Tuesday 6 December 2011

Today I walked the old road .......... Part Three

We had been following the old road and been talking about the massive earthworks which protected us from the Mersey. In a further effort to curb the river and control the ever present danger of flooding they built a weir in the bend of the Mersey just beyond where Chorlton Brook flows into the river.

On a cold bleak and rain swept morning it was possible to sense the importance of the weir. Stretching out from the wall was a deep and placid pool of water home to ducks and broken by bunches of water plants. 

But with just a little imagination how different it might have been on a stormy night when the river swollen with rain water burst over the weir. And almost on queue my companion talked about his own scary moment earlier in the year when after what seemed to be weeks of rain the river rose and topped the protective banks, leaving him scrabbling for safety. And indeed these historic floods were quite sudden. One such event left a farmer just enough time to release his horses from the cart and stamped them to higher ground, while on another occasion one man was forced to take refuge in a birch tree till the following morning. As destructive as these floods were they did deposit silt from the river onto the land which the farmers prized. In normal times it was the practice to “open the sluices or floodgates in order to get the advantage of such sewage upon the land as the river affords, thus saving the trouble and expense of carting ‘management’ there.” Later as our walk took us along the banks of the Mersey we walked through flood silt which had been left by the river earlier in the year when it had nearly topped the bank.

Painting;Higginbotham's field in flood 1946, painted in 1963, J Montgomery m80092 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Informationand Archives, Manchester City Council.

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