Cheshire is a historic county of north-west England, separated from Lancashire by the River Mersey and bordering Yorkshire, Staffordshire and Shropshire to the east and south, with Denbighshire and Flintshire across the River Dee to the west. Eighteenth-century surveys recorded it at some fifty miles long and thirty-three broad, its coast washed by the Irish Sea and shaped into a peninsula between the mouths of the Mersey and the Dee. Together with Lancashire, Cheshire held the unusual status of a county palatine, governed within its own borders by a chamberlain and a chief justice of Chester rather than solely through the ordinary machinery of royal government, a privilege rooted in its history as a semi-independent earldom on the Welsh border.
The county was, and is, most famous for its dairying. Its broad, level pastures supported vast herds of cattle whose milk, antiquarian writers noted, was reckoned unusually rich, producing the celebrated Cheshire cheese exported in enormous quantities to London, Bristol, Scotland and Ireland — so much so that neighbouring Shropshire, Staffordshire and Lancashire took to making cheese in the same style under the same name. Beyond dairying, Cheshire produced salt from its famous brine springs around Northwich, along with millstones, coal and other minerals, and its rivers and canals linked it into the emerging inland trade network of the industrial Midlands and North.
Chester, the county town, preserves the most complete circuit of Roman and medieval walls in England, and its castle and cathedral were already noted antiquities in the eighteenth century, alongside Beeston Castle on its dramatic hilltop and the ruined abbeys of Norton and Combermere. Manchester, then still reckoned a Cheshire neighbour rather than a metropolis in its own right, was already emerging as a significant town on the county's eastern edge, a foretaste of the industrial transformation that would remake the region in the following century.