe railway opened in 1842, Manchester merchants were offered free travel to build substantial houses near the station, and land sold off by the de Trafford estate became the villa roads that still climb towards the Edge — Macclesfield Road, Woodbrook Road and Swiss Hill. The money is still on and around those roads, in surviving villas and the larger houses that replaced many of them, behind sandstone walls and old trees. The station, at the north end of London Road, has direct trains to Manchester and the airport; London trains call one stop north, at Wilmslow, the next point of the Golden Triangle. The A34 has used the Melrose Way bypass, west of the village, since 2010.

The seclusion is less complete than it looks. Public footpaths cross the villa roads and run along the scarp; the National Trust car park on Macclesfield Road puts visitors’ cars on the same road as the villa gates, bound for Stormy Point and the Wizard tea-room; and the council’s conservation appraisal notes that these houses show more from the footpaths once the leaves are down. The same appraisal records a steady run of building projects on these roads. The Alderley Edge Hotel on Macclesfield Road is the only commercial building in the conservation area; besides it, the village’s landmarks are London Road’s restaurants, the cricket club on Moss Lane and The Ryleys on Ryleys Lane.

Here the survey starts outside the wall: walked from the footpath side as well as the drive, in winter light as well as summer, with a look at how contractors come and go and a written report that grades what to fix and what to leave alone. Away-day property watch covers the house through absences that are public knowledge, and security driving takes the Manchester Airport run and evenings on London Road. A standing officer is rarely the answer.